"At a time when the District government is $500 million in the hole, allow me to suggest a quick way to slash $.2.6 million: 86 the OPC.

Born in the day when police were often accused of roughing up citizens, OPC is now redundant in an age of excessive scrutiny of cops."

Jaffe's column, written on May 12, essentially parrots the complaints forwarded from Kristopher Baumann, the D.C. Police union chief. It's Baumann's job to advocate for the rank and file; he does great work on behalf of his fellow officers. But Jaffe's job is to actually report accurately the facts, and formulate an independent opinion based on those facts. In this case,  Jaffe didn't even bother to interview anyone at the OPC.  Instead, he actually writes that the police do a good job of investigating their own.

Fortunately, the OPC's budget had zero chance of being eliminated. While Mayor Adrian Fenty had proposed cuts to the OPC, Councilmember Phil Mendelson restored the funds.

The OPC's standing was such that it didn't matter that the Examiner's columnist got his facts wrong.

In a letter-to-the-editor, OPC Executive Director Phil Eure writes in the May 26 Examiner:

"The next time that Harry Jaffe wants to propose that the D.C. Office of Police Complaints be eliminated, he should get his facts straight. Mr. Jaffe claims that the office issued only 'zero decisions' so far this year. The correct number is 172. He claims that last year, the office issued six decisions. The correct number is 338.

He further claims that the office is 'redundant' because it only gets a case after the Metropolitan Police Department has investigated and federal prosecutors have declined to prosecute. Actually, the police department does not investigate citizen complaints filed with our agency, and federal prosecutors only review complaints involving excessive force allegations — a very small fraction of the total number we receive.

Mr. Jaffe credits the Fraternal Order of Police's 'well-argued' letter to judiciary committee Chairman Phil Mendelson for making the case to 'ax' the office. Assuming that he is relying on the union's letter for the wrong statistics he cites, neither he nor the FOP has made a very good case to do away with independent police review in Washington, D.C."

"Vincent Gray and the constituents of ward 8 enabled Barry for decades. I doubt anything has changed. Barry stole from the people that needed him most. But the people still love him..."

Super-commenter Rick Mangus offered up some of his typical poetry: "Vincent Gray is a PUSSY!" Friend of the Friends wrote us yesterday with this bit of knowledge: "First, let me say that I know Skinner. I was in those marathon study sessions...that he never came to. Sinclaire is full of shit. He will tell anyone that listens that they should pay him to help you get with Fenty."

Maybe we just have conspiracy nuts for readers. Or maybe there's something going on here—a sense that people that do wrong never get truly punished. Today, the Examiner's Michael Neibauer has a sweet story that may only deepen your distrust in the District government's ability to properly adjudicate bad behavior.

Neibauer reports that the District was ordered to pay $3.4 million in 2009 to more than three dozen city employees who had successfully appealed their terminations. Among the employees receiving a fat payout is a cop who had been busted and jailed for drunk driving. The cop lost his license, but not his job. So why did these appeals cost so much? The District appeal process took so long that when the employees won their jobs back they were entitled to back pay and benefits.

"The Office of Employee Appeals has a backlog of 533 cases, only four administrative judges on staff and finances so depleted that it can't even hire court reporters, agency leaders say. Cases stemming from basic budget-related layoffs to terminations for cause often drag on for years, and those workers who successfully appeal are ultimately paid 'to take a long vacation,' said Ward 3 D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh, government operations committee chairwoman."

What the city's employee appeals office should have known is that the lawyers handling these cases aren't dumb. The lawyer who handled the drunk cop's appeal was Robert Deso, an accomplished veteran with a long track record as one of the police union's main advocates. The union's president, Kristopher Baumann is no slouch either. These are guys that don't back down from any fight.

It's troubling that the city can't even fire people correctly.

Yesterday, Kristopher Baumann won another two-year term as Chairman of the FOP/MPD Labor Committee.This will be his third term playing the sharpest thorn in the side of police brass. The preliminary vote tally shows that the rank and file more than approve of Baumann's work. Out of the 1800 or so that voted, Baumann received a little over 1000 votes.

