A former investigator of employment discrimination cases within the Metropolitan Police Department claims in a new lawsuit that she faced rampant discrimination and retaliation after blowing the whistle on her superiors. Loose Lips has got to give MPD points for irony, at least.
Rosemarie Lucero alleges that MPD leadership jerked her around in a variety of ways after she filed a federal lawsuit against the department in 2022, along with other internal complaints about her bosses at the agency’s Equal Employment Opportunity office. After she raised those concerns, Lucero claims that MPD officials transferred her to another unit, refused to give her any work, assigned her to an office that was actually a storage closet, and denied her telework and medical leave requests before she quit in frustration, according to a new lawsuit filed in D.C. Superior Court last month.
Lucero’s attorney, Pam Keith, tells Loose Lips that her client has been sounding the alarm on the EEO office for years now, as more and more women have come forward to allege discrimination, pointing to the depth of the problems within this part of the police agency.
A report commissioned by MPD two years ago found that the EEO office was so dysfunctional it would require an “in-depth audit” and some sort of reform. Lucero was joined by four of her fellow employees in the EEO office in filing the 2022 lawsuit in federal court describing a “toxic and hostile work environment,” and other MPD employees have outlined similar problems with its management in subsequent lawsuits. MPD ultimately chose to disband the EEO office and redistribute its functions, according to documents filed in Lucero’s case—hardly the most encouraging sign for a department plagued by accusations of race and sex discrimination.
“It’s just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic,” says Keith, who has represented a number of MPD officers in lawsuits against the department over the years. “It’s not me making up these cases. People come to me. Because there is an attitude within the department that if you complain or you go public, you can expect the wrath of Khan to come down upon you. Because it will.”
An MPD spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit, merely pointing LL to the department’s EEO policies on its website. But the Office of the Attorney General (which represents MPD in such cases) has repeatedly disputed Lucero’s claims in legal filings.
Many of the alleged problems with the EEO office stem from Alphonso Lee, who led the unit back when it still existed.
Lucero and her colleagues describe Lee in their suit “as a self-appointed defender of MPD management, put in place to undermine and discredit complainants, rather than to investigate or remedy alleged acts of discrimination.” In her own more recent suit, Lucero recounts instances where Lee would ask that she listen to audio interviews with MPD employees raising discrimination claims and “report to him anything that could be used to discredit the complainant.” She adds that Lee would frequently inform MPD management about the contents of these complaints before the EEO office would file a formal report on them and would massage these documents based on feedback from his supervisors. (Three other women working for MPD made similar claims about his conduct in a December 2023 lawsuit.)
“One of Mr. Lee’s dubious directives was to demand that the EEO counselors search out and find people who have no first-hand knowledge of any facts or circumstances related to a claim, to assert that they had not been treated badly or discriminated against, in order [to] undermine a claim of discrimination,” Lucero wrote in her lawsuit. “According to Mr. Lee’s rule, when [Lucero] found a person of similar demographics (i.e., Black, female, disabled) who would state that they had not been discriminated against, she was directed to use that statement to invalidate and discredit the complainant’s assertion they were discriminated against.”
Lee also faced persistent allegations of creating a hostile work environment for women in his office, in particular. Lucero and her fellow EEO investigators described his “clear and unmistakable contempt for women police officers” in their federal suit; Lucero herself claimed in her case that Lee frequently expressed “that women police officers are liars, conniving, deceptive and will do anything to get what they want.”
But his former employees also asserted that Lee would treat anyone who filed a discrimination complaint with contempt, regardless of their gender. For instance, MPD Lt. Savyon Weinfeld claimed in a 2022 lawsuit that Lee worked to quash his EEO complaint after he was denied a promotion. Lee “threatened [Weinfeld] and warned him that there would be negative consequences to him if he carried on with the allegations he was making,” Weinfeld alleged. (The case is still pending in D.C. Superior Court.) Lucero and her EEO colleagues claimed dozens of complaints were filed against Lee during his tenure, but he’s been protected by his relationships with top MPD officials.)
All of these allegations contributed to the 2022 report recommending the EEO office’s reform. The “cultural assessment” of MPD, commissioned by former Chief Robert Contee, concluded that all the claims made in these various lawsuits (as well as the office’s failure to adhere to best practices and the “incomplete and inconsistent” data it maintained on its activities) suggested the need for top-to-bottom changes. “The unit has lacked scrutiny for at least the past several years, which calls into question how seriously the department takes its” commitment to creating a bias-free workplace, the report’s authors wrote.
