For D.C. Cop Who Pleaded Guilty To Drunk Driving, MPD Overlooked Previous Harassment

Before Metropolitan Police Department Officer John Bewley pleaded guilty to showing up drunk—in his take-home police cruiser, with emergency lights flashing, while off duty—at the scene of his fiancee’s DUI arrest, the 13-year veteran of the force had racked up a lengthy record of sustained misconduct, according to City Paper’s review of police investigations and public records.

Some of the allegations against Bewley are relatively minor: using MPD’s computers to research Bitcoin and neglecting to write police reports, for example.

He’s also gotten in trouble for failing to turn on his body camera and for turning it off too early. In the latter case, Bewley turned off his body cam after arresting two men for illegal gambling. He and another officer, both members of the Seventh District crime suppression team, were attempting to turn one of the men into a confidential informant, according to his explanation to internal investigators.

“In order to protect the defendant’s safety, due to our body worn camera videos being public, I turned my camera off,” Bewley said. (Several 7D officers were recently investigated for a similar tactic, and two now face termination, though unlike Bewley, those officers failed to make arrests.)

Other internal investigations into Bewley are more serious. He has been involved in at least one shooting (the victim survived, and Bewley was cleared of wrongdoing), and at least two vehicle pursuits that violated department policy. In one pursuit, Bewley chased a man who failed to use his turn signal back and forth across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge. It ended when the man crashed into an unmarked MPD vehicle with two lieutenants inside; both sustained minor injuries, according to the department’s investigation. Bewley was issued an official reprimand but faced no formal discipline.

He has been the subject of at least three sustained complaints by the Office of Police Complaints, D.C.’s civilian watchdog that operates independently of MPD. Two involved harassment of men suspected of carrying illegal firearms.

A third sustained complaint found that Bewley and other officers harassed and illegally searched the apartment of two men who were smoking weed in a car parked just outside their door.

But after reviewing the same evidence, MPD’s internal investigators cleared Bewley and the other officers of wrongdoing. The two separate investigations stand as another example of the ongoing tension between the consequences OPC believes officers should face for sustained misconduct and those that MPD are willing to impose.

Most of the investigations City Paper reviewed resulted in few actual repercussions for Bewley other than official reprimands or “education-based development” where he’s been instructed to re-read MPD’s general orders or receive additional training. (Bewley has acknowledged in court testimony that he was suspended as the result of at least one OPC investigation.)

Among his peers in the department, Bewley stands out as a “leader” and as a “respected” and “trustworthy” officer who specializes in getting guns and drugs off the streets, according to officers who’ve worked with him. But among some civilians and attorneys—including a prosecutor who felt the need to apologize to a jury in open court for Bewley’s behavior—Bewley has a reputation for being an aggressive officer with credibility issues.

Now, the Marine Corps veteran and former member of MPD’s notorious Gun Recovery Unit is facing termination for his drunk driving arrest.

A panel of MPD officials heard the evidence against Bewley during an adverse action hearing late last year. Bewley declined to comment for this story, but during the hearing, he asked for leniency—a suspension in lieu of termination—and provided examples of other officers who were also arrested for drunk driving and got to keep their jobs. The adverse action panel was scheduled to issue a recommendation this week, which will not be publicly announced. Bewley’s fate ultimately rests with Chief Pamela Smith.

“With this chief, she likes metrics, and gun recovery is a metric,” says Paul Butler, a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office who now teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University. “So officers who are really good at that might get more support and protection than officers who don’t recover as many guns.”

***

Around 9:30 p.m. in March of 2017, Lafayette Knight and his cousin were sitting in a car outside his apartment on Stanton Road SE, watching YouTube videos and smoking weed. Knight’s girlfriend was inside caring for their 4-month-old child.

The men got out of the car as four MPD officers arrived in an unmarked cruiser. Knight struggled with two of the officers before they wrestled him to the ground; Bewley arrived in a separate car as officers were attempting to subdue Knight. Both men were put in handcuffs, and officers noticed that Knight’s cousin, who worked as a special police officer, was wearing a duty belt with no gun in the holster.

“Where is the gun?” Bewley asked.

“Locked up in the house,” Knight’s cousin responded.

By this time, Knight’s girlfriend had come out of the apartment, but left the infant inside. Hearing this, Bewley told the woman that if she did not give police consent to search the apartment, she would have to wait up to four hours before she could go back inside while they applied for a search warrant. The woman declined to give them permission to search the place.

Bewley then turned to Knight, saying, “I’m kicking in your door,” if he didn’t give consent to search. Sgt. John Rowland followed up, telling Knight that if he continued to deny them permission to search, “We’re gonna tear the whole house to pieces.”

