39 Deaths. 2 Charges. No Accountability: Oversight Won’t Save Us From a System Built to Protect Police

Maryland's Independent Investigations Division (IID) was established to bring accountability to police-involved fatalities. Instead, it has become a case study in institutional opacity. Of 39 completed investigations, charges have been brought in just two cases, one of which was dismissed, raising serious questions about whether the office is genuinely committed to transparency or merely performing it.

The death of Dontae Melton Jr. crystallizes these concerns. Melton, experiencing a mental health crisis, approached officers seeking help on June 24, 2025. He begged, "Please, bro, please. It's an emergency." He was restrained, laid on hot pavement, and left waiting for medical assistance that never came due to a CAD system outage. He died alone in a hospital, unidentified, because the responding officer never noted his name.

The coroner ruled the death a homicide. And yet the IID, remarkably, concluded its investigation without speaking to any of the ten officers involved. The report determined that "none of the subject officers committed a crime under Maryland law," a finding that strains credulity given what body camera footage shows: a supervising officer, Sgt. Joshua Jackson, declining offers of help and stating plainly, "This don't look good. It's all about optics, baby."

That comment, and others like it, went entirely unaddressed in the declination report. As legal expert David Jaros noted, Jackson's statements "suggest he really was aware of the risk and was simply balancing those risks against his concerns about not looking good in the public eye," a potentially significant indicator of criminal awareness that the IID chose not to engage with.

Melton's mother, Eleshiea Goode, cut to the heart of the matter: "If the police are not responsible for my son's death, please tell me who is... A CAD system is not a person. Who killed my son?"

The Attorney General's office declined to answer detailed questions, referring reporters back to the report itself.

Link: Baltimore Beat 

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