Police then delayed the internal affairs investigation so long - potentially beyond the one-year statute of limitations outlined in the Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights - that a judge granted the detective the right to depose high-ranking police officials and prosecutors in an effort to avoid any form of punishment.
Before submitting to attorneys' questions about sensitive internal affairs procedures, police negotiated a deal and dropped the most serious charges of deception. They suspended Hagee without pay for 10 days and transferred him from the organized crime division.
But internal charging documents allege that the detective fabricated a story about the dispute and redirected responding officers to chase a fictitious suspect.
According to court records, Hagee told investigators that the woman's boyfriend, who also was a police officer, was the one banging on her door trying to get inside and not him. Hagee told police that the other man had run down the stairwell.
At the time, Hagee was a member of an elite federal team investigating drug trafficking and had 100 cases pending in Circuit Court.
In the deposition, Krehely says that he rarely - if ever - conducts investigations independent of the Police Department's internal affairs division, and that when he does, he notifies police of the actions he plans to take, including the identities of people he plans to interview.
He said he does not attend regular meetings of internal affairs investigators or share what he knows with rank-and-file prosecutors because he fears the information will be leaked. He also said that he has an office of two - himself and an investigator - and handles about 100 allegations of police misconduct a year.
"All I can say is, I maintain as little information in my databases, any of them, as I can because I do not want it to get out that Tom Krehely has all the information that the Police Department has so that I'm not the first person that gets a subpoena from attorneys, so," he said in the deposition. Fischer declined to comment, as did one of Hagee's attorneys in the police internal matter, Michael E. Davey.
Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for city police and the mayor, declined to comment, citing a federal lawsuit. Hagee, who is white, is alleging that his punishment after the domestic dispute was discriminatory because black and female officers who commit similar infractions are treated less harshly.
melissa.harris@baltsun.com
