Prince George’s County will pay a group of Black and Latino officers $2.3 million to settle their workplace discrimination lawsuit against the police department — a payout that is a fraction of the nearly $18 million officials spent fighting the case over 2？ years.
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The agreement includes a host of policy reforms at the department and requires the county to pay $5.8 million in attorneys’ fees and reimbursements to the Washington Lawyers Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland and Arnold & Porter, which represented the plaintiffs. That money will fund future handling of cases pro bono, the lawyers said.
With legal fees, the settlement and other sums Prince George’s has paid defending the case, the county’s spending on the lawsuit totals nearly $26 million — exceeding the historic $20 million payout it made last year to the family of a man fatally shot by a Prince George’s officer.
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The agreement comes after weeks of mediation between the parties and increased pressure from lawmakers and community organizers on the county to settle the suit. Frustration over the costs mounted after The Washington Post reported last month that the county had spent at least $17.6 million defending itself in the lawsuit with funds from the police department’s budget.
The Post also found that the county paid the private D.C. firm it retained as outside counsel, Venable LLC, at least $2 million more than was authorized in contracts — a mistake that officials in County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks’s administration have acknowledged, saying they did not have a firm handle on the bills in the expansive case.
Alsobrooks (D) has defended her decision to aggressively fight the suit that was filed during her second week in office, in December 2018, even though she had pledged to overhaul the police department.
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She said in a statement Tuesday that she was “pleased that we have settled this lawsuit.”
“With this settlement we can now continue to move forward,” she said, “focusing on implementing the necessary reforms within our police department to ensure that it exemplifies best practices in policing, to include fairness and equity in how we interact with those we serve and how we address internal challenges within the department.”
The county said Alsobrooks will hold a news conference Thursday to discuss the terms of the settlement.
While vowing police reform, a majority-Black county has spent $17.6 million fighting officers who allege racism
The plaintiffs, who are members of the Hispanic National Law Enforcement Association and the United Black Police Officers Association, accused the department and three White former leaders on the force of fostering an environment in which officers of color faced systemic racism in promotions and discipline. The lawsuit also alleged that the department retaliated against those who tried to expose wrongdoing.
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The terms of the settlement will address those concerns with policy changes aimed at making the promotion process more fair, and will clearly state the possible punishments for those who engage in racist or discriminatory conduct, and prohibiting officers from using race, ethnicity or national origin to make policing decisions. One revised policy will clarify the “severe discipline” to which supervisors are subject if they do not properly fulfill their duties during use-of-force reviews.
Additionally, a new equal employment opportunity policy that covers anti-discrimination, anti-retaliation and bias-free policing will address the timeliness and resolution of investigations into complaints and require additional training for officers and supervisors. These changes will be monitored by the department’s new Office of Integrity and Compliance, which was formed as one of dozens of recommendations Alsobrooks accepted from a police reform work group she organized last year.
“This is an important step, but the work is not over,” Lt. Thomas Boone, president of UBPOA and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement. “We have reached a place where things can be reset, and we will see if we can work better together with the County and the police department going forward.”
News of the settlement spread late Tuesday morning after an announcement from the plaintiffs, which the county executive’s office said came before Chief Administrative Officer Tara Jackson had signed the finalized agreement. Jackson said the Prince George’s County Council will be briefed Thursday ahead of Alsobrooks’s news conference. She said they were not briefed Tuesday because the news was not then official.
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Council Chair Calvin Hawkins (D-At Large), who leads the 11-member body responsible for oversight of county spending, did not respond to requests for comment.
Other council members said they were glad the expensive legal fight was over, even as they added that they knew little about the terms of the settlement.
When asked about the settlement amount, Council Vice Chair Deni Taveras (D-District 2) said that “this is the first that I have heard of it.” Her hope, she said, was that everyone could work together to improve the police department’s culture and officer morale — and implement the outlined reforms.
Council member Jolene Ivey (D-District 5) said she was “very glad” that the suit had been settled, although she added that she wished the council had been better informed throughout the process. She hopes, she added, “that we have all learned something from this.”