Initially, Baumann faced three challengers; one candidate dropped out shortly before the election. The election was not without controversy. The Examiner's Harry Jaffe had reported earlier this month that Baumann's fliers had been repeatedly swiped from police department walls.

"There were issues where our campaign materials were constantly being removed from police facilities throughout D.C. especially headquarters," Baumann tells City Desk. "The posters for the other candidates were not removed. There were anonymous fliers attacking me."

Baumann says that the department refused his request to investigate the matter.

Baumann has done much to piss off Chief Lanier and Co. And it's a safe bet that he's not received an Evite to Peter Nickles' horse farm in Virginia. He's successfully joined the fight against the police checkpoints and threw up a roadblock to Lanier's All Hands On Deck gimmick.

There's still plenty of  pending litigation on Baumann's docket from FOIA requests to whistleblower cases to an unsettled union contract. "I think there's a lot of unfinished business," he says.

"What this department needs is sunlight," Baumann, 42, explains. "Look at Pershing Park. That is a disgrace. That is a stain on the police department."

Still, Baumann says the union job isn't the job he really wants. "I just want to go back to being a police officer, but what kind of police officer would I be if I saw all these problems and did nothing about it?"

*file photo by Darrow Montgomery.

The No. 1 complaint of most D.C. Police officers isn't about stupid residents. Or even false alarms. Or, for that matter, thugs.

The rank and file, rather, love to bitch about their bosses. They've never made any real arrests. They're messing around with my days off. They don't let me do my job.

And that's where it usually ends. The grunts mutter something under their breath, always off the record, and go about their business.

Yet on Dec. 28 the old cop-vs.-white-shirt tension went a bit beyond its usual confines. Inside the D.C. Police Department's Special Operations Division (SOD), it exploded into threats of violence.

According to police records, Officer Steven Hebron had made the mistake of questioning why Captain Burt Henry had taken overtime assignments. Hebron allegedly believed Henry's use of overtime was unnecessary. The allegation did not sit well with Henry.

Henry spent a lot of time on Dec. 28 hunting down Hebron. Whoever was in his path got an earful. Marvin Spriggs was ready to leave the office on an assignment when Henry yelled for him to stop what he was doing and listen to his rant.

"As I walked over to him it was clear that he was upset by the look on his face," Spriggs wrote in his witness statement. "At this time, he pointed his finger toward me and stated, 'Tell your motherfucking boy to keep my name out of his mouth.'"

Spriggs stated that he then asked Henry which officer he was talking about. Henry replied: "That bitch Hebron! I'm going to fuck him up. I'm going to get him....Where is he?" Spriggs told the captain that Hebron was inside. "Capt. Henry then stormed inside looking for officer Hebron."

Hebron, in his own statement to police, stated that a fellow officer informed him that Henry was looking for him. He left the roll call room and entered the locker room, where he spotted Henry and another officer sitting on a couch. Henry then confronted the officer.

Hebron writes:

"Captain Henry stated, 'Listen motherfucker, what is this I been hearing about you telling people that I been cornering the market on overtime?' He then said that he would fuck me up and that this conversation is not the captain officer conversation, but a man to man conversation. He told me to consider myself lucky and that the next time it will be a captain to officer conversation....The captain was pointing with his finger in my face within close proximity, gesturing as if he wanted to fight me. I asked the captain to please stop talking to me in that tone. However he continued to move in my direction and follow me around the locker room."

The other officer, Louis Guerra, cut off Henry's rant. Guerra made his own formal statement to police officials. His statement confirms Hebron's testimony: "At one point Captain Henry called Officer Hebron a 'mother-fucker' and also said, 'I will fuck you up.'"

Guerra goes on to state:

"I got up off the couch and told the captain that he was out of line, and that he couldn't just turn his rank on and off like a light switch. I also told him that his demeanor did not represent his rank of the Metropolitan Police Department and that he should leave the locker room. After that he kept rambling on like a mad man and saying something like he did the best he could but that people did not appreciate him around here. He acted as if he was going thru some kind of break-down."

