Maryland State Police Superintendent Roland Butler. File photo by Bryan P. Sears.
The Maryland State Police agreed to change the way it tests recruits and said it will pay $2.75 million to 48 women and Black applicants who were turned down for trooper jobs after they failed recruiting tests later deemed discriminatory.
The actions, approved Wednesday by the Board of Public Works, are part of a consent decree that settles a two-year civil rights investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into hiring and promotion practices by the department.
The probe found that the police “engaged in a pattern or practice of unintentional discrimination against African-American and female applicants” for entry-level trooper jobs, through the use of written and physical tests that disproportionately disqualified those applicants. The rejected recruits were applying to police recruiting classes from 2017 to today.
Col. Roland Butler, the Maryland State Police superintendent, stressed Wednesday that the Justice Department determined the discrimination was unintentional. But he also said the department agreed with the findings and that the agency is “committed to making meaningful and lasting change.”
“The fact remains that 48 men and women were deprived of the opportunity to serve and protect the communities, and they were done so unjustly and denied this opportunity unintentionally,” Butler said during testimony to the board. “However, discrimination in any form has no place in the Maryland State Police and it will not be tolerated.”
The investigation focused on two tests that are part of the process – including background checks, drug tests and interviews – to hire a new trooper.
The Police Officer Selection Test is a written test of an applicant’s abilities in math, reading, writing and grammar. A passing grade is 70%, and would-be officers can retake the test up to four times in a year in an effort to pass. Applicants who fail are eliminated from the program.
The Functional Fitness Assessment Test requires applicants to do 18 pushups in a minute and 27 situps in a minute, run 1.5 miles in 15 minutes, 20 seconds, and be able to reach 1.5 inches past their toes while seated to test their flexibility. All four parts of the test have to be successfully completed to pass, but applicants can try three times in a year before being eliminated.
The settlement caps a two-year civil rights investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. File Ppoto by Danielle E. Gaines
According to the Justice Department investigation, however, the skills assessed in those two tests were not actually essential to a trooper’s job performance. And while 91% of white applicants were ultimately able to pass the POST test, just 71% of Black applicants were able to so. On the physical test, 51% of women passed compared to 81% of men.
“The Justice Department found that MdSP (Maryland State Police) used discriminatory hiring practices that wrongfully disqualified Black and female state trooper candidates,” said Sarah Marquardt, an assistant U.S. attorney involved in the case.
In addition to a cash payment, the police department will offer jobs, with seniority dating back to the year they applied, to at least 25 of the 48 Black and woman applicants who have been rejected since 2017, under the settlement. The agency will also develop new tests, under the supervision of the Justice Department, that are nondiscriminatory.
Because the new tests will take time to develop, the Justice Department has agreed to let the police keep using the two flawed tests, but with relaxed standards – no time limit to complete the run or the pushups, for example. But that concerned Treasurer Dereck Davis and Comptroller Brooke Lierman who, with the governor, make up the Board of Public Works.
“Why are we still doing it? … Why aren’t they completely eliminated?” Davis asked of the tests. “If it’s not related to the job, then it doesn’t need to be a part of the process.”
Davis worried that by removing objective standards like the time limits for the physical test, the outcomes would be more subjective, which “lends itself to be more discriminatory.”
But Butler said it’s important to keep the tests, with relaxed standards, so that police have a baseline for applicants and might be able to help them focus on areas where they can improve.
Davis was also concerned with a request Wednesday from the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services for $70,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by an inmate who claimed corrections officers used excessive force during a strip search. Davis said he fears that the state is too quick to settle and is paying out millions as a result.
“Why are we settling?” Davis asked. “We seem to look at how much more we could be paying (by going to trial), and I’m looking at it as how much more we could be saving.”
He estimated that the board spent $10 million on settlements last year, and wanted to know why the department was not taking more cases to trial.
“It just seems there’s this reluctance to take a case to trial. I’m just going to say it: Are we afraid of Black jurors and Black juries, especially when the [inmates] are Black?”asked Davis, who is Black.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
Joseph Sedtal, the deputy secretary of administration for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said the department is not happy about the payouts, either. But he said the decision to settle a case is driven not by the racial makeup of a potential jury, but by the facts of each case and a recent trend overall of increasing verdicts in all jury trials.
“With any of these, it’s a cost-benefit analysis,” Sedtal said. “Do we think a jury’s going to come back with a verdict in the six- seven-figure range, or does a $50,000 settlement make sense?”
He said the board was only seeing the cases that are settled, and not the ones that the department fights.
“Around 90-91% of these cases are ultimately getting kicked out,” Sedtal said.
The case settled Wednesday was frustrating to Davis because corrections officials said they believe the officer involved largely followed a 15-step protocol for a strip search. Because of privacy concerns, however, there is no video of the actual strip search and Sedtal said what actually happened in that short window becomes “our word against theirs.”
“And their word is more credible than yours,” Davis said. “That’s essentially what we’re saying.”
“I would like to think of settlements as more of a rarity, as opposed to a regularity,” said Davis, who worried that “the word is out” among inmates that the state will settle.
Lierman asked Sedtal for data on the number of cases pursued and won by the department compared to the number settled.
“Are you actually litigating these, if so, what’s your success rate?” she asked.
“If somebody has been wronged, we should be paying that person and the employee should be retrained or released,” Lierman said. “But we can’t have strip searches that were done properly cost the state $50,000 each.”