Investigators probing potential Boise police racism clash with former employees suing city

The investigation into whether racism influenced the Boise Police Department has hit a snag.

A disagreement over the terms of potential interviews has so far left investigators without the perspective of two notable recent former employees.

Tom Fleming, a retired Boise police captain, and Jesus Jara, the former director of the department’s oversight office who was fired in December, have declined to participate in live interviews with Steptoe & Johnson, the firm investigating, said Michael Bromwich, the lead attorney. Both men have pending lawsuits against Boise.

“We’ve told them that it’s an entirely voluntary interview,” Bromwich, who is a former inspector general at the U.S. Department of Justice, told the Idaho Statesman by phone. “They can decline to answer any questions that are related to their lawsuit and that they think might prejudice their lawsuit, and they can walk out anytime. … We would stay away from stuff that is directly related to the lawsuit, none of which has much to do with our investigation.”

Steptoe’s probe began after allegations surfaced that a retired veteran officer, Matt Bryngelson, was tied to racist online posts.

Jara was fired in December for “exploiting” his access to internal police department systems, and using them to “randomly” view thousands of police body camera videos, according to a previous statement from Mayor Lauren McLean. Three days later, Jara sued the city, arguing the city discriminated and retaliated against him for investigating complaints against the former chief, Ryan Lee, who resigned in September.

Fleming sued the city in November, arguing that he was retaliated against by the former chief for conducting internal investigations before he left the department in July.

Grady Hepworth, an attorney representing both Fleming and Jara, told the Statesman that his clients had not declined to participate in interviews but had offered instead to respond to written questions or to sit for a recorded interview. Because his clients have sued the city, Hepworth said anything they say about their past employment at the city becomes evidence, and must be preserved.

“No attorney in their right mind would trust attorneys hired by the city to keep accurate notes of what their clients say,” Hepworth said by phone. “We flat-out reject this notion that we’ve declined to participate when we’ve specifically offered to participate.”

Hepworth added that the Steptoe firm had declined to allow the interview to be recorded. Bromwich disputed that, too.

“They can record it,” he said in a follow-up phone call. “They never asked me that.”

Bromwich also said that providing written answers is a “non-starter,” and that such responses do not compare to live interviews.

“It’s too bad, because I think both Fleming and Jara have very significant things to say, particularly about the internal affairs and oversight processes within the department and from outside the department,” Bromwich said.

The interview dispute was first reported by BoiseDev.

Hepworth also took issue with the investigation as a whole, but said his clients would be interested in helping to resolve whether there is racism in the department.

“The whole investigation is such a red herring,” he said. “What’s most disappointing is that this amount of effort and time is being spent on a single former employee, when my clients brought credible allegations about current employees and current elected officials. Where was the investigation for that?”

An attorney representing former chief Ryan Lee, William Mauk, declined to say if Lee had been interviewed by the firm, and declined to comment further.

Are the lawsuits relevant to the investigation?

The turmoil at the Police Department in recent months is part of the background of the Bryngelson investigation, Bromwich said.

The firm was hired to investigate whether racism has affected police work in Boise. When the investigators have asked employees about how the department is functioning, “those things inevitably come up,” he said.

But the investigation’s focus is on examining potential racism, such as whether Black and other minority officers were graded more harshly, or deliberately not hired. Or whether minority communities faced harsher policing than white communities.

Steptoe investigation going ‘well’

The six-lawyer team of Steptoe attorneys has made two trips to Boise so far and has interviewed over a dozen current and former members of the department, Bromwich said.

A couple of people were initially reluctant to talk to the firm because “they were concerned we had some preconceived ideas of what we would find,” he said. But they have left the interviews thinking that the investigation would “give (them) a fair shake,” and they have encouraged others to participate, he said.

The investigation has yet to begin analyzing paperwork.

Steptoe has asked the Police Department for many documents, which staff members are having trouble providing.

“They’re struggling with (the requests) a little bit because of the state of record-keeping systems within the Police Department,” he said, noting older records of Bryngelson’s early years have proved difficult to locate.

“I have absolutely no suspicion that they’re hiding things from us,” he said. “I think these are legitimate problems with the way information was stored 10 or 15 years ago.”

Has the firm interviewed Bryngelson?

Bromwich said Bryngelson, the retired officer, declined an interview.

Though he expected that, Bromwich said that he thought Bryngelson might be interested in dispelling the “cloud” he has created around the department. The officer spent more than two decades with Boise police.

Under a pseudonym, Bryngelson wrote posts discussing the “violent tendencies of Blacks” and accusing Black people of instinctive criminality. He wrote that he left California and moved to Boise because of its predominant white population.

“I would think there would be a substantial temptation to explain himself rather than sit back and be vilified by his former colleagues,” Bromwich said. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re very angry at him.”

Bryngelson did not respond to a request for comment.

Investigators are inviting the public to leave comments on a new website created for the probe.