As a young man just out of graduate school in 1969, Charles Wellford approached the Baltimore Police Department with a pitch: to let him do a survey of citizens who called 911 to find out whether residents were satisfied with the police response. To his surprise, then-Police Commissioner Donald D. Pomerleau enthusiastically said yes.
Forty-one years later, Wellford, 71, a criminology professor at the University of Maryland, College Park will again be reviewing the Police Department's effectiveness — this time as an auditor as part of a court settlement in which police vowed to distance themselves from "zero tolerance" policies and better track citizen complaints.
Wellford, along with former state appellate court judge and longtime Montgomery County State's Attorney Andrew L. Sonner, are awaiting final approval to begin a three-year review of the department's compliance with the terms of the settlement.
What he finds will likely be subjected to intense scrutiny. Though the Police Department claims it has disavowed zero tolerance and reduced arrests by 30 percent — down from a whopping 100,000 in 2005 — citizens in troubled neighborhoods still report being harassed and wrongly arrested or searched.
The mild-mannered professor said he takes no position on those issues, bringing a statistics-driven analysis based on his findings.
"The only defense I've ever developed [for scrutiny] is just to do it as well as you can and explain it to people who have those concerns," Wellford said in an interview at his College Park office. "We're going to have to be very careful that we document everything we do, and if people want to complain about the results, they can, but they won't be able to attack the methods that we use."
The lawsuit was filed in 2006 by the American Civil Liberties Union and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on behalf of 14 plaintiffs who alleged they were wrongly arrested as part of a city policy that emphasized arrests for minor offenses.
The suit was settled in June, with the Police Department agreeing to retrain officers, issue new policies and improve data collection, including development of "trigger points" that will help spot problem officers early.
Martin O'Malley, a Democrat who is now governor, was asked in June whether the settlement was a rebuke of his policies as mayor. He responded that he believed it was a "cost-benefit analysis to settle … cases rather than go to trial with them."
Wellford sees it differently. Asked whether he anticipates difficulty working with the police, he noted the fact that the department voluntarily entered into the agreement rather than being court-ordered, as well as the depth and scope of the reforms.
"They aren't being forced, dragging and kicking, to do this by the court," he said. "The data on complaints, data on arrest, setting up a system to identify problems before they occur, those are very interesting and cutting-edge kinds of elements of an agreement, [elements] that you wouldn't find in many other departments."
While Wellford has done high-profile police reviews, he is also known for his work on campus athletics at the University of Maryland, where he has been a faculty athletic representative since the drug death of basketball player Len Bias in 1986. He has also served on the leadership council for the NCAA, though this will be his last year dabbling in sports.
"I took this position mainly because I thought we needed to integrate athletics more into the campus. I think we've accomplished a lot in that regard," he said.
The review will be the third involving Baltimore police for Wellford. In the late 1990s, as O'Malley, then an outspoken city councilman accused police of a "massive hoax" in undercounting crime, Wellford was selected to review four years' worth of data on assaults.
His findings confirmed that police were overstating crime declines, but not because they had fudged the drop. Instead, he found, they had overcounted shootings significantly in the years before 1994.
"We took every assault report for a multiyear period and just went through them," said Wellford, who called the review "very easy."
The 1969 review was spurred after Wellford observed an unconscious man from his office window at the National Institute of Justice in Washington and called police. He said it took hours for the first officer to respond, prompting a discussion with a colleague about how interactions with police affected residents' perception of crime and police service. The Baltimore Police Department was receptive to such a review.
Wellford said Pomerleau gave him wide access, and the results were published in an academic journal in which they argued that police should make use of "consumer satisfaction survey methodology to evaluate their services." Twenty years later, Wellford says, such surveys became more widespread.
In 2008, the Baltimore Police Department tried the survey again under the direction of the chief of patrol and a Towson University researcher. The study's findings mirrored the previous study: People generally felt police were doing a good job, but were frustrated when there was little or no follow-up.
Wellford will be the second outside monitor keeping tabs on the department as the result of a lawsuit. James Outtz has been hired to monitor and compile confidential reports on internal discipline as part of a multimillion-dollar settlement in a lawsuit that alleged widespread race discrimination in internal disciplinary procedures.
Sonner was brought aboard because the settlement required the involvement of an attorney, who will pore over the arrest documents to determine if police had probable cause. Wellford said he submitted a list of names, and Sonner was selected.
Their first report is due in late 2011, with subsequent reports due every six months. The agreement calls for the review to last three years, though it could be extended or cut short depending on his findings.
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