BALTIMORE _ After reports surfaced Friday in Texas that Fort Worth Police Chief Joel Fitzgerald had been chosen to be Baltimore's next police commissioner, Mayor Catherine Pugh quickly denied the story and said her administration was still vetting candidates. But she declined to answer additional questions.
That left many in Baltimore confused as to where the city stood in the search for its next chief _ which was nothing new, critics said.
For the past six months, Pugh's administration has done everything in could to maintain secrecy in the search, revealing next to nothing about the process with the public and denying City Council requests for more information, the critics said. That's despite the fact that the administration, facing a violent crime epidemic, is under a federal consent decree mandating police transparency, has admitted to repeated failures in vetting high-level candidates and promised a transparent process for picking the next commissioner, they said.
"The way this process unveiled itself is an embarrassment to the city," said Brandon Scott, chairman of the City Council's public safety committee.
"The mayor's actions are so self-evidently self-defeating and utterly inconsistent with her professed rhetoric, but that pattern has been repeated so many times that it's no longer a surprise," said David Rocah, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland. "It's pathetic that it has become expected, but that feels like where we are in the city. It feels like everyone expects a gaping disconnect between action and rhetoric, and that's precisely what we see and get."
Rocah called the entire search process a "farce" _ one that has been "depressing, demoralizing, pathetic, ridiculous, upsetting (and) incomprehensible."
Pugh and aides did not respond to requests for comment. The Pugh administration has said the new commissioner would be named by the end of this month, but has declined to identify candidates or provide a shortlist of finalists.
Pugh had said there would be a listening tour to gather public input on the pending selection, but that never happened. City Solicitor Andre Davis at one point said a panel of seven people would consider applicants, but later said it was just three people, all with law enforcement ties. The administration has repeatedly declined to explain its vetting.
The last permanent police commissioner in the city, Darryl De Sousa, resigned in May after being indicted on federal criminal tax charges. He admitted to not filing his federal or state tax returns for multiple years, but said it was an oversight he was trying to fix.
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price told media that Fitzgerald planned to leave Fort Worth to become Baltimore's police commissioner.
The current interim commissioner, Gary Tuggle, took his name out of the running for the permanent position this month.
The secrecy around the search for his replacement has been criticized for months by police transparency advocates and civil rights organizations, who say the city should be providing the public with as much insight into the selection process as possible.
They say years of widespread discriminatory and unconstitutional policing in the city and a series of high-profile scandals of late have destroyed community trust in the department, and transparency is the way to win that trust back. They asked for the Pugh administration to publicly announce finalists for the position, so that the public could not only review their pasts, but ask them about their visions for the future.
Instead, they said, Pugh has turned away from the community in picking the next commissioner.
"We are really disappointed," said Lydia Walther-Rodriguez, regional lead organizer for CASA de Maryland and convener of the Campaign for Justice, Safety and Jobs, a coalition of more than 30 grassroots and nonprofit organizations focused on police reforms in the state. "It wasn't transparent, and it wasn't inclusive of community voices."
Walther-Rodriguez said her coalition had called for finalists' names and resumes to be released to the public, "so the community members could see who the finalists were and potentially meet with the finalists."
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(Justin Fenton contributed to this report.)
