Maryland Appellate Court dismisses lawsuit against Johns Hopkins, campus police department
The Maryland Appellate Court agreed with a lower court decision to dismiss a lawsuit from three Baltimore residents that challenged the Johns Hopkins University’s police department.
Judge Douglas Nazarian wrote in an opinion Wednesday that the plaintiffs did not show they were aggrieved in a different way than the public, the facts of the case haven’t matured into an existing controversy, and the suit failed to state a claim.
A 2021 law called the Community Safety and Strengthening Act allowed Hopkins to create a campus police force, a move that was met with boisterous protests. The private university signed a memorandum of understanding with the Baltimore Police Department about the force’s standards and jurisdiction.
The Hopkins police force has jurisdiction to patrol the Homewood academic campus, the medical campus in East Baltimore and the Peabody Institute conservatory in Mount Vernon. Officers can also operate in certain areas of public space that border campus.
The plaintiffs, Donald Gresham, Kushan Ratnayake and Joan Floyd, live near Hopkins’ Homewood campus. They sued Hopkins and the BPD for a second time in 2023 to nullify the memorandum of understanding that created the university police department. They appealed after a Baltimore Circuit Court judge dismissed the case.
In his opinion, Nazarian said their argument that they could be harmed by living near the Hopkins campus and walking on streets that overlap with the police department’s jurisdiction is theoretical and can’t be resolved by a court.
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“They have assumed, before the JHUPD has even come into being, that the JHUPD will exceed its statutory authority, violate the MOU, and cause negative impacts on them,” Nazarian wrote. “The Challengers have not alleged any past or present or actual harm as a result of the MOU and the [Hopkins police department], nor a likelihood of discernible harm in the near future.”
Floyd, one of the three plaintiffs who are representing themselves, said they are “definitely going to take it further” and try to appeal to the Maryland Supreme Court. She declined to comment further.
“This ruling again affirms the thoughtful statutory process the General Assembly set out for the development and operation of the Johns Hopkins Police Department,” said Hopkins spokesperson Shayne Buchwald-Nickoles in a statement.
Johns Hopkins Police Department is currently hiring and training officers. The department posted a series of draft policies outlining how university police will operate and is in the process of finalizing them.
