Former Metro Transit Police officer James D. Holmes sees himself as a typical Metro whistleblower because, he says, his concerns have been repeatedly ignored.
“Both of these programs affect the public welfare,” Holmes said in a recent interview. Metro has repeatedly declined to discuss Holmes’ allegations with Tripping.
Holmes, who retired as a sergeant nearly two years ago, said the driver-monitoring program searched motor vehicle agency databases to ensure that Metro employees were not driving on restricted licenses because of drunk driving or other violations. When Holmes retired, the agency shut down his program and instead relied on employee self-reporting, he said. It’s not clear now that the agency has yet replaced the monitoring program with an equivalent of the one Holmes ran.
“Their response is that we’re going to let the drivers voluntarily report problems with their driver’s licenses? That’s just ludicrous,” Holmes said.
Holmes said he believes Metro discontinued the driving-monitoring program after some senior managers became angry that their names surfaced in his reports, especially if their duties didn’t require them to drive an agency vehicle.
As for screening job applicants, Holmes said Metro ignored warnings that third-party vendors were conducting inadequate background checks, especially in regard to MetroAccess employees. MetroAccess’s contracted employees work with children, elderly riders, and people with disabilities and children and so are required by law to undergo closer scrutiny, he said.
Under Holmes ‘screening, prospective MetroAccess employees were fingerprinted and their backgrounds checked against an FBI database. The police unit also used other records, including sex offender registries, terrorism watchlists, and court records that included outstanding warrants. If the applicants had outstanding warrants, police would arrest them — another policy that Holmes said had put his unit at odds with Metro’s management.
“We did have applicants that were on the terrorist watch list,” Holmes said. He said nearly 6,000 people were vetted using records available only to law enforcement.
But Holmes said he believes that Metro discontinued the police-run program because of a class action lawsuit alleging that the criminal background checks violated people’s civil rights. The lawsuit alleged that Metro declined to hire people or dismissed them from the job after background checks turned up minor charges, sometimes from far in the past.
But learning whether someone has a record doesn’t mean having to discard the person’s job application or fire the person, Holmes said. That was a decision dictated by Human Resources. Yet, according to Holmes, Metro’s response was to forgo exhaustive background checks altogether.
Metro wouldn’t comment on Holmes’ allegations because they “pertain to a matter that is subject to ongoing litigation and as a matter of policy Metro does not comment on ongoing litigation,” a spokeswoman said. Metro also declined several requests to discuss current driver-monitoring programs or its procedures for vetting job applicants.
Holmes has been sounding alarms about the two programs since his retirement in July 2015 without success.
Holmes bypassed the Metro’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) because he said he lacked confidence in the IG to deal with serious whistleblower allegations of fraud, misconduct, or incompetence — a claim echoed recently by Jackie L. Jeter, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689.
“The inspector General’s office is a total waste of time in Metro,” Holmes said.
Inspector General Helen Lew, who has been the agency’s watchdog since 2007, has a staff of 34 full-time employees, a Metro spokeswoman said. Lew, through Metro’s media office, has declined requests for interviews.
Instead, Holmes wrote to former Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), who raised Holmes’s concerns with the agency. He also reached out to the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) safety oversight team under its former director, Sean Thompson.
Holmes said he never heard back from the FTA’s Thompson but Milkuski forwarded Holmes’s letter to the transit agency. In response, Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld said Holmes’s account was “incomplete at best.” Holmes left the agency without training anyone to keep the programs going, Wiedefeld said.
“WMATA had to reconstruct a new process that conforms to each jurisdiction’s rules regarding the release of this information,” Wiedefeld wrote in the Jan. 16, 2016 letter to Mikulski in regard to the driver-monitoring program. He also said Metro staff were working on a program that would receive automatic notifications from the District, Maryland and Virginia so that there would be no need for Metro employees to actively search for updates.
In regard to background checks, Wiedefeld’s letter acknowledges that Holmes had been screening MetroAccess contractors using fingerprints and FBI records — a practice specific to MetroAccess contractors, not all Metro employees. But because Metro screens all prospective employees using third-party contractors, the agency opted “for business purposes” to entrust all background screening to third-party vendors, according to Wiedefeld’s letter.
Holmes said Wiedefeld’s letter confirms his account but glosses over problems with contractors. Before leaving the agency, Holmes said, he found that the contractor either failed to discover criminal charges on people’s records or improperly disqualified people whose records were cleared.
Holmes said he decided to publicize his concerns after allegations surfaced that some Metro workers had falsified track inspection reports. Metro has fired 21 people, including supervisors and front-line workers, and disciplined 14 others in its track inspection department.
But Holmes said Metro’s response to his concerns also shows why employees are often slow to come forward on their own with allegations of misconduct or safety problems.
“They spun it to make me look bad,” he said. “They had no intentions to start these programs up again.”
Mikulski, who joined Johns Hopkins University as a professor of public policy since retiring from the Senate, declined comment. An FTA spokeswoman said the agency’s oversight duties do not extend to personnel practices. Thompson, who is now director of rail operations at the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (GCRTA), did not return emails sent directly and forwarded through the GCRTA press office seeking comment.
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