Although the incident is under investigation, Henry remains on duty. The investigation is being conducted by Henry's boss within SOD.

The police union has lobbied police officials that Henry should be removed from SOD and be required to undergo a psych review. "I have no comments," Henry tells City Desk when asked about the incident.

"If this were you, and I pulled up on the scene, you would be arrested. This should be a criminal investigation," says one officer in SOD.

The police union had e-mailed one police official, Alfred Durham,  several times concerning the incident. Durham told the union that Henry would not be sent for a psych evaluation. "If that was any police officer, he would be sent to a clinic ASAP," says the SOD officer.

Henry is currently in charge of the department's SWAT team.

"It's stunning that the department would leave him in that position," says union chief Kristopher Baumann. "It's certainly cause for alarm both for police officers and the citizens of the District of Columbia."

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

D.C. Police Union Chief Kristopher Baumann has reviewed Ret. Judge Stanley Sporkin's report on the missing and/or destroyed evidence in the Pershing Park case. Baumann says he has concluded that there can be only one next step: The case should be referred to the Department of Justice.

“There needs to be an independent prosecutor set up," Baumann says. There’s a host of potential criminal charges ranging from perjury to obstruction of justice. That’s just what we know….We don’t know that much. What we do know is terrible. What goes on past that is a question obviously someone needs to come in and tear this all apart.”

At issue is how did the Pershing Park running resume, a real-time accounting of police activity generated by the police department's command center, disappear? And how did the radio transcripts concerning Pershing Park end up containing gaps?

Although the Sporkin Report failed to reach definitive conclusions, it suggested that the running resume may have been destroyed on purpose. And it called for an outside expert to examine the radio tapes. The report also documents conflicting statements from police officials about the evidence destruction.

"I gave it my best shot," Sporkin tells City Desk. He explains that he did not feel comfortable making determinations of fact. That's best left to a courtroom, he argued. "It has to be done in a court of law," he says. "You cannot make determinations without the people having a right to counsel, and the right to cross-examine those witnesses that are giving information that are contrary to your interests."

One way to address Sporkin's concerns is to open up a criminal case with the feds, Baumann says. And he believes the Department of Justice, not the U.S. Attorney's Office, should handle the matter.

“I think Department of Justice," Baumann says. Because of the U.S. Attorney's Office's close working relationship with the D.C. Police and the OAG, he says, it should not take the case. "This needs to be handled out of Main Justice.”

Requesting federal intervention isn't in the police union chief's standard arsenal of policy prescriptions. Historically, in fact, the police union has chafed at federal oversight into departmental affairs. In the late '90s, former Chief Charles Ramsey sought out the Justice Department's assistance in reviewing all police-involved shootings. Rank-and-file cops were furious with Ramsey over that decision.

In the case of Pershing Park, Baumann's tough talk runs no risk of a backlash from the rank and file, in large part because the culprits of unwarranted arrests and the missing evidence are all top department brass. Indeed, it's Baumann's job to hound those folks.

The course of the Pershing Park case, says Baumann, goes beyond whether top police officials erred in a critical decision. He feels the whole drama has the potential to impact criminal cases. If the OAG and D.C. Police general counsel could so thoroughly screw up this case, how well are they handling evidence on the criminal docket?

"I think this is going to become a major crisis for a lot of agencies and a lot of people," Baumann says.

The FOP chief joins Councilmember Mary Cheh in calling for federal authorities to look into Pershing Park.

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

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The D.C. Police have re-launched its All-Hands-On-Deck program for the weekend. It started today at 6 a.m. So what does this mean? It means that every available officer will be on patrol. Cheap joke: Expect longer lines at 7-11! Cheap publicity: According to WJLA: "The initiative is a continuation of the initiative that began last year with five separate All Hands events. Taken together, the five policing drives in 2008 netted more than 2,300 arrests."

No details were given on the nature of those arrests. The FOP has called the initiative a drain on resources and a costly p.r. move. And Upset The Setup has questioned the program's effectiveness.