3 Black Maryland Police Officers File Racial Discrimination Suit
Three black police officers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court in Baltimore on Thursday, alleging the kind of Jim Crow-era racial discrimination that “most Americans would have believed unthinkable in the second decade of the 21st century.”
The suit grows out of the firing of Kelvin Sewell, the former chief of the 16-member police department in Pocomoke City, a racially mixed community of 4,000 people that bills itself as “the friendliest town on the Eastern Shore.” Mr. Sewell has called his firing in June, by a mostly white City Council, “racially motivated” payback for his refusal to fire the other two officers after they complained of discrimination.
The suit, filed Thursday morning in United States District Court for the District of Maryland, alleges an openly hostile climate in which Chief Sewell and the two black officers — one of whom was also fired — were subjected to “racial mockery, epithets, threats, humiliation and discrimination” by the law enforcement community in Pocomoke and its surrounding county, Worcester, in Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore. The region is pocked by poverty, and racial tensions date from the Civil War.
The suit names a string of defendants, including the Pocomoke City, the state’s attorney in Worcester County and several law enforcement departments: the Pocomoke City Police Department, the Worcester County Sheriff’s Department and the Maryland State Police. Officials from Pocomoke City and the Worcester County Sheriff’s Department declined to comment on the complaint, as did the Maryland attorney general, who represents the state police.
Mr. Sewell’s firing ripped apart the small community of Pocomoke City, forcing lifelong friends and neighbors to confront how differently they viewed issues of race and policing. According to the complaint, the chain of events that ultimately led to his dismissal began with another plaintiff in the suit, Franklin Savage, a Pocomoke officer who had been assigned to work with a regional drug task force.