Lawyers for the state will square off with an attorney for a Maine State Police detective in federal court Thursday over whether his 2018 demotion was because of his allegations that a state police division was illegally collecting and maintaining data on Maine residents’ activities.
George Loder, 52, of Scarborough sued the Maine Information and Analysis Center in Augusta and its supervisors in May 2020 in U.S. District Court in Portland.
The center is a division of the Maine State Police that came under fire in the state Legislature following Loder’s lawsuit and a hack that showed the center was closely monitoring protests in Maine over police brutality and racism in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
The Maine House last year voted to close the center, but that effort died in the Senate.
Loder claimed he was demoted after he told his bosses that the center was collecting and maintaining data illegally, including information about people who had applied to buy guns from firearms dealers, those who legally protested and those who worked at a Maine camp for Israeli and Arab teens.
The state has asked the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Jon Levy, to find that Loder was not demoted because of the allegations he made, but instead that he was forced to return to working as a trooper after he was denied a job with an investigative unit.
Loder alleged in the lawsuit that the state police violated the Whistleblower Protection Act...
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