Baltimore Police Officer Indicted for Falsifying Traffic Stop Reports in CAD System

A Baltimore police officer has been indicted by a city grand jury for fabricating traffic stop entries in the department's electronic reporting system, allegedly logging stops that never occurred while he sat idle in his vehicle to avoid service calls.

Officer Dequwan Houchins, 30, was indicted in Baltimore Circuit Court on four counts of false entry in a public record and five counts of misconduct in office, according to a press release from the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office (State's Attorney's Office). The indictment was announced on August 10, with additional details emerging from an August 11 Guardian report.

Baltimore police record traffic stops in a Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) electronic reporting system. A random audit conducted in December 2025 flagged Houchins's activity, revealing that he had made numerous false reports of traffic stops in CAD for at least four months, according to WBAL-TV (WBAL-TV). The audit followed an earlier complaint received by police officials in December alleging that Houchins had been filing false traffic stop reports for months.

After the complaint surfaced, Baltimore police detectives conducted an undercover investigation, tailing Houchins for two hours during each of four traffic patrol shifts between April 8 and May 13. The sting operation found that Houchins made nine legitimate traffic stops but recorded eight illegitimate stops — entries in CAD for stops that did not occur. On one occasion when Houchins reported himself unavailable for service calls, he was allegedly ordering a smoothie, a detail confirmed by both the State's Attorney's Office press release and the Guardian.

Investigators also discovered that Houchins had not filed any body-worn camera footage, as required by Baltimore Police Department policy. The absence of body-cam recordings corresponded with the phantom traffic stops: no footage existed because the stops never took place.

The allegations drew swift condemnation from city officials. Baltimore City State's Attorney Ivan Bates said the indictment reflects "a troubling disregard for responsibility" and that falsifying official records for personal convenience constitutes a serious breach of public trust. Mayor Brandon Scott called Houchins's alleged actions "shameful." Police Commissioner Richard Worley was more blunt at a news conference, describing Houchins as "a lazy cop who didn't want to do anything and wanted to collect a paycheck."

Houchins, contacted by the Baltimore Banner, said he was unaware of the indictment and rejected the allegation that he had been ordering a smoothie when he claimed to be conducting a traffic stop.

If convicted, Houchins faces up to 12 years in jail and a $4,000 fine for each of the four false entry charges, in addition to the five misconduct-in-office counts.

The case arrives against a broader pattern of accountability actions within the Baltimore Police Department. In March, four Baltimore officers were indicted on charges including assault, misconduct in office, and filing false reports, and another three were indicted on charges including theft, forgery, and misconduct. The Houchins indictment, while narrower in scope, touches on the same category of offense — falsification of official records — that has drawn federal scrutiny of the department in prior years.

The CAD system at the center of this case is the operational backbone for dispatch and record-keeping in Baltimore policing. False entries in CAD do not merely inflate an officer's activity metrics; they can skew deployment data, skew crime analysis, and create a paper trail that misrepresents officer whereabouts during a given shift. The body-worn camera requirement was designed precisely as a corroborating safeguard against such fabrications. Its circumvention — or, in this case, simple noncompliance — exposes the limits of oversight mechanisms when an officer declines to generate the evidence that would confirm or contradict a CAD entry.

The use of a covert surveillance operation to verify an officer's reported activity is itself notable. Internal affairs investigations of this type are resource-intensive, requiring plainclothes or undercover personnel to shadow a sworn officer over multiple shifts. The decision to deploy that apparatus here suggests that the December complaint and audit findings were treated as credible enough to justify the operational cost.