This story was updated at 3:13 p.m. on June 19. 

Prince George’s County Assistant Police Chief Hector Velez will step in as the department’s interim police chief, following the resignation of Hank Stawinski on Thursday. County Executive Angela Alsobrooks announced the new leadership change at a press conference Friday.

Stawinski’s resignation came hours after a new report was released claiming that an environment of racism and retaliation persists in the Prince George’s County Police Department and has not been adequately addressed by department leadership.

The 94-page document was released as part of an ongoing racial discrimination lawsuit against the department filed by a group of current and former police officers in 2018. Michael Graham, a policing expert and former assistant sheriff with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, who was retained by the lawyers for the officers who brought the suit, produced the report.

During Friday’s press conference, Alsobrooks largely declined to comment on the lawsuit, and claimed that Stawinski’s resignation was not related to the release of the report.

“[Stawinski’s resignation] did not have anything to do with the report,” Alsobrooks said Friday. “[I] just had the sense that it was in the best interest of our county and our department. And it was time to move in a different direction in terms of leadership.”

Velez thanked Alsobrooks Friday for giving him the opportunity to lead the department during these “unprecedented times.”

“We’re at a crossroads where we have an opportunity to choose a path that unites us,” he said. “That helps strengthen the relationship between the residents of Prince George’s County and the men and women of the police department.”

Velez has been with the department for 26 years. He started his 37-year career in law enforcement as a military police officer with the United States Army. As a sergeant in the department, Velez was part of a special investigations response team which was responsible for overseeing incidents of discharging firearms, in-custody deaths, serious uses of force, and criminal allegations of misconduct.

Alsobrooks said that a nationwide search is being conducted for a new chief of police.

Alsobrooks spoke of entering a “new season,” with the leadership change that will focus on fixing “broken” parts of the department — namely, mental health resources for officers and public transparency.

“I have a great concern about mental healthcare and how we provide it to officers who have been involved in critical incidents, making sure that we provide that care often and early,” Alsobrooks said. “Also making sure that we have transparency in the way that we communicate with the public.”

She mentioned that the department will be hiring an independent consultant to evaluate and provide feedback on existing issues.

In a separate press conference on Friday, Prince George’s State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy applauded Alsobrooks’ statements on transparency earlier in the day.

“Our goal is not to protect a case, our goal is to protect justice, and justice requires transparency,” Braveboy said at Friday’s press conference. “And I am encouraged that our County Executive committed, and I believe she is committed, to greater transparency. And I think as a result of the greater transparency that we will have with our law enforcement partners, we will be able to confidently and competently be able to prosecute cases here in Prince George’s County.”

President of the Prince George’s NAACP chapter Bob Ross spoke at the press conference as well, saying he was “proud” of Alsobrooks’ handling of the “crisis.”

Ross’ chapter was set to take a vote of no confidence in Stawinski’s leadership before he resigned, Ross told the Washington Post.

Report Details Discrimination and Retaliation

Graham’s report says the department fails to adequately investigate incidents of racist conduct towards Black and brown officers and county residents. It also says nonwhite officers in the department have faced retaliation for complaining about discrimination based on race and gender.

The report’s analysis of internal PGPD data concludes that nonwhite officers routinely face harsher discipline than their white counterparts for similar misconduct. It alleges that high-ranking officials, including Stawinski, failed to respond to racism within the department.

“Based on my review of the available evidence, complaints of racial discrimination and harassment are usually not investigated at all,” Graham wrote in the report, which details several examples of times when complaints concerning racist conduct were not investigated or did not result in officer discipline.

WAMU/DCist has reached out to Prince George’s County officials for comment on the contents of the report and on the resignation. We have not yet received a response.

Separately, the U.S. Department of Justice has also been investigating racial discrimination against Black and Hispanic PGPD officers.

Lt. Sonya Zollicoffer, the second vice president of the United Black Police Officers Association and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, told reporters Thursday that speaking up has “taken over my life, but I don’t regret it.”

“I did stand up for something, even if it meant losing everything I have,” Zollicoffer said. “Because I was tired. And I am speaking for officers that are afraid to speak up, that are intimidated.”

Stawinski’s resignation and the release of the report come amid a national wave of uprisings and protests related to police violence and racism in policing, following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

Many specific claims and pieces of data in the report have been redacted. According to the legal team representing the officers suing the department, PGPD provided those files on the condition that they be kept confidential, which meant the plaintiffs had to significantly redact the public version of the report.

Still, the nonredacted portions of the report portray an environment where officer misconduct is inconsistently investigated. In one case outlined in the document, a complaint was filed against three members of the department for sending each other racist text messages, which the report says included language like, “we should bring back public hangings,” along with sexist comments about Black female officers. The report found that the matter was not investigated.

