LA PLATA — A misconduct complaint against a Charles County deputy from April 2025 spent more than a year at the State’s Attorney’s Office before investigators could even interview the officers involved. Another sat for about seven months because investigators could not reach the person who filed it. And when a fired officer appealed, it took the Circuit Court more than 13 months to uphold the firing.
Those timelines came out at the Charles County Police Accountability Board’s October meeting, when board members asked the county’s law enforcement agencies whether anything is causing backlogs in getting cases to the county’s administrative charging committee, or ACC, the panel that decides whether officers face discipline.
The answers show where time goes in a system Maryland built in 2021 to speed up and open up police discipline. Under the Maryland Police Accountability Act, agencies investigate complaints and send completed investigations involving members of the public to the ACC, which can recommend charges and penalties. Delays at any step push back the day a complainant gets an answer and an officer learns the outcome.
Waiting on prosecutors
A Charles County Sheriff’s Office official told the board a typical case is done in roughly 60 to 90 days. The one thing that reliably slows it down, he said, is a possible criminal angle.
Every excessive-force complaint goes to the State’s Attorney’s Office to see whether prosecutors find anything criminal, he said, even when video shows on first review that the complaint is unfounded. The Sheriff’s Office waits for a declination letter from prosecutors before interviewing the officers named in the complaint. That protects the officers’ Fifth Amendment rights in case criminal charges follow, he said.
The April 2025 case shows how long that can take. It sat with prosecutors for more than a calendar year, the official said. Once the declination came back, investigators interviewed one officer almost immediately. The second had just started extended leave after the birth of a child, and agency policy bars interviewing officers while they are off duty, so investigators waited until his family leave ran out.
That interview happened about a week and a half before the meeting. The case went to internal review the day of the meeting and was expected to reach the ACC in about a week.
Two cases the board flagged
A board member pointed to two cases that did not reach the ACC within the expected time frame, both since received by the committee: case numbers 25-047 and 25-055.
- Case 25-047 was an excessive-force complaint that went to the State’s Attorney’s Office for review and had a related criminal case attached, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
- Case 25-055 stalled because investigators tried for about seven months to reach the complainant, who was not answering calls. They finally reached him in a medical facility, where he was recovering from an unrelated accident. Officials said the ACC returned its findings on that case Oct. 13.
Officials described a third open matter, two cases from one incident involving two officers, to show how the calendar can stretch before an agency even gets a complaint. The complainant filed in August about an incident from January 2025, they said. She was criminally charged in March of that year, and her court case is still pending.
Board members said the ACC and the board take those circumstances into account. They asked both agencies to send the ACC a quick status note whenever a case will run past the expected time frame, so the committee knows a case is coming and why it is delayed.
The Sheriff’s Office official said he and the agency’s three assistant sheriffs meet with internal affairs every month to track open cases. Representatives also noted that misconduct that occurred before the Police Accountability Act took effect is handled under the old Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, even if the complaint arrives later.
La Plata’s caseload
The La Plata Police Department reported one delayed case in the past year. A previous chief suspended it because a civil matter and a criminal matter were running at the same time, the department said. Otherwise, it reported no issues, and it said a couple of investigations should go to the ACC in the next month or two.
La Plata Police Chief Matthew Norris also told the board, in a follow-up on earlier body-camera concerns, that the department has set up an internal discipline matrix for officers who don’t follow its body-worn camera policy, with steps for a first violation and tougher ones for repeat offenders, backed by a tracking database.
Appeals that drag
Delays don’t end once discipline is decided. The Sheriff’s Office’s attorney told the board that the Circuit Court recently affirmed a trial board’s decision to fire an officer, but the appeal took more than 13 months. Scheduling the hearing took almost a year, and the judge then held the case for about two months before ruling, he said.
He called the lack of a quick appeal route a problem with the accountability law. A second discipline case has been waiting several months for a decision from the Appellate Court of Maryland, he said. The board’s attorney reported no trial boards during the last period and none scheduled.
The board has spent the year cataloging problems with the law. Earlier this month, the Chronicle reported that Charles police oversight is seeking state law changes, including someone to present the ACC’s cases at trial boards. Before letting the law enforcement representatives go, the board asked whether they wanted anything included in its year-end report, which goes to the county commissioners and the county’s state delegation in December, ahead of the General Assembly session that begins in January.
