Messenger: Ballwin chief misused criminal database and ran hundreds of names, report says (2024)

BALLWIN — Matthew Conlon went to a Ballwin Board of Aldermen