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DC Police In The News

Old Bathos
@OldBathos
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The Free Beacon has details of a suit by a DC policewoman who kept pushing up the chain of command against a dubious practice of reclassifying crimes to reduce the reported serious crime numbers. It was a six-year struggle apparently. She sued in part because of retaliatory actions against her. (She even called one superior at 4:30 AM near the end of her shift to discuss the issue. I think I might have considered retaliatory measures if I were in his place after that being awoken for that lengthy call.)

I wore my shocked face as I read the story of the intransigence of the higher-ups. On a side note, one of the officers whose name appears in her lawsuit as one of those recharacterizing data was convicted and sentenced to 3-4 years for doing some ‘recharacterizing’ of the scene of a crime. His and a partner’s high-speed pursuit of a fool on a moped resulted in a fatal collision for the pursued as he roared out of an alley in front of an oncoming car. They told the driver to just leave and say nothing, readjusted the wreckage and filed a false report. How can anyone in DC not know that a cover-up is always worse than the crime?

Maybe it is the influence of TV and movies, or numerous local stories I read of and followed over the years, but my impression is that while line police officers are often admirable sorts, the upper echelons of police departments exist in an overly weasel-friendly environment that fosters the very worst kinds of bureaucratic political thinking.

Case in point being the loathsome Minneapolis police higher-ups who flat out lied about restraint training, methods and policy in the Derek Chauvin trial, even throwing the two innocent rookies to the mob because it was expedient. It is especially heroic that there are still any cops on that force defending the populace in that forlorn city in spite of the caliber of the leadership.

A friend retired as a captain in the DC Police force a couple of decades ago and his superiors were probably glad to see him go. He was outspoken and competent, a dangerous mix. While in homicide and tired of the absurd requirement that detectives had to make written requests for data reports from the data access maintained by computer services and perhaps wait 2 days or more for an answer, he took a database app I gave him that our firm had decided not to use and painstakingly entered years of data on a PC. Within a few months, other detectives were bypassing the old request process and going to him for instant answers on his desktop database, which made people and existing processes look bad. Thus, this had to be stopped or at least done in secret. He was given to pointing out other suboptimal policies and practices.

Some personal involvement with law enforcement politics: I had an apologetic home visit from my local suburban town police chief, on orders from the mayor. I had written a detailed letter to a wide range of officials because an idiot young cop claimed he mistook a black Lincoln with six kids (four white, two black, four females, including my two teenage daughters) for a red car with three black males driving on the other side of town in the opposite direction after committing a robbery; that is why held these six kids at gunpoint until backup arrived and treated the kids roughly in the mistaken belief they were actually suspected of something. All in daylight on a Saturday.

The chief said he would censure the cop but not fire him, insisting he was a good young man of promise. Some years later that cop was in the news as Policeman of the Year for the city police force for a spotless record and rave citizen reviews. I hope he gave his award to the chief, whom I grudgingly admit was right about his man. A leader with admirable loyalty to his people and thus entirely unsuitable for senior police positions in DC or Minneapolis.

This post was promoted to the Main Feed at the recommendation of Ricochet's members.

Discussion (6)

  • Bob Thompson@BobThompson
    Old Bathos (View Post):
    I think I might have considered retaliatory measures if I were in his place after that being awakend for that lengthy call.

    Part of the job to hear such reports. If the job is management of law enforcement, it's a 24-hour job

  • kedavis@kedavis
    Old Bathos (View Post):
    I wore my shocked face as a read the story of the intransigence of the higher-ups. On a side note, one of the officers whose name appears in her lawsuit as one of those recharacterizing data was convicted and sentenced to 3-4 years for doing some ‘recharacterizing’ of the scene of a crime. His and a partner’s high-speed pursuit of a fool on a moped resulted in a fatal collision for the pursued as he roared out of an alley in front an oncoming car. They told that driver to just leave and say nothing, readjusted the wreckage and filed a false report. How can anyone in DC not know that that coverup is always worse than the crime?

