Traffic Stop

A city police officer has been suspended with pay as the department investigates a woman's allegation that she was sexually assaulted during a traffic stop last week, officials confirmed Monday night. The alleged assault occurred Friday night or Saturday morning when the officer was on-duty, with the woman telling police she was asked to perform a sex act to get out of being arrested, said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. The officer was not identified pending the outcome of the investigation but was described as a three-year veteran assigned to the Northeastern District.

Maryland's highest court has agreed to decide whether the NAACP should be allowed to see state police records of how the agency handled five years of motorists' complaints of racial profiling, none of which the agency found to be valid. The Court of Appeals could upend a lower court ruling in the long-running "driving while black" dispute that ordered the disclosure of documents in about 100 complaints or could uphold it and allow the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to see the internal police records that the organization has been seeking since 2007.

The Carroll County Sheriff's Department is seeking a 30-year-old former Westminster resident charged with attempted murder of a deputy during a shooting early Monday. Brian Joseph Hill, whose last known address was on Penhurst Avenue in Baltimore, attempted to shoot the deputy with a handgun during a traffic stop on Old Westminster Pike about 2:30 a.m., police said. The deputy, who had stopped Hill's Ford Explorer for suspended tags, returned fire. Hill accelerated and crashed into a resident's yard.

I don't condone all of the actions of Anthony John Graber III, the Harford County motorcyclist now facing charges for videotaping a police officer who stopped him for traffic violations, nor do I know him. But what's the difference between a camera in a police car and the person being pulled over recording a traffic stop? Let's imagine that the trooper struck Mr. Graber with his weapon. Would Mr. Graber be facing wiretap charges? I don't think so. I don't think that we can assume that Mr. Graber was trying to entrap a police officer.

Cops don't seem to like getting caught on camera. Anthony John Graber III of Harford County is finding that out the hard way. His rapid and possibly reckless motorcycle trip up Interstate 95 has landed the systems engineer in more trouble than a speeding ticket. The 24-year-old Graber is facing criminal charges after the Internet posting of a video he recorded on his helmet-mounted camera during a March 5 traffic stop. When a state trooper saw the 23-second clip on YouTube 10 days after the stop, police got a warrant, searched Graber's parents' house in Abingdon, seized his equipment and charged him with violating the state's unusually restrictive wiretapping law. It's illegal in Maryland to capture audio without the other person's consent, and Trooper J.D. Uhler said he didn't know he was being recorded.

A District Court judge threw out this week the September 2009 disorderly conduct charge against Kelli Oliver, daughter of Baltimore County Councilman Kenneth N. Oliver, but she and the councilman's granddaughter will stand trial on other charges stemming from a traffic stop in which the two are accused of arguing with a county police officer. In dismissing the disorderly conduct charge, Judge Dorothy Wilson said that "the elements of disorderly conduct did not exist" at the time Kelli Oliver was arrested.

A police stop of a gold Corvette in Northeast Baltimore this month led authorities to a house on Holder Avenue over the weekend that had a cache of unregistered weapons including a World War II-era grenade, a Baltimore police spokesman said Monday. Michael Hudlicka, 59, was released on $35,000 bail stemming from his arrest after the traffic stop March 16 when police said he had a holstered .45-caliber handgun loaded with 10 hollow-point bullets. He could now face new charges besides possession of an unregistered handgun, according to police.

An early Sunday morning shooting that left two police officers injured and a suspect dead is the latest stain on a part of the city trying to improve its image after a dozen people were shot at a barbecue last summer. "We've been working toward changing the mind-set and changing the community," said McElderry Park Community Association President Ernest Smith, as the two city police officers remained hospitalized, recovering from their wounds. "As these things, these numbers, begin to go up again, it's a concern.

City police have charged a 34-year-old man in a January 2008 double shooting at a West Baltimore liquor store that left one man dead and another paralyzed. James Fortune was pulled over during a traffic stop in December and police found a semiautomatic handgun. The gun has been linked to the Jan. 24, 2008, shootings of Sidney Millner, 25, and Natavein Henry, 31, according to charging documents. Millner was shot in the neck and died at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, while Henry was paralyzed from the neck down.