LIFE IN PIECES. Sun editorial asks: "Is Worley the right top cop?" The Sun does not mention the BPD's colossal failure to "protect and serve."
Paper does not mention serious allegations against Worley and 3 others in BPD brass accusing them of years of sexual discrimination, harassment, repeated lies, vicious verbal abuse, vindictiveness.
The Baltimore Sun, July 25 Editorial: Is Worley the right top cop? Burden is on Baltimore City Council to weigh his merits, sans national search. | COMMENTARY
I went back to my own July 22 commentary, cut out some stuff I never should have included and updated a bit:
BALTIMORE OBSERVED: “A homegrown Baltimore Police commissioner: Bringing baggage from BPD’s history or ‘best of both worlds’?"
Sun gets its (spicy) answer from Brandon Scott: "Richard Worley, the mayor said, has Old Bay in his blood: ‘That means a lot to me.’"
At the City Council hearing, Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard J. Worley Jr. said it all.
In one sentence.
"I am saddened we weren't able to protect and serve.”
He added: “I didn't want to be on world news for something negative. I’m angry, sad and very disappointed.”
Oh, here, here, don’t cry for me, Pasadena.
Or is it Edgewater or Glen Burnie or Dundalk?
Here’s a handkerchief.
Some thoughts and prayers for the people of Brooklyn Homes maybe?
In lieu of cops?
World’s smallest violin?
GARY GATELY
You’re saddened, Commissioner?
You’re saddened over what happened in Brooklyn, where, you reminded us, you had lived for 12 years?
You should be, what with 30 people shot, two fatally, 28 others wounded, 23 of them teens, two of those teens just 13 years old.
We’re saddened and shocked and disappointed that your BPD failed so utterly, betrayed the public trust so badly that there wasn’t a cop in sight when those shots rang out early July 2 not in the famous Brooklyn, but your Brooklyn, our Brooklyn, in our hometown of Baltimore. We’re infamous across the world as the city of murders and now, a city where the Baltimore Police Department did not send a single officer to Brooklyn Homes in response to all those ominous 911 calls for hours — including a report of hundreds of people wielding guns and knifes and other reports of shots ringing out in the night.
The BPD sent Fox Trot, which gave the all-clear from the sky above Brooklyn Homes.
The BPD didn’t protect and serve, Commissioner Worley?
You don’t say.
Is that like the literary device of understatement you learned in Brooklyn? Or maybe Pigtown, and how about that mayor who calls you a true and loyal “Son of Baltimore” (and do you now live not far from one of the many wide waterways of Anne Arundel County)?
Baltimore's top cop, and Mayor Brandon Scott's pick for full police commissioner, failed to perform a police department's most critical duty and obligation to citizens through gross neglect.
That should compel city lawmakers — if they have any self-respect or respect for Baltimore, our hometown — to act totally out of character and demonstrate that they actually do possess heart, courage and a brain, not to mention a conscience.
Yes, the Baltimore City Council must stand up to a police department with blood all over its hands in the Brooklyn Homes tragedy and tell the acting commissioner that he and his police department indeed failed to protect and serve, so egregiously that he has no business leading this city’s troubled police force.
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“MY BABY!!! Worst day of my life! I cannot do life without her. I NEED HER!! Why would they do this to a perfect angel? I love you so much, baby. I didn’t get there fast enough. God this is a mistake!!! Please!!” — Facebook Post, Krystal Gonzalez, Mother of 18-Year-Old Aaliyah Gonzalez, Fatally Shot At Brooklyn Homes, July 2
What about women, Commissioner Worley?
In Brooklyn, your home of 12 years, or in Pigtown or Pasadena? How have you witnessed them being treated, whether in the precinct or in life beyond the PD?
How does that square with the allegations in the lawsuit against you, your longtime buddy Lester R. Rutherford, the one in the wedding photo with you, and two of your other friends in high places in the BPD?
