The Maryland Court of Appeals has ruled that the county’s top watchdog does not have the authority to access records of an investigation by the police department’s Internal Affairs Division. Two Montgomery police officers, Sgt. Edward Shropshire and Capt. Willie Parker-Loan, sued the county last year to prevent Inspector General Thomas Dagley from accessing documents from an internal police investigation into an incident surrounding a four-car pileup caused by then Assistant Fire Chief Greg DeHaven.
DeHaven was driving his county-owned vehicle home from a 2008 Washington Redskins game when he crashed into a police vehicle making a traffic stop and two other vehicles. Shropshire and Parker-Loan responded to the accident and administered a field sobriety test. Now retired, DeHaven was issued a $130 ticket for “failure to control vehicle speed on a highway to avoid collision.”
County officials later acknowledged allegations of a drunken-driving cover-up, but an investigation by the police department’s Internal Affairs Division found that the two officers had committed “no administrative violations,” according to the opinion by the Court of Appeals.
Even before the Internal Affairs Division completed its investigation, Dagley initiated his own probe to determine whether the police’s investigation of DeHaven’s accident was “consistent with generally accepted investigative standards to ensure legal, fiscal, and ethical accountability in Montgomery County government organizations,” according to the opinion.
In the most recent decision, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that the documents Dagley requested are personnel records, and therefore are exempt from the Public Information Act and the inspector general’s authority. The court referred to previous cases in which personnel records were defined as “those relating to hiring, discipline, promotion, dismissal, or any matter involving an employee’s status.”
In particular, the actions of Shropshire and Parker-Loan could result in “employee discipline,” which qualifies as a personnel matter, the opinion says.
County Attorney Marc Hansen, who represented the inspector general in the case, said the decision speaks for itself and declined to comment further.
The Montgomery County Police Department referred comment to the Fraternal Order of Police, who could not be reached.
