A Baltimore Police Officer Is Accused of Making Up Traffic Stops

A Baltimore police officer has been indicted by a city grand jury for making up traffic stop reports in the department's computer system, allegedly logging stops that never happened while he sat in his vehicle to avoid work.

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 use an electronic system called Computer-Aided Dispatch, or CAD, to log traffic stops and track what officers do during their shifts. Think of it as a digital timesheet. A random check in December 2025 flagged Houchins's activity, showing he had filed false traffic stop reports in CAD for at least four months, according to WBAL-TV (WBAL-TV). The check followed an earlier complaint from December alleging that Houchins had been filing false reports for months.

After the complaint, Baltimore police detectives ran an undercover investigation. They followed Houchins for two hours during each of four shifts between April 8 and May 13. They found that Houchins made nine real traffic stops but recorded eight fake ones. On one occasion when Houchins reported himself unavailable for service calls, he was allegedly ordering a smoothie. That detail was confirmed by both the State's Attorney's Office press release and the Guardian.

Investigators also found that Houchins had not filed any body-worn camera footage, as required by department policy. No footage existed because the stops never took place.

City officials responded quickly. Baltimore City State's Attorney Ivan Bates said the indictment reflects "a troubling disregard for responsibility." Mayor Brandon Scott called Houchins's alleged actions "shameful." Police Commissioner Richard Worley was blunt at a news conference, calling Houchins "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 denied 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, plus the five misconduct-in-office counts.

This case is part of a larger pattern. In March, four Baltimore officers were indicted on charges including assault, misconduct in office, and filing false reports. Three more were indicted on charges including theft, forgery, and misconduct. The Houchins case, while smaller in scope, involves the same kind of offense — falsifying official records — that has drawn federal scrutiny of the department in prior years.

Why does this matter beyond one officer? The CAD system is the backbone of Baltimore's police record-keeping. False entries do not just make an officer look busier than they are. They can skew decisions about where to send police resources, distort crime data, and create a false record of where an officer was during a shift. The body-worn camera rule was designed as a safeguard — a second source of evidence to check against written reports. When an officer simply does not turn on the camera, that safeguard fails.

The undercover operation itself is also worth noting. Investigations like this require plainclothes detectives to follow an officer over multiple shifts, which takes significant time and staff. The decision to go to that length suggests the December complaint and audit were taken seriously enough to justify the cost.