    Sounds like they might have been trying to help the "victim" who in effect got their car crashed into by a moped. I wonder what other options may have been available, to save that person/those people a lot of trouble for something that wasn't their fault.

  • Old Bathos@OldBathos
    Replyingtokedavis

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Old Bathos (View Post):

    Old Bathos (View Post):
    I wore my shocked face as a read the story of the intransigence of the higher-ups. On a side note, one of the officers whose name appears in her lawsuit as one of those recharacterizing data was convicted and sentenced to 3-4 years for doing some ‘recharacterizing’ of the scene of a crime. His and a partner’s high-speed pursuit of a fool on a moped resulted in a fatal collision for the pursued as he roared out of an alley in front an oncoming car. They told that driver to just leave and say nothing, readjusted the wreckage and filed a false report. How can anyone in DC not know that that coverup is always worse than the crime?

    Sounds like they might have been trying to help the “victim” who in effect got their car crashed into by a moped. I wonder what other options may have been available, to save that person/those people a lot of trouble for something that wasn’t their fault.

    Here is more detail. Excerpt from the linked article:

    [The]officers observed Mr. Hylton-Brown, 20, driving a moped, helmetless, on a sidewalk in the Brightwood Park area of Northwest Washington. Mr. Hylton-Brown, who was unarmed, ignored Sutton’s attempt to stop him and drove off. Sutton then began chasing Mr. Hylton-Brown on neighborhood streets for minutes, over more than 10 blocks, at unreasonable speeds, and at one point proceeding the wrong way up a one-way street. In the pursuit’s final moments, Sutton followed Mr. Hylton-Brown into a narrow alley, turned off his car’s emergency lights and siren, and accelerated behind the moped. When Mr. Hylton-Brown reached the street at the mouth of the alley, he was struck by an uninvolved oncoming motorist. As Mr. Hylton-Brown lay unconscious in the street in a pool of his own blood, Sutton and Zabavsky, agreed to cover up what Sutton had done to prevent any further investigation of the incident.

    Neither Sutton, as the lead officer at the scene, nor Zabavsky, the ranking MPD official, preserved the crash scene for investigators; they allowed the driver of the car that struck Hylton-Brown to leave the scene within 20 minutes of the crash. They then turned off their own body worn cameras, conferred privately, and left. Zabavsky designated no other MPD official to supervise the scene upon his own departure. Sutton further compromised the integrity of the crash scene by driving his MPD car directly over the crash site, audibly crushing pieces of debris from the collision as he left. At no point did either defendant contact MPD’s Major Crash Unit (MCU) or its Internal Affairs Division (IAD) to initiate an investigation by those units.

    Sutton and Zabavsky continued the cover up back at the police station. First, they misled their commanding officer about the nature of the incident by substantially downplaying its seriousness, denying that a police chase had even occurred, and omitting any mention of Mr. Hylton-Brown’s critical injuries. Zabavsky also falsely implied that Mr. Hylton-Brown had been a drunk driver. Both defendants also hid their direct involvement in the incident, thereby avoiding the assignment of other, uninvolved MPD officials to investigate what had happened. Sutton drafted a police report that memorialized a false narrative of the incident. Despite video evidence to the contrary, his false narrative gave the impression that no police pursuit had occurred, that officers had lost sight of Mr. Hylton-Brown and were engaged in a “canvass” of him in the area until shortly before the crash, and that the officers were wholly uninvolved with the fatal collision in any way. The defendant’s account also described Mr. Hylton Brown’s observable injuries only as “superficial abrasions on [his] left eyebrow line.”

    I can sympathize with the dubious decision to take some inappropriate risks to pursue that idiot but everything they did afterward made it all exponentially worse. Idiots.

  • kedavis@kedavis
    ReplyingtoOld Bathos

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Old Bathos (View Post):

    Old Bathos (View Post):
    I wore my shocked face as a read the story of the intransigence of the higher-ups. On a side note, one of the officers whose name appears in her lawsuit as one of those recharacterizing data was convicted and sentenced to 3-4 years for doing some ‘recharacterizing’ of the scene of a crime. His and a partner’s high-speed pursuit of a fool on a moped resulted in a fatal collision for the pursued as he roared out of an alley in front an oncoming car. They told that driver to just leave and say nothing, readjusted the wreckage and filed a false report. How can anyone in DC not know that that coverup is always worse than the crime?