Again, Knight refused, so Bewley changed tactics. The officer told Knight that he “wouldn’t get in trouble” for having the gun in his apartment if he allowed police to search for it. But, Bewley said, if Knight still refused, and police had to obtain a search warrant, “you’ll take the gun charge.”

Finally, Knight relented. “Alright, man. Hurry up,” he said, adding that he’s a “scared Black man.”

None of this back-and-forth was noted in MPD’s internal investigation completed by Lt. Jimmie Thompson, whose focus was on officers’ use of force against the two men—a “Team Tactical Takedown.” Yet MPD’s General Orders instruct police officials to investigate any misconduct that they see in the course of an internal investigation, even if it isn’t part of the initial scope.

Knight and his cousin filed complaints with OPC, and hearing examiner Meaghan Hannan Davant found that Bewley and Rowland threatened and intimidated Knight in order to unlawfully search his apartment. But MPD did not impose any discipline against Bewley or the other officers.

“It was a slap on the wrist,” Knight says.  

Davant wrote in her findings that “there can be no question that Sergeant Rowland and Officer Bewley made credible threats to [Knight]’s 4-month-old child, to the apartment that he rented and for which he was thereby financially responsible, as well as to his future employment and even his personal freedom, should he be faced with a gun charge,” in violation of D.C. law and MPD’s general orders.

“The only immediate and credible threat to the child was created by the officers themselves,” Davant concluded.

Butler, the constitutional law professor who reviewed the investigations related to Knight’s complaint, agrees that officers’ “most egregious misconduct” was the attempt to leverage a 4-month-old’s safety. “As a matter of law, the police would not have been allowed to leave a 4-month-old baby in an apartment by herself while they sought a warrant,” he says. “Especially if the warrant is to find a gun in the apartment.”

Knight’s consent to search the apartment is a little murkier. Consent to search must be voluntary, not coerced, Butler says, and he suspects most judges would rule that Knight’s consent was voluntary.

“It’s not uncommon that there’s language about consent that can be interpreted either way, and judges typically interpret in a way that favors the cops,” he says. But, he adds, some jurisdictions, including D.C., give people more rights than the Constitution provides, so “it sounds like what happened [to Knight] was … harassment in the way that it’s described in the General Orders.”

Knight’s initial complaint alleged that Officer David Whitehead “knee[d] him in the face three times while he was in handcuffs,” a claim he repeated in an interview with City Paper. Those accusations were dismissed by OPC Director Michael Tobin. MPD denied City Paper’s request for the body camera footage.

The D.C. Police Union disagreed with OPC’s findings against Bewley and other officers and wrote an appeal on the officers’ behalf. The officers “acted prudently in their attempt to secure a weapon that was unsecured in a home with a child,” the union argued, adding that “reasonableness justified the entry into the home.”

A panel of OPC hearing examiners upheld the findings against Bewley, according to OPC’s legal counsel Jacqueline Hazzan. But in lieu of discipline, MPD ordered Bewley to re-read the department’s General Orders, he said when subsequently asked about the case in court.

Since the incident, Knight says he has purchased a harness for his cellphone so that it can act as a body camera for the next time he interacts with police. “You see what happens is, [if people] are scared, they die,” Knight says of his experiences with D.C. police. “So I’m not scared. That incident that night, it took 15 cops to take me down. I’m not scared.”

Tobin, the OPC director, has repeatedly called attention to MPD’s refusal to impose meaningful discipline when his agency sustains police misconduct. His latest report, dated August 2024, points out a pattern dating back two years where MPD initially indicates it will impose discipline, such as suspension, but later reverses that decision, and officers instead receive education-based development. 

The report points to an officer City Paper has identified as Anthony Gaton, who has received three sustained harassment complaints in three years. MPD ordered Gaton to do more training after the first two complaints; only after the third was he issued a suspension, according to OPC’s annual report.

MPD’s failure to hold its officers accountable, Tobin says in the report, “demonstrates to officers that complaints from community members are insignificant, and implies to the community that MPD endorses, or at least tolerates police misconduct.”

***

When Bewley took the stand during his disciplinary hearing last December, he was humble and apologetic. He said he had met up with fellow veterans earlier that night to celebrate the Marine Corps’ birthday and took an Uber to and from the celebration because he knew he would be drinking. He said he was at home in bed when he got a distressing call around 3 a.m. from his fiancee.

Bewley acknowledged that he showed poor judgment on Nov. 11, 2023, when he drove his take-home cruiser while intoxicated. He said he regrets the disrespectful things he said to one officer in particular when he remarked on their weight. And he argued that he did not intend to obstruct officers on the scene that night; he was trying to tell his fiancee to refuse the field sobriety tests, which are optional, and he got frustrated when the officers insisted otherwise.

