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Feds look at officer’s bias complaint
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BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Investigators with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission are probing allegations that a Baltimore police homicide supervisor ordered a black officer to view a Ku Klux Klan Web site for more than an hour.
The Baltimore office of the EEOC has assigned the case to the Baltimore Community Relations Commission, the city agency charged with investigating discrimination complaints. Director Alvin Gillard said his agency could not comment on a specific case.
At a Tuesday meeting of the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld said the charges in the case had been sustained by the police department’s EEOC unit. In an interview Thursday, Bealefeld confirmed he made the statement, but declined to make further comment.
Sources familiar with the probe said police investigators have sustained the charges of discrimination against Lt. James Hagin, subject of the complaint, and charged two other detectives with filing false reports and tampering with evidence. In the complaint, filed with the EEOC, Sgt. Kelvin Sewell, a 20- year veteran of the force and supervisor in the homicide division, alleged one of his commanders ordered him on March 3 to look at Ku Klux Klan sites.
The sites, the March 5 complaint alleges, focus on a KKK rally that had occurred two years earlier near Sewell’s Cecil County home.
“He pulled up approximately 25-30 Web sites of the KKK,” Sewell wrote in the complaint. “This activity went on for over one hour before I was able to leave his office.”
According to investigators, a homicide detective removed Hagin’s hard drive from the computer in his office after Sewell filed his complaint, and attempted to acquire a new hard drive from the department’s technology unit. Another veteran homicide detective gave statements discrediting Sewell’s story, but investigators later determined he was not present when the incident occurred.
The officers will now face a police trial board, which will rule on the charges and decide punishment. Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the NAACP Baltimore chapter, lauded the police department for completing the investigation.
“We are happy that the case has been completed and we appreciate Commissioner Bealefeld being forthcoming,” Cheatham said. “But I think this shows we have work to do in addressing discrimination inside the department.”
lbroadwater@baltimoreexaminer.com