    Sounds like they might have been trying to help the “victim” who in effect got their car crashed into by a moped. I wonder what other options may have been available, to save that person/those people a lot of trouble for something that wasn’t their fault.

    Old Bathos (View Comment):

    Here is more detail. Excerpt from the linked article:

    [The]officers observed Mr. Hylton-Brown, 20, driving a moped, helmetless, on a sidewalk in the Brightwood Park area of Northwest Washington. Mr. Hylton-Brown, who was unarmed, ignored Sutton’s attempt to stop him and drove off. Sutton then began chasing Mr. Hylton-Brown on neighborhood streets for minutes, over more than 10 blocks, at unreasonable speeds, and at one point proceeding the wrong way up a one-way street. In the pursuit’s final moments, Sutton followed Mr. Hylton-Brown into a narrow alley, turned off his car’s emergency lights and siren, and accelerated behind the moped. When Mr. Hylton-Brown reached the street at the mouth of the alley, he was struck by an uninvolved oncoming motorist. As Mr. Hylton-Brown lay unconscious in the street in a pool of his own blood, Sutton and Zabavsky, agreed to cover up what Sutton had done to prevent any further investigation of the incident.

    Neither Sutton, as the lead officer at the scene, nor Zabavsky, the ranking MPD official, preserved the crash scene for investigators; they allowed the driver of the car that struck Hylton-Brown to leave the scene within 20 minutes of the crash. They then turned off their own body worn cameras, conferred privately, and left. Zabavsky designated no other MPD official to supervise the scene upon his own departure. Sutton further compromised the integrity of the crash scene by driving his MPD car directly over the crash site, audibly crushing pieces of debris from the collision as he left. At no point did either defendant contact MPD’s Major Crash Unit (MCU) or its Internal Affairs Division (IAD) to initiate an investigation by those units.

    Sutton and Zabavsky continued the cover up back at the police station. First, they misled their commanding officer about the nature of the incident by substantially downplaying its seriousness, denying that a police chase had even occurred, and omitting any mention of Mr. Hylton-Brown’s critical injuries. Zabavsky also falsely implied that Mr. Hylton-Brown had been a drunk driver. Both defendants also hid their direct involvement in the incident, thereby avoiding the assignment of other, uninvolved MPD officials to investigate what had happened. Sutton drafted a police report that memorialized a false narrative of the incident. Despite video evidence to the contrary, his false narrative gave the impression that no police pursuit had occurred, that officers had lost sight of Mr. Hylton-Brown and were engaged in a “canvass” of him in the area until shortly before the crash, and that the officers were wholly uninvolved with the fatal collision in any way. The defendant’s account also described Mr. Hylton Brown’s observable injuries only as “superficial abrasions on [his] left eyebrow line.”

    I can sympathize with the dubious decision to take some inappropriate risks to pursue that idiot but everything they did afterward made it all exponentially worse. Idiots.

    Well, yeah. It's actually pretty common that cops do high-speed pursuits etc when their rules say not to. To the extent they were covering up their own violations rather than trying to keep an innocent driver out of trouble, they deserved to have the book - several books, really - thrown at them.

  • Doug Watt@DougWatt

    You have line cops that are on the street every day. Seargeant's are on the next rung of the ladder. Sgts spend time on the street with the line cops as well as reading Incident Reports and responding to requests from line cops for a supervisor during a shift.

    Lieutenants, Captains, Precinct Commanders, Assistant Chiefs, and Chiefs is when the job becomes political. Didn't help a mayor or city council member in their run for office a Chief might be fired. Those just below the chief might not be fired but they might lose their rank.

    Then you have the grant writers or worse an admin cop who only spent about two years on the street.

    Not everyone in the upper ranks were admin cops but some are.

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