Bill Myers and Lauren Grover, The Examiner
2006-08-15 09:00:00.0
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WASHINGTON -

Since Charles Ramsey became chief of D.C. police, the department has paid almost $14 million to settle 246 civil rights suits, an Examiner review found.

For District Council Member Kathy Patterson, D-Ward 3, the figures are proof that Ramsey has only paid lip service to curbing police excesses.

“It’s a systemic issue,” Patterson said.

The former chair of the Council’s Judiciary Committee, Patterson once held hearings to examine civil suits against the department.

“One of the reasons we tracked that issue is we tried to figure out what was causing the problems in the first place,” Patterson said.

That there have been so many settlements “tells me that we haven’t done that,” she said.

Defenders of the police department say that the settlements aren’t a true gauge of Ramsey’s reform efforts. Additionally, the settlements are dramatically lower than when Ramsey came in and the department was paying tens of millions in single years.

The Examiner pored over hundreds of court documents, reviewed figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviewed lawyers, plaintiffs and police officers.

The records show that the District has paid more than $13.9 million since fiscal 1999.

The full amount of settlements under Ramsey’s reign is likely to be larger because, officials acknowledge, many records have been lost. Furthermore, many more recent civil suits are still pending.

Nonetheless, the records obtained and reviewed by The Examiner offer a rare glimpse at Ramsey’s eight-year struggle to fix a department with a history of racism, violence and corruption.

Under Ramsey’s tenure, D.C. has been embarrassed by several high-profile incidents of police violence.

The settlements reviewed include the $157,500 paid to Joshua Hayden-Ali, shot in the face in 2000 by an officer who thought Hayden-Ali was vandalizing a church; the $50,000 paid to Martha Howard, an innocent bystander to a police foot chase who was shot in the leg as she stepped off a bus in Southwest in 2001; and the nearly $1.2 million to the family of Thomas Hamlette Jr., who was shot by a fellow officer as he lay on the ground following a brawl outside his father’s Northwest nightclub in July 1998.

But D.C. has avoided the monstrous settlements other cities have had to pay. Some major cities have spent in just a few cases what D.C. has spent in eight years.

New York City, for instance, paid a city record $8.7 million in 2001 to settle a lawsuit brought by immigrant Abner Louima, who was raped with a broomstick by police officers. New York paid another $3 million to the mother of Amadou Diallo, a Liberian who was shot 41 times by four officers while reaching for his wallet in 1999.

In 2001, Chicago — where Ramsey learned his trade — paid a city record $18 million to the family of computer programmer LaTanya Haggerty, an unarmed woman shot and killed by an officer who thought Haggerty’s cell phone was a handgun. Last year alone, Chicago settled 252 cases for almost $21 million — three of them for a total of $11.5 million, city spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle said.

Nonetheless, some critics say they aren’t ready to acquit Ramsey of mismanagement.

“The department has not put guidelines and training in place to make sure that false arrests don’t happen,” Patterson said.

But Ramsey’s spokesman, Kevin Morison, cautioned against reading too much into the settlement figures.

“In many of these cases, the attorneys undoubtedly made the decision that pursuing the case in court was not the best use of their resources,” Morison wrote in a recent e-mail to The Examiner.

Besides, the number of settlements don’t even add up to 1 percent of the hundreds of thousands of arrests D.C. police have made over the past decade, Morison said.

Ramsey’s boss, D.C. deputy mayor Ed Reiskin, said that the chief “has been very proactive” in preventing police violence.

“He approached the Department of Justice and said, ‘We need your help here,’” Reiskin said. “In a lot of cities, the Department of Justice goes into cities against their will. In this case, the chief invited them. It’s a model for the country.”

Patterson is not so sure. She cites the most recent Justice Department review — which found that only 36 percent of incidents of violence were properly reported last year — as proof that Ramsey isn’t committed to changing the way his department does business.

The Justice Department partnership, while a fine idea, hasn’t produced the necessary changes, Patterson said.

By comparison

» D.C., late 1998-present: 246 cases settled for total of $13.9 million; average settlement was $56,591.19

» Chicago, 2005: 252 cases settled for $21 million; average settlement was $83,353

— Megan Snider contributed to this report.

bmyers@dcexaminer.com