City attorneys told a federal judge at a hearing last week that police destroyed evidence it was under a court order to preserve in a civil rights lawsuit against the department.
The evidence, confidential command files from 2001 and 2002, were part of nearly 14 years worth of documents plaintiffs requested to prove that black officers faced retaliation for filing discrimination complaints.
City Solicitor Ralph Tyler told The Examiner that the documents were shredded inadvertently the week before.
“The officers that destroyed the documents were not aware that they were relevant to the case,” Tyler said recently.
But attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that the city was bound by a judge?s order issued when the case was filed in November of 2005 to preserve the evidence.
“The city was under obligation to preserve the files since the case was filed; that obligation was memorialized by a judge?s order in January,” said David Southard, an attorney for the plaintiffs at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.
The lawsuit, Hopson versus the city of Baltimore, alleges that black officers faced retaliation for reporting discrimination within the department, including dog feces wrapped in an Afro-American Newspaper placed in their desk and retaliatory disciplinary actions. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission already has determined “probable cause” that the plaintiffs had been discriminated against.
The evidence, command referral files and administrative tracking files from 2001 and 2002, were to be turned over to the plaintiffs after a judge ordered the city to release the documents, the plaintiffs? attorneys said.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, said the destruction of evidence is alarming.
“It?s highly usual; it raises very serious concerns,” said Sue Huhta, an attorney for the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, a nonprofit civil rights organization that represents the plaintiffs.
“We?ve been in this lawsuit from a long time. We should have had these documents months ago,” she said.
Tyler, though, said that the suit was without merit, and that information from the missing documents could be reconstructed. “We believe it will be possible to reconstruct the vast majority of what has been destroyed,” he said.
Tyler said the city has already turned over thousands of documents to the plaintiffs
“We have provided the plaintiffs with nearly 100,000 documents already, and will be turning over 50,000 electronic documents soon,” he said.
The judge has ordered the city to produce an affidavit next week explaining why the documents were destroyed.
