Top police commander retires

But he was never afraid to say he was sorry. In the picture, he's visiting the home of a young boy who was struck by a police cruiser, putting him in a cast for the summer. Andrew was upset that no other cop or commander bothered to go, even if the accident was the child's fault.

Today's Crime Scene column goes into more detail of Andrew's career. He's known for his blunt, outspoken style, never afraid to speak his mind. And that got him into trouble, and endeared him to newspaper reporters.

Angry that cops stormed an apartment back in 2003 and shot and killed a man (who had killed someone else) without what Andrew thought was adequate negotiations, Andrew leaked a critical memo to a Baltimore Sun reporter. Commanders discovered the source, fired him and then reinstated him, but with banishment to the property division.

Andrew fought his discipline and for his lost pay all the way up the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in his favor. The city then gave up and last year Andrew got his money and a promotion to lead the tactical team. A year later, Andrew said the police commissioner called him into his office and asked if he was ready to retire.

Not many cops can boast of getting support in court from groups as varied as the police union, the ACLU and a committee for a free press. Most of the time, these groups are not exactly in agreement, especially when it comes to the release of information.

But Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, in a concurring opinion, offered one of the best defenses of whistle-blowers I've ever come across. He wrote, in part, that government scrutiny by the news media "is impossible without sources such as Michael Andrew" and that "it seems inimical to First Amendment principles to treat too summarily those who bring, often at some personal risk, its operations into public view."

The judge went on about how traditional media is losing ground and money as it struggles to deal with less revenue and a competing Internet, and said it's even more important now that people like Andrew step forward to help shine the light on government.

Wilkinson noted that Andrew was hardly passing along office gossip. "The matter about which Andrew spoke was not just an office quarrel or a routine personnel action," the judge wrote, "but a question of real public importance, namely whether a police shooting of a citizen was justified and whether the investigation of that shooting was less than forthcoming."

Andrew didn't just speak out to reporters. Here he is in some other moments:

Listen to Andrew, as a captain in charged of the Western in 1994, try to explain how a city worker fixing a pothole was felled by a stray bullet: "The guy was just trying to make a decent living and in the middle of the daytime, he gets shot in the mouth. If you can figure that out, explain it to me."

Andrew may have disappeared into the bowels of police headquarters as punishment for his leak to the reporter, but his candor never ceased. He was outraged when he alone showed up at a court hearing for a killer of a cop seeking an early release from prison, and he publicly dressed down his colleagues, saying "We lost our way."

When a 5-year-old boy was hurt last summer after he darted out into traffic and was hit by a police car, Andrew visited the young man and brought him Oriole bobble heads, a police patch and tickets to a baseball game.

Andrew, now the newly minted head of the Special Operations Section, which included traffic accident investigators, told me tried to get his colleagues to join him. He came alone, accompanied by his wife who brought baked goods for the family.

"It bothers me that the cops who did that didn't see that boy," Andrew said on Wednesday. "I wasn't trying to place blame. But it was the right thing to do. The poor did got his legs run over in the middle of the summertime and nobody went up there to see how he was doing. What is he going to think of cops?"