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The core of the officers’ case became clear last summer when, amid the national racial justice reckoning, the plaintiffs filed an expert report in court that used discipline, promotions and internal investigations data to argue that Black and Latino officers were not treated the same as their White colleagues.
The report also names officers accused of discriminatory conduct, including posting derogatory remarks about Black superiors in chat groups, making sexist and racist comments about Latinas, and calling Black colleagues a “Signal 7” — the police code for a suspicious person.
The racist behavior of individuals in the department, the suit argued, ultimately harmed the residents of Prince George’s, more than 80 percent of whom are Black or Latino.
Fight over release of details in expert report alleging police misconduct, racism continues in Maryland
Initially, the plaintiffs were not seeking money. They said they only wanted changes to the department’s culture — how officers were treated internally and the community was treated externally. But they said police leadership dismissed them.
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The Justice Department had investigated the department in the late 1990s because of complaints of excessive force, which led to a consent decree that lasted until 2004. But when that federal oversight ended, the plaintiffs said, the department began to regress.
In 2016, when Hank Stawinski became police chief, the presidents of the HNLEA and the UBPOA filed a complaint with the Justice Department’s civil rights division that they said was signed by more than 100 officers. They asked the federal government to investigate what they said were unfair promotion and discipline practices and racism on the force.
According to data in the plaintiffs’ expert report filed last summer, the department staffing and its higher ranks are disproportionately White. The report showed at the time that about 80 percent of captains in the department were White — even though just 12 percent of the county’s residents are White.
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On the day the report was filed, Stawinski resigned.
Over the next year, even as the county created the police reform work group and moved funds from the police department budget to invest in mental health services, officials largely declined to discuss the lawsuit in public. They also kept certain information about the legal fight from those who said they needed it to do their jobs, including the county council, the public defender’s office and the state’s attorney.
But in February, a judge forced the county to share information it had sought to keep sealed. Two months later, the judge also ordered the department to overhaul its promotion system.
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In his ruling, the judge wrote that the department “has been aware of the significant disparities in promotion rates based on race dating back at least to 2012 but has done virtually nothing to address them.”
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In a news release announcing the settlement, Deborah Jeon, legal director for the ACLU of Maryland, said the plaintiffs showed “bravery and boldness” in stepping forward to “blow the whistle on the entrenched racism and retaliation” they faced at the police department.
Joe Perez, a plaintiff who retired from the department and is president of the HNLEA, said the scale of reform negotiated in the settlement “speaks volumes.”
“People lost their jobs, some were demoted, some were driven out, and community members were killed,” Perez said in a statement. “It is my hope that our personal sacrifices will lead to positive change both for the officers and for the communities they serve, so that everyone can be treated with dignity and respect.”
The Justice Department has not answered questions about the complaint the officers filed against the police department and whether the matter is under federal review.
Krystal Oriadha, a founder of community group PG Change Makers and a member of Alsobrooks’s police reform work group, said this settlement is “long overdue.” She is disappointed, she said, that the county has spent at least $45 million in the past three years in connection with police wrongdoing, especially during the global pandemic, when residents are struggling to pay their bills and rent and buy food.
But this agreement, Oriadha said, is the “first step in mending trust with the community.”
“There’s just some healing that needs to happen now,” she said. “And a readjustment of how we spend our money and resources.”
In March, Alsobrooks announced that she had selected Malik Aziz as the new police chief, citing the reputation of the then-deputy chief of the Dallas force as a reform-focused leader. Asked about the lawsuit during a county council meeting in May, Aziz said that his goal was to gather more information and put processes in place to “make sure that everyone is treated with equity inside the Prince George’s County Police Department.”
Prince George’s County’s new police chief will be Malik Aziz, a deputy chief from Dallas
While vowing police reform, a majority-Black county has spent $17.6 million fighting officers who allege racism
This majority-Black D.C. suburb instituted police reforms years ago. It’s trying again.