“I just hope that you all are able to see that I did make a mistake, and I’m taking ownership and I want a second chance,” he told the panel of three MPD officials who will recommend what discipline he should face. “If I’m afforded one, it will not backfire.”

But some of his explanations are contradicted by body camera footage.

Bewley told the panel, for example, that he drove to the scene of his fiancee’s DUI arrest because he was concerned for her safety. She had gotten into a minor collision with another driver, who was “irate” and yelling at her. Bewley claimed he didn’t know that officers were on the scene until he was already on his way. But body camera footage from an officer on scene captured his phone conversation with his fiancee before he left his home.

Bewley also told the panel that he did not resist being handcuffed after he ignored his fellow officers’ orders to stop interfering. But body camera footage played during the hearing shows several officers struggling to put Bewley in cuffs and saying “stop resisting” and “the only reason we’re cutting you slack is because you’re our brother.” Bewley responds: “You’re not going to cuff me because I’m a police officer.” Even after watching the footage, Bewley maintained that he wasn’t resisting.

And footage played earlier in the hearing shows Bewley, sitting in cuffs in the back of a police vehicle, telling a lieutenant that he had taken an Uber to the scene—a glaringly untruthful statement considering that several officers watched him drive up in his cruiser with the emergency lights activated.

“There’s a theme here,” said Daniel Thaler, the assistant attorney general who argued for Bewley’s termination. “Statements from Officer Bewley have not been truthful.”

It’s not the first time Bewley’s veracity has been called into question during an official hearing.

During a motion to suppress evidence in an illegal gun case in 2022, Bewley described how and why he decided to stop a man who was driving on the shoulder of I-295. In his testimony, Bewley said that he could see the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror—a claim that D.C. Superior Court Judge Michael Ryan called “somewhat fantastic.” 

“The looking in the rearview mirror I found somewhat lacking in credibility, that Bewley could have seen that,” Ryan said before making his ruling. “And generally these atmospherics do give cause to doubt the credibility of the witness testifying.”

Jamison Koehler, the defense attorney in that case, says judges rarely issue adverse credibility findings against police because they know the impact it can have on an officer’s career.

“Once [an officer] gets an adverse credibility finding, like what Judge Ryan did, if attorneys are on their game, they can keep using it against him,” Koehler says. “If the government doesn’t feel comfortable calling him to testify at trial, their arrests don’t stand up and their ability to perform their duties is compromised.”

<img data-recalc-dims="1" decoding="async" width="780" height="528" data-attachment-id="722771" data-permalink="https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/722768/d-c-judges-keep-tossing-mpd-gun-seizures-out-of-court-have-cops-changed-their-ways/cheif_smith1/" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?fit=2000%2C1354&ssl=1" data-orig-size="2000,1354" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Pamela Smith MPD" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="

MPD Chief Pamela Smith speaks at an event in 2024.

” data-medium-file=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?fit=300%2C203&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?fit=780%2C528&ssl=1″ src=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1-1024×693.jpg?resize=780%2C528&ssl=1″ alt=”Pamela Smith” class=”wp-image-722771″ srcset=”https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=1024%2C693&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=300%2C203&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=768%2C520&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=1536%2C1040&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=1200%2C812&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=600%2C406&ssl=1 600w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=1568%2C1062&ssl=1 1568w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?resize=400%2C271&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1.jpg?w=2000&ssl=1 2000w, https://i0.wp.com/newspack-washingtoncitypaper.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2024/06/Cheif_Smith1-1024×693.jpg?w=370&ssl=1 370w” sizes=”(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px” />

Ryan’s statements didn’t come up during Bewley’s adverse action hearing in December.

When it was the panelists’ turn to ask questions, Capt. Riley Hong and Inspector Michael Jones Sr., who chaired the hearing, thanked Bewley for his military service. Jones complimented his “outstanding work” for the 7D gun recovery unit.

Hong asked if Bewley has a history of misbehavior connected to alcohol (no) and gave Bewley another chance to acknowledge that he resisted being put in handcuffs. (Bewley admitted that he “did tense up.”)

Jones asked whether, in Bewley’s experience, an uncooperative person helps or hurts when police officers are dealing with a chaotic scene. “I did not help at all,” Bewley replied. 

The panel was scheduled to issue its recommendation by Jan. 21, and Chief Smith will decide whether Bewley should be suspended or fired. Regardless of Smith’s decision, Bewley can appeal his case further, including to Superior Court.

Bewley’s attorney, Dan McCartin, said in closing that he found as many as 10 examples of D.C. police officers who were arrested for DUI and were disrespectful with officers on scene (some of whom were arrested with their service pistols on them)—all of whom were given suspensions in lieu of termination.

“His prior service to the department warrants a second chance,” McCartin said.