This lawsuit accuses you and other top BPD brass of sexual discrimination targeting a veteran, high-ranking police officer through cruel, degrading, demoralizing, humiliating behavior, through verbal abuse, intimidation and vicious lies.
Would you call that unspeakably cruel and vicious behavior unbecoming of a police officer, Commissioner Worley?
Old Bay in His Blood
On June 10, The Baltimore Sun published a triple-bylined, lengthy feature about the 59-year-old Worley headlined: “A homegrown Baltimore Police commissioner: Bringing baggage from BPD’s history or ‘best of both worlds’?”
Scott, who has known Worley since the first-term Democrat served on the City Council, gushed about that hometown hero Worley (who lives in Anne Arundel County). The mayor called Worley a “Son of Baltimore” who rose through the ranks after starting as a police cadet in 1998 and moving to a patrol officer in the Western District the next year.
The Sun: “Richard Worley, the mayor said, has Old Bay in his blood: ‘That means a lot to me.’”
Now we can’t be sure if The Sun writers came up with that little wordplay on a favorite hometown spice or if the mayor — not exactly known for being an eloquent, eminently quotable leader — did.
Either way: Uh, no thanks, love it on crabs, but not into IV Old Bay or anything.
Forgive the digression.
I needed a break from the Brooklyn policing disaster and these stories of how BPD treated this woman, according to the federal lawsuit, the latter enough to make me feel like I need a shower or something.
But we’ll return to that in a bit — and in the days to come.
Scott sees the vital importance of having a homegrown Son of Baltimore as the city’s next police commissioner, as The Sun’s front-page opus made clear.
I love ya still, Baltimore Sun, the paper I delivered as a boy and the one where I worked for 11 years, winning a dozen major writing awards along the way. I hardly recognize it some days.
I still like to get ink on hands, so I read the print edition and can’t get over it.
Damn, sure wasn’t this light when I was a paperboy, back when I started circling stuff while sitting on the curb before and after my deliveries, and I never dreamed of being anything but a reporter since.
The Sun’s light in other ways too, what with the eviscerated staff struggling to do more or at least as much as in the paper’s glory days, but with much, much less.
This could help explain why three weeks into starting this little side project newsletter, I reported on a lawsuit against the city’s top cop and three of his longtime cronies, one a good friend, while The Sun did not.
But early last month, the newspaper did devote an enormous amount of newsprint to a profile about Worley, mostly sympathetic.
The Sun apparently forgot that it’s wise for a reporter from our hometown paper to visit the Garmatz federal court building daily, because the lawsuit, filed in December 2021, is just playing out now, and Worley will answer detailed questions in a deposition in September with Woodlawn High, Harvard and Stanford Law grad employment lawyer Tonya Baña.
The suit Baña filed in U.S. District Court in Baltimore alleges a more than decade-long pattern of sexual discrimination against a high-ranking female BPD officer, Deanna Effland — not only bias, but also routine harassment, bogus charges, disciplinary actions and a demotion that cut Effland’s annual salary by $10,000.
The suit alleges that Worley’s good friend Rutherford is the chief culprit.
Here we have allegations that Worley’s longtime friend called a female, high-ranking police officer a “bitch” and telling her and fellow female officers who demanded their rights per the FOP contract: “Fuck the contract!” Should any of these women, professional police officers, report him for behavior banned by both the contract and BPD rules and policies, he would “find a way to fuck them,” as he put it, according to the suit.
It got so bad that the BPD’s anti-discrimination unit forced out Rutherford in 2013.
That would be the supervisor who, the suit says, stood in front of a high-ranking female officer and imitated pushing a woman’s head down as she gives him a blowjob.
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Thanks for reading The Baltimore Observer, and if you have any suggestions on how I could better serve you and Baltimore, spot any errors, have news tips or pitches for story ideas or would like to submit a first-person piece, I’d love to hear from you. —Gary Gately, 410-382-4364, garymichaelgately@gmail.com
