Crime & Safety

Redmond Cop Says Department Treated Other Misconduct Lightly

Complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by Officer Marcella Fogg allege another Redmond officer faced minimal repercussions for sexual harassment.

A police officer's $3 million lawsuit against the city of Redmond contains a detailed account of how a former lieutenant allegedly received relatively light punishment after a sexual harassment investigation involving another officer.

Officer Marcella Fogg is accusing the Redmond Police Department of bias-based harassment and retaliation after she went undercover at Redmond High School to help orchestrate a 2010 drug bust. KING 5 first shed light on her case in an investigative report last week.

Redmond city officials declined to comment on the claims.

Among her allegations, Fogg says she received unfairly harsh punishments for relatively minor offenses and was the subject of an "agency assist" investigation by the Bellevue Police Department that was based on unfounded rumors concerning her relationship with a teenager.

One of the claims Fogg filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleges RPD responded much less harshly toward accusations against other officers.

Do you think Fogg was treated unfairly? Tell us in the comments section.

Legal documents provided to Patch by Fogg's attorney, Robert Kim, detail a 2009 incident in which a male RPD lieutenant allegedly grabbed the crotch of another male officer in Leavenworth in front of several other department personnel. The lieutenant was also accused of sexually assaulting a "young man" at a social gathering in 2008, according to the documents—an incident that was allegedly witnessed by another officer.

"Instead of having an outside agency investigate this, which is standard procedure for possible crimes and serious accusations such as sexual harassment, the department decided to handle the internal investigation 'in house,'" the documents state. "An outside agency would not only have sustained the allegations, it would have most likely recommended termination."

But the lieutenant, who was not named in the documents, was merely demoted, according to the claim.

Fogg, however, was the subject of an agency-assist investigation by Bellevue Police surrounding her relationship with a teenage boy she had been mentoring.  The matter was closed last September, with Bellevue PD finding "no evidence of a crime involving sexual misconduct with a minor," according to KING 5. 

For its part, the city of Bellevue says its police were merely following standard procedure in responding to a request from a neighboring jurisdictions. So-called agency assists are not uncommon, city spokeswoman Emily Christensen told Patch, and they are often done out of privacy concerns.

“In part, it’s to protect the employee in their own department,” she said.    

But Kim, the attorney, says the request was just another example of Redmond Police showing bias against Fogg, who is also seeking $1 million in damages from the City of Bellevue. RPD, he says, wanted to escalate the rumors "just to get this thing put into Marcella's file."

“There was never any doubt that it would be unfounded," he said.


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