A retired Duluth police lieutenant says speaking up about fellow officers cost him his career trajectory, and he is now taking the city to court over it. In a whistleblower lawsuit filed March 1, former Lt. David Drozdowski alleges he was punished after raising concerns about officer conduct. The suit names Police Chief Mike Ceynowa and Mayor Roger Reinert and claims city leaders minimized use-of-force incidents and troubling behavior around suicide calls. Drozdowski, who led the department's behavioral health unit and crisis negotiation team, says he was reassigned to patrol, put on leave, and ordered to undergo a psychological fitness-for-duty exam before he ultimately retired to protect his benefits.
In the complaint, Drozdowski lays out several episodes he says were brushed off by supervisors instead of being taken seriously. One involves an officer who fired less-lethal projectiles into occupied vehicles and received only a letter of reprimand. Another centers on members of the Lake Superior Violent Offender Task Force, who allegedly turned on a live camera feed of a man threatening to jump and treated the scene as entertainment.
The lawsuit also alleges an officer who was not assigned to a suicide call took a photograph of a dead body and shared it in a private group called "Operation Rip and Tear." According to Drozdowski, when he raised concerns about these kinds of incidents, the response inside the department was not reform but retaliation. As reported by the ...
Kenneth Scott Miller, 48, is charged with a felony count of making a false report to law enforcement. He was released from the Escambia County Jail on a $500 bond. According to an Escambia County ...