Undercover probe logged eight illegitimate stops across four shifts
Dequwan Houchins, 30, is accused in an indictment filed by city prosecutors of four counts of false entry in a public record and five counts of misconduct in office. If convicted on the false-entry charges, Houchins could face up to 12 years in jail and a $4,000 fine for each count.
Prosecutors allege that Houchins avoided service calls for months by claiming he was on traffic stops when he was in fact “sitting idle in his car,” according to the indictment. On one occasion when Houchins reported being unavailable, he was allegedly ordering a smoothie. His unusual work patterns came to light in December after police officials received a complaint that Houchins had been making false reports of traffic stops for months.
Baltimore police detectives conducted an undercover investigation of four traffic patrol shifts, tailing Houchins for two hours on each occasion between 8 April and 13 May, the indictment notes. Investigators found that Houchins made nine legitimate traffic stops and recorded eight illegitimate stops. On the smoothie occasion, he claimed he was making traffic stops but investigators said he was sitting in his patrol car. Detectives also found that he had not filed body-camera footage, as required by police department rules.
As Houchins claimed he was busy during various instances, other officers had to pick up calls that would have been assigned to him, the indictment states. The complaint does not include examples of the kinds of calls he missed.
“The allegations in this indictment reflect a troubled disregard for that responsibility,” Baltimore city state’s attorney Ivan Bates said. “Falsifying official records for personal convenience is a serious breach of public trust.” Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, called Houchins’s alleged actions “shameful.”
“This was just a lazy cop who didn’t want to do anything and wanted to collect a paycheck,” Baltimore police commissioner Richard Worley said at a news conference Monday. “The bad thing is he was probably sitting doing something else when another officer needed help, and somebody else had to help him because he was too lazy to do it.”
Worley added: “This is bigger than one officer trying to make his numbers look good. Even the numbers that he falsified, he wasn’t a ball of fire, so he wasn’t really out there doing a whole lot of work.”
Contacted by the Baltimore Banner, Houchins said he was unaware of the indictment and rejected the allegation that he had been ordering a smoothie at the time he claimed to have been making a stop. “Getting smoothies. What the hell?” he reportedly responded, describing how he had wanted to become a police officer since he was 18 and enjoyed his job. “But now I’m like: ‘What the hell is going on?’”
A number of Baltimore police officers have been indicted on misconduct charges in recent months. In March, four officers were indicted on charges including assault, misconduct in office and filing false reports, and another three on charges including theft, forgery and misconduct. Complaints in those cases included one officer accused of failing to report for overnight shifts while logging the hours on her timesheet, another accused of inflating his hours by clocking in before leaving his home and not clocking out until he got home, and a third accused of submitting fraudulent doctor’s notes to obtain sick leave pay.