This month, just one Metropolitan Police Department officer—Lt. Andre Suber— is scheduled for an adverse action hearing, which will take place on Sept. 27.
Suber is accused of engaging in “inappropriate workplace conduct,” according to the schedule posted MPD’s website; he was previously scheduled for a hearing in February, but that one was postponed.
Suber is one of four men at MPD who have been accused of sexual harassment in a lawsuit filed late last year. All three plaintiffs in that case—two officers and one civilian employee—say Suber harassed them while at work. The details of their accounts reveal a strikingly similar pattern.
In previous interviews, each woman described how Suber would talk to them about his frustrations with his marital sex life before propositioning them. When the women rejected his advances, they say Suber would retaliate against them.
On one occasion, Officer Brady Smith said Suber lured her into a conference room under the guise of helping him with a work-related task. “We ended up in a conference room, and he asked me to lean over on this desk to try to have sex,” Smith said, adding that she declined his advances.
The lawsuit says Suber would call Smith “at all hours of the day, and began calling her when she was at home, off duty, and on her personal phone.” When Smith made it clear that she was not interested in his advances, he began to retaliate against her—writing her up for minor violations, denying her leave requests, and assigning her to “undesirable tasks,” according to the lawsuit.
It’s unclear whether Suber’s upcoming disciplinary hearing is related to the accusations in the lawsuit, and MPD has declined to provide more detail than the brief descriptions included in the hearing schedules. Suber did not immediately respond to an email or phone message.
Adverse action hearings are typically scheduled on a monthly basis but the department’s Disciplinary Review Division did not hold any hearings from June through August. An MPD spokesperson says via email that no hearings were held over the summer due to “staffing changes (retirement).”
Earlier this year, MPD began identifying the officers on the adverse action calendar by their first initials and last name. Previous public hearing calendars omitted officers’ names altogether and only included vague descriptions of the allegations they were facing.
The hearings are open to the public, but MPD requires attendees to register by emailing drd-hearing.admin@dc.gov at least two business days in advance. The chairperson who oversees these proceedings has the discretion to close “all or portions of the hearing for cause,” according to the DRD’s rules.
The hearings operate like mini trials, where an officer (typically represented by an attorney) has the opportunity to respond to the accusations and present witnesses and evidence. At some point afterward, a panel of MPD brass will make a disciplinary recommendation, which can include a fine, suspension, reduction in rank or pay, and termination, according to MPD’s general orders. The final disciplinary decision rests with the chief of police, but the department generally does not tell the public what sort of punishment it imposes on officers who engage in misconduct.