There’s little evidence that MPD has done the sort of serious soul-searching suggested by that study, however. Instead, the department disbanded the office and redistributed its functions: Investigations of discrimination complaints are now handled by the Internal Affairs Division, while sensitivity counseling for employees was moved into the HR department’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion Office. The city wrote in a filing responding to Lucero’s suit that the change took place in June 2023, just a few weeks before Mayor Muriel Bowser tapped Pamela Smith as Contee’s successor.
Keith believes this reorganization has actually made things worse for employees experiencing discrimination, considering the stigma that surrounds IAD, which traditionally probes misconduct complaints against officers.
At the very least, it seems as if MPD has somehow ousted Lee. Lucero claims in her suit that Lee “was allowed to resign in lieu of termination” in November. Keith says she based that assertion on Lee’s own statements during a deposition in a separate lawsuit, but she is still working to understand the circumstances surrounding his departure. (But Lee is currently listed as an MPD employee on the city’s HR database, making a $130,800 salary; MPD spokespeople did not answer LL’s questions about Lee’s status.)
MPD Chief Pamela Smith speaks at an event in 2024. Credit: Darrow Montgomery
“The things we accused him of in 2022 were very serious,” Keith says. “So whatever he did or whatever they saw as problematic in 2024, I’m very curious about.”
As the department dealt with the fallout from allegations about the EEO office, Lucero claims MPD brass began their campaign of retaliation against her. By March 2022, just a few weeks after she filed the federal lawsuit against the department, Lucero says her office was moved to “a storage closet full of boxes stacked to the ceiling, with no windows, in an extremely narrow cramped space.”
“This space had never before been used as an office, and [her] colleagues remarked on how unusual it was to have someone work out of that space,” Lucero’s suit argues. She believes “she was relegated to a closet for the express purpose of separating [her] from her colleagues, and demonstrating to others that [she] was out of favor with management.”
In May 2022, her office was moved again, this time to a room without air-conditioning, which “exacerbated [her] migraine headaches,” the suit alleges. Shortly afterward, Lucero says she was approached by one of Lee’s subordinates, who attempted to “elicit from [her] denigrating and/or derogatory comments” about the other EEO employees who joined her in filing the federal lawsuit. Lucero also discovered that the woman attempted to record their conversation, but Lucero refused to engage with her.
By September of that year, Smith (then the department’s chief equity officer) informed Lucero that she’d be temporarily detailed to MPD’s recruiting unit to manage applicants’ background checks. While this work didn’t exactly match her training or experience, she “did not strenuously object to the move because of her desire to avoid Mr. Lee.” She was also “keeping an open mind about the intentions of Chief Smith because Chief Smith was new to MPD, and was ostensibly hired to address the issues that had been raised in the lawsuits” filed by a number of women working for the department.
But Lucero quickly found herself under undue scrutiny from her superiors, she claims, and was the only member of the staff denied the right to telework, even though much of her work could easily be completed remotely. She believes the latter decision was made directly by Ben Haiman, then the department’s influential chief of staff. (Haiman, who left the department last year for a new role in academia, did not respond to a request for comment.)
So in June 2023, Lucero says she asked for permission to move back to the EEO office only to find that MPD dissolved it almost immediately after she was transferred. She agreed to accept a counseling role with the DEI office, but she again ran into trouble with her supervisors. Lucero says she “was given no counseling duties, no investigations, and no other meaningful work to do as a DEI counselor” and “systematically excluded from team meetings, and not allowed to participate in any of the discussions regarding employee issues or concerns.” She alleges that these decisions came straight from Haiman.
“She was required to show up in person every day for eight hours and sit for eight hours with no work, no meetings, no investigations, no collaborating with other employees, no nothing,” Keith says.
Lucero claims that her bosses then began making unreasonable demands as she sought medical leave and other accommodations after undergoing wrist surgery, which she viewed as the final straw. She opted to quit in May and filed her recent lawsuit in December.
“When MPD retaliates, it’s a multilayer cake of things to break your spirit,” Keith says. “She goes from being somebody whose career was going great and everything was just fine to basically persona non grata, and everything sucks.”
Lucero initially made some of these claims in a lawsuit filed in December 2023, opting to file a new case after she experienced troubles securing medical leave and left the department. D.C.’s lawyers have denied many of her charges and tried to have them tossed out of court on procedural grounds, but a judge ruled in July that the bulk of the case could proceed. The city has yet to respond to her latest suit.
Keith says she’s also still awaiting action from the federal court on Lucero’s other case. D.C. attorneys asked in August 2022 to have it dismissed, but a judge has still not weighed in on the matter.
“It’s remarkable to me how hard they fight these cases instead of trying to look at the system as a whole,” Keith laments. “It’s a culture of: ‘How dare you hold anybody accountable for what they do, but we’re going to hold you accountable for what you do.’”