Police agencies debating who takes charge of homicide cases

State police may alter five-year truce with sheriff’s office

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The original agreement combined detectives in the two agencies to solve major crimes, and is now being renegotiated.

A draft of a renewal agreement introduced by Maryland State Police would require that when a state trooper is the first to respond to a homicide or life-threatening injury, the case will be handled by the agency’s statewide homicide squad.

Their work would be assisted by the local Bureau of Criminal Investigations, which for the last five years has handled those cases on its own regardless of whether a sheriff’s deputy or state trooper is the first one on the scene.

State police policy already states that its homicide unit will take ‘‘full investigative responsibility” in those cases, and in counties where combined detectives squads exist, those squads ‘‘will be encouraged to assist.”

Changing the St. Mary’s agreement ‘‘would conform with the established policy of the department at this time,” state police Lt. Michael Thompson said Tuesday at the Leonardtown barrack.

Whether that state police policy will override the current BCI agreement in St. Mary’s remains an issue that the county sheriff and senior state troopers hope to soon resolve.

State police Capt. Brian Cedar, Thompson’s predecessor who is now heading the agency’s statewide criminal investigations division, said the final memorandums of understanding will take into account the current practices in each county.

‘‘We’re not going to approach it with a cookie-cutter mentality,” Cedar said. ‘‘There’s room to consider other points of view.”

Cedar, the Leonardtown barrack’s commander when the initial St. Mary’s agreement was signed in July 2003, said the current head of the state police will decide if changes in the renewal draft are acceptable. An agreement to continue the local joint detectives’ squad also would require the signature of the current sheriff and state’s attorney.

‘‘Each voting member has a say in this,” Cedar said Tuesday at the Leonardtown barrack. ‘‘I don’t see any reason why a successful unit like this would not stay in operation. It’s going to keep on working, as it has for five years.”

Thompson said other changes in the state agency this month, including three new bureau chiefs, could come into play in reaching a new agreement.

‘‘Their point of view might be significantly different than their predecessors,” the lieutenant said.

St. Mary’s Sheriff Timothy K. Cameron (R) said the agreement renewal process has been ongoing, both here and in other jurisdictions where state and local investigators have worked together.

‘‘There have been some concerns about who handles homicides and police shootings,” Cameron said. ‘‘That’s part of the challenge, to work that out. It’s going to require sitting down face-to-face and going over those concerns.”

Cedar said the lone exception to the current combined-agencies approach in St. Mary’s is in responding to shootings involving police. But Cameron said a state trooper assigned as a BCI detective handled an October 2003 incident where an off-duty sheriff’s deputy shot and wounded a homicide suspect in Great Mills.

‘‘Whoever’s up [on the response rotation] catches the case. We do it right by the numbers,” the sheriff said. ‘‘It’s a separate entity,” he said of BCI’s operations.

Each agency also has internal-affairs officers conducting separate administrative investigations in shootings involving their respective police officers.

Cedar acknowledged that the response time of a statewide homicide unit to a Southern Maryland crime scene needs to be addressed. Calvert County’s state’s attorney recently wrote to the current state police superintendent that it took two hours for its crime scene technicians and investigators to respond to a homicide last month in that county, impinging on the work of its existing joint detectives team.

‘‘Response time to any crime is a major point to consider,” Cedar said. ‘‘There are remedies to that by having state police homicide investigators who reside in Southern Maryland.

‘‘Right now, there are no currently assigned homicide members who live in Charles, St. Mary’s or Calvert,” he said. ‘‘That’s just one possible consideration.”

Cameron said he expects the issues to be resolved.

‘‘I’m confident we’ll work it out,” the sheriff said. ‘‘Meanwhile, we press on every day. BCI does their thing. We’re doing a lot together all the time. We’ll continue to do that.”