In another case, the report says a corporal in the department allegedly made racist comments, referring to former President Barack Obama as a “coon” and saying that “at least slaves had food and a place to live.” That same corporal allegedly equated the Black Lives Matter movement with the Ku Klux Klan and defended the Ku Klux Klan. Though the report says someone lodged a complaint against the corporal, there is no evidence in the report that the complaint was investigated or that the corporal was disciplined.

According to the report, police Chief Hank Stawinski in some cases played a direct role in downgrading discipline for officers accused of racist conduct. The report says that in his discovery responses to the lawsuit, Stawinski acknowledges that he had “personally interceded” to lower the disciplinary fine for a sergeant who texted subordinate officers a video with racist language. In another case, the police chief downgraded disciplinary action for a sergeant who allegedly referred to members of the command staff as “baboons.”

The report details an incident in which most officers attending an implicit bias training walked out in the middle of the session. It concludes that“there is no indication … that the matter was investigated or that any of the officers were disciplined.”

“The workshop touched upon bias towards racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, and LGBT people, bias and other marginalized communities,” said PGPD officer Michael Anis, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the department, in a sworn declaration about the incident. “On this particular date, around 25 officers were in attendance. Around thirty minutes into the presentation, the instructor allowed the officers to take a brief break before resuming the training. Only myself and one other officer returned to the classroom once the break had concluded. I was offended and embarrassed. The officers’ walk-out was rude and unprofessional and left the instructor visibly upset.”

The instructor for the seminar, Rashawn Ray, is an expert on policing, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a sociology professor and executive director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. He corroborated details about the walkout during a press conference about the lawsuit on Thursday.

The report also analyzed departmental data about discipline, and found that minority officers were more likely than white officers to face formal disciplinary proceedings. In addition, the report says, “when charges are evaluated in a formal disciplinary process, a minority officer is more likely than a white officer to be found guilty.” Nonwhite officers are also more likely to face the most severe forms of punishment, including reduction in rank and termination. The specific data that proves this claim in the report is redacted.

The Black and brown police officers who brought the lawsuit explicitly connect the racism they experienced personally with racism they believe affects police officers’ treatment of Black residents in Prince George’s County. Graham’s report also claims that the department does not adequately address officer misconduct towards community members.

Marc Snoddy, an African American officer who worked in the department from 2010-2019, sometimes doing undercover work in the Narcotics Enforcement Division, said in a sworn declaration that he faced discrimination and was alarmed by the way white officers in his units spoke about black resident.

“On one occasion, when I was part of an undercover operation, a black male citizen displayed his weapon,” reads Snoddy’s declaration. “He did not brandish it or display it in a threatening manner; he lifted it up to show the officers that he was armed, so that the officers would not shoot him. During the debriefing after the operation was over, I overheard white officers saying that they ‘should have shot’ the black citizen. I was appalled that the white officers would state that they should take someone’s life when they were not threatened.”

Snoddy and two other officers also said they had been referred to using the phrase “Signal 7,” which they say officers in the department use as a colloquialism to refer to Black people.

“While ‘Signal 7’ is a police code that is intended to identify a person whose behavior is suspicious, in practice it is used to identify as suspicious individuals whose appearance or ‘look’ fit a negative stereotype of a black person,” Snoddy wrote. “For example, when I worked undercover and let my hair grow out longer than I had worn it previously, I was told by other officers that I ‘look like a real Signal 7 now.’ ”

Snoddy also describes a particularly stressful period in 2016 after Jacai Colson, a black PGPD officer, was shot and killed by a white colleague. Prosecutors say the officer did not realize Colson was a fellow officer. Snoddy says while PGPD officers were encouraged to check on the officer who had shot Colson, “the Department did not adequately address the way that many black officers were feeling. Some of these black officers … needed help, such as grief counseling and/or mental health treatment.”

Lawsuit Addresses Need For Reform

Thomas Boone, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and president of the United Black Police Officers Association, told reporters Thursday that he sees the practice of discrimination within the department as explicitly connected to instances of police violence.

“Before there was a George Floyd, we had a William Green. We had a Demonte Ward-Blake,” Boone said, referring to the case of William Green, a Black man who was shot and killed by a PGPD officer while he was handcuffed and sitting in the front seat of a police cruiser in January 2020, according to police. Demonte Ward-Blake, also a Black man, was paralyzed after he was handcuffed by police and pulled to the ground in 2019.

“We are pleading with you … to pay attention to what’s going on in our police department,” Boone added.

Michael Owen, the officer who killed William Green, was charged with second-degree murder and indicted by a grand jury. Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks has applauded Prince George’s County state’s attorney Aisha Braveboy for announcing charges against the officer within 24 hours of the killing. Alsobrooks announced several police reforms earlier this week, including new incentives for police officers who live in the county and the diversion of funds away from public safety training and towards mental health and addiction programs.

This story was updated with the news of the naming of the new interim police chief and further quotation from County officials.