Three Annapolis police union reps walked into a meeting at City Hall.

They had just wrapped up negotiating a new contract, one that members would soon ratify, giving officers a 19% raise.

John Lee, director of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400, and the two shop stewards had something else on their minds. They wanted Police Chief Ed Jackson, along with members of his command recruited from his old department in Baltimore, fired for what they said was waste and mismanagement.

They had proof, Mayor Gavin Buckley said they told him.

They complained, Buckley said, that Deputy Chief Stan Branford was improperly using his department-issued vehicle while working from home.

They knew because they were tracking the major’s movements with the locator on all department vehicles. Lee summed it up in a pithy assessment of Jackson’s five years as chief.

“They said it was time to put them in their clown car and send them back to Baltimore,” Buckley said.

What they didn’t bring up, the mayor said, was that Branford is home taking care of his daughter while she waits for a heart transplant.

The two officers’ use of department tech to track Branford was central to the union campaign to oust Jackson, and the chief’s decision to suspend them. Local 400 announced the suspensions last month on its website, saying its local leaders were unfairly disciplined by the chief for bringing “discredit to the department.” The union says they were illegally targeted for being whistleblowers.

A union spokesperson would not comment on the description of the meeting provided by the mayor and others, or details of the complaints.

“We brought our officers’ concerns to the mayor’s office acting as union stewards,” said John Williams, a spokesperson for the union. “We aren’t interested in making those concerns public. We’re trying to protect the officers involved from further retaliation.”

Both officers returned to duty this week after investigators from an outside agency, the Baltimore Police Department, found they hadn’t violated department policy. Local 400, which represents 100-plus officers, filed a grievance July 24 with state and federal regulators and scheduled a no-confidence vote for Thursday.

Buckley confirmed these details — saying the officers had no reasonable expectation of privacy because they went outside their chain of command — in hopes of flipping the script on the union’s campaign. He addressed officers on Tuesday, praising their work and Jackson’s record, and met with command staff two days later.

“Chief Jackson is here because he believes you can’t police hopelessness,” he told the officers in a prepared speech. “He was selected, after a national search, to bring a style of policing to Annapolis — a social approach that is tough when it needs to be but understands everyone’s circumstances are different.”

This dispute isn’t about crime. Annapolis is experiencing a dramatic decline in gun violence. There were nine fatal shootings last year and just one in 2024.

It seems to be more about Jackson’s efforts to reshape the department. Buckley plucked him from a retirement job teaching college, which followed a career in the Baltimore Police Department. He has shaken up a small-town force with a history of getting it wrong.

Past Annapolis chiefs have cited satirical news sites in blaming homicide numbers on cannabis and tried to illegally obtain the names and addresses of all public housing residents. One chief allowed an officer to retire without facing charges after he admitted taking $1,500 from a man found passed out at a gas pump — and approved repaying the money from city funds.

An officer ignored the significance of a machete attack on a Hispanic man, only to have Anne Arundel County police later link it to executions by a Salvadoran crime gang. A senior sergeant changed the race from Black to white on an arrest warrant for assault because he was sure he knew who committed the crime, only to arrest the wrong man with the right name.

Critics have said majority-Black neighborhoods were policed with an armed occupation style, with officers chasing street corner drug dealers from one part of the city to another and back again. Civil rights groups cast three no-confidence votes against the department.

Longtime civil rights activist Carl Snowden, a former city alderman, has followed this history closely.

He reminded me of a story about John Schmitt, the police chief during the 1980s. Standing 6-foot-5, the chief thundered during a staff meeting that officers were neither white nor black but blue.

One Black corporal at the back of the meeting raised his hand and asked a question.

“Chief, why do you treat the light blues differently than the dark blues?” Snowden recalled.

Schmitt, Snowden’s story goes, responded: “You’re to be a corporal for a long time.”

Annapolis would soon be under a federal consent decree, mandating changes to assure diversity in hiring and promotion.

The change under Jackson is visible, a younger and more diverse department. Twenty longtime officers, most or all of them white, have retired or resigned since Jackson was appointed in 2019.

Jackson is not the first Black chief, but he is the first to name a command staff equally divided among Black and white officers. About 30 percent of rank-and-file officers are now Black and there are more Hispanic officers than ever before, a reflection of the city’s population.

The union campaign prompted Snowden last month to lead many of the same civil rights leaders who had criticized police conduct in the past to issue a statement of confidence in Jackson’s department.

Square that with the May 3 meeting — which included the mayor, the city manager and others — when the union reps, two white and one Black, brought their concerns to the mayor.

They included Branford’s use of a department vehicle, an accident involving a captain’s department-issued car, a civilian staff member who officers felt was unqualified and the loss of accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) for the first time since 2004.

Buckley asked his staff to look into the accusations and found that the accident was properly reported, the staff hire within the chief’s prerogative.

The officer in charge of CALEA certification didn’t complete it because he was transferred to street patrol during the violent crime spike last year. The mayor expects to get it back. And there was no indication that Branford was misusing his vehicle, the mayor said.

“They’re entitled to feel that way, but to me, it seemed personal,” Buckley said.

Buckley brought the concerns to Jackson in their next meeting, prompting the chief to suspend the officers.

Maybe Branford, the deputy chief, has used his car for errands or trips or doctors’ visits. Neither he nor Jackson would comment.

Yet generosity fits with Annapolis’ recent record of supporting employees who are sick or who have illness in the family. Workers donated unused sick leave to Branford, as they did for a member of the mayor’s staff during yearlong cancer treatment and another employee with terminal cancer.

“We are a city that cares about people,” Buckley said.

Most people are more worried about crime than department intrigue, and Jackson’s record there seems strong.

There was the shift of administrative officers, including the one on the CALEA paperwork, onto the street during last year’s shootings This summer, after two high-profile incidents downtown, the chief redirected more officers to patrol the historic city center. Arrests in the one homicide this year came within days.

Six months after taking office, Jackson launched a return-from-prison program that has enrolled 300 people. Twenty have been rearrested, but 60 have found jobs and more are in training programs.

Ten months after that, someone leaked a 2017 police interview video on social media showing two men cooperating with police. Within days, residents of neighborhoods most affected by crime stopped talking with police. The release remains a mystery.

Jackson promoted a respected captain, who was hired by the department two decades earlier after graduating from St. John’s College, to head up community outreach in October 2022.

Since then, community confidence has been so successfully restored that officers collected 53 guns and 1,400 rounds of ammunition at a voluntary gun turn-in.

When officers vote next week, the results will be based on turnout rather than a percentage of total members. They also will be symbolic — they won’t get Jackson fired.

Buckley leaves office next year because of term limits, and it seems likely that the next mayor will pick his or her own chief.

Yet it’s clear some union members see Jackson’s changes differently than the chief or the mayor do.

“Our officers are rightly proud of their work,” said Williams, the police union spokesperson.

If only they hadn’t tracked that deputy chief. They’d be more believable.

This story has been updated to correctly spell John Schmitt's name on second reference.