‘A lazy cop’: Maryland police officer allegedly faked traffic stops to avoid service calls

A Baltimore, Maryland, police officer avoided service calls by claiming he was on traffic stops when he was in fact “sitting idle in his car”, according to an indictment filed by city prosecutors.Dequwan Houchins, 30, is accused of four counts of false entry in a public record and five counts of misconduct in office and could face 12 years in jail and a $4,000 fine for each of the false entry charges, if convicted.On one occasion, when Houchins reported being unavailable, he was allegedly ordering a smoothie, the indictment claims. His unusual work patterns came to light in December after police officials received a complaint that Houchins had been making false reports of traffic stops for months.“The allegations in this indictment reflect a troubling disregard for that responsibility,” said Baltimore city state’s attorney Ivan Bates. “Falsifying official records for personal convenience is a serious breach of public trust.”Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, called Houchins’s alleged actions “shameful”.The indictment notes that Baltimore police detectives conducted an undercover investigation of four traffic patrol shifts, tailing Houchins for two hours on each occasion between 8 April and 13 May. The sting operation found that Houchins made nine legitimate traffic stops and recorded eight illegitimate stops.On the occasion when Houchins bought a smoothie, he claimed he was making traffic stops but investigators said he sitting in his patrol car. It was also discovered that he had not filed any body-cam footage, as is required by police department rules.As Houchins claimed he was busy during various instances, other officers had “to pick up calls that would have been assigned to him”, the indictment states. The complaint does not include examples of the kinds of calls he missed.“This was just a lazy cop who didn’t want to do anything and wanted to collect a paycheck,” Baltimore police commissioner Richard Worley said at a news conference on Monday. “The bad thing is he was probably sitting doing something else when another officer needed help, and somebody else had to help him because he was too lazy to do it.”He said: “This is bigger than one officer trying to make his numbers look good. Even the numbers that he falsified, he wasn’t a ball of fire, so he wasn’t really out there doing a whole lot of work.”Contacted by the Baltimore-banner" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="92282" data-entity-type="organization">Baltimore Banner, Houchins said he was unaware of the indictment and rejected the allegation that he had been ordering a smoothie at the time he claimed to have been making a stop.“Getting smoothies. What the hell?” he reportedly responded, and described how he’d wanted to become a police officer since he was 18 and enjoyed his job. “But now I’m like: ‘What the hell is going on?’” Houchins said.A number of Baltimore police have recently been indicted on misconduct charges in recent months. In March, four police officers were indicted on charges including assault, misconduct in office and filing false reports, and another three on charges including theft, forgery and misconduct.The complaints included one officer accused of failing to report for her overnight shifts while logging the hours on her timesheet; another accused of inflating his hours by clocking in before leaving his home and not clocking out until he got home; and a third accused of submitting fraudulent doctor’s notes to obtain sick leave pay.