The Metro Transit Police Department didn’t investigate or properly document thousands of crimes committed on the transit system between 2010 and 2017, according to a report published Thursday by Metro’s Inspector General.

The 20-page report says MTPD’s Criminal Investigation Division failed to adequately look into 3,110 “victim and general complaints,” which run the gamut from armed robberies and sexual offenses to kidnapping, assaults, and other crimes.

In many of these cases, the police department didn’t provide evidence that any basic investigation — like interviews with complainants, witnesses, or victims — took place. For about half of the reported complaints, Metro police didn’t produce any documents related to an investigation.

The report doesn’t specify the extent of MTPD’s alleged failures – for example, it’s unclear whether the inspector general is alleging that MTPD failed to follow up at all on complaints made to the department, whether it failed to conduct full investigations, or whether both issues occurred. Part of the issue with making that determination, the inspector general’s office wrote, is that Metro police files were too incomplete to judge.

A spokesperson for WMATA, whose communication department also represents Metro police, says MTPD is still internally investigating what happened but has no timeline on when that investigation is supposed to conclude. Metro Board Chair Paul Smedberg deferred comment to WMATA staff.

“MTPD staff’s failure to properly and accurately maintain investigative files, evidence, and/or associated judicial records obstructed OIG’s ability to determine if CID Detectives ignored victim complaints between 2010 and 2017,” the report says. “Furthermore, failure to properly maintain investigative files could affect past prosecutions and appeals and loss of public confidence in WMATA’s police department.”

The inspector general’s office requested documentation on MTPD’s case files, it said in the report, but only received information for 1,445 of them. Of the documents it received, “most of them only contained a one-page document suspending the investigation,” the report states.

In many case files, there were only initial police reports. More than 1,200 cases lacked any documentation of investigative activity. MTPD used paper investigation files until 2018, when it switched to an electronic database.

Metro Police says it had 18,586 cases from 2010-2017 and closed more than 8 in 10 of those. Among the cases that remained open are:

• 1514 crimes against property
• 909 robberies
• 471 misdemeanor assault
• 108 felony assaults
• 66 misdemeanor sex offenses
• 48 indecent exposure cases
• 3 felony sex offenses

In an official response to the OIG report, police say that the number of open cases was “unacceptable and [MTPD] undertook corrective action as part of their modernization efforts.”  They also say the department has no current knowledge of “any Court of Appeals or prosecutorial body having a case identified in this investigation affected due to record-keeping issues.”

“Since 2017, Metro Transit Police has implemented a number of initiatives for the Criminal Investigation Division, including adopting new policies and procedures, mandating the use of an automated record-keeping system, and creating a new case management process, in addition to changing leadership,” a Metro spokesperson said to DCist/WAMU in an emailed statement. “Today, cases are investigated by detectives in accordance with standard operating procedures that are similar to those used by peers in surrounding jurisdictions.”

Metro’s police department has been conducting an internal review of those cases since April 2019, MTPD Chief Ron Pavlik said in the OIG report.

But the report emphasizes concerns about the lack of attention paid to open complaints by Metro Transit Police leadership.

“OIG is alarmed that this matter has not been resolved, despite the commencement of MTPD’s internal audit almost two years ago,” the report states. “OIG is concerned that MTPD top officials have not made this matter a priority and have not officially determined the root cause related to the mishandling of these investigative case files or the possibility the victim and general complaints were never investigated.“

When news first broke of the report’s publication, Metro riders flooded Twitter with their own stories of being “ghosted” by the agency’s police department after reporting crimes.

[If you reported a crime to MTPD from 2010 to 2017 and feel it wasn’t properly investigated, please email jpascale@wamu.org if you feel comfortable sharing your story for a follow-up article].

The inspector general made ten recommendations for the police department, including that police train management staff so they gain experience in “conducting, managing, and leading criminal investigations that are thorough, legally sufficient for a prosecutor, impartial, objective, timely, accurate and complete.”

It also told Metro to require detectives to be responsive to all victim complaints and meet the investigative standards that other police departments do. The OIG said the department should also create independent annual or bi-annual reviews and prioritize old open cases.

Metro says it’s already implemented most of these recommendations and has plans to implement the rest.

But the inspector general called into question whether the fixes Metro police have implemented are adequate. In a response to MTPD’s response to the report, the oversight body declined to close its recommendations to the department “because MTPD’s replies are unresponsive to the recommendations made by our office.” The inspector general’s office is requesting further proof of the police department’s changes in policy.

Meanwhile, an unnamed Transit Police officials said in the report it would that MTPD would need staffing for a cold case unit to properly investigate the 3,000-plus complaints.

The report is far from the first call for further oversight and transparency from Metro police.

In 2012, the OIG received an allegation that MTPD falsified investigations. The OIG found discrepancies between what detectives documented and what the victims in those cases told the OIG. Similar to today’s report, MTPD could not produce 88 out of 134 randomly selected suspended case files back then.

Officers with Metro Transit Police have also come under fire for excessive uses of force and inadequate in recent years, including using a taser on an unarmed passenger and arresting a young teen who was engaged in horseplay on a station platform.

Concerns about the department’s culture also arose when documents showing a weekly contest that rewarded officers for making arrests and citations surfaced.

Last year, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, the Metro Board voted unanimously to create an oversight board for the department, though some have questioned how independent the panel’s review process will be from the rest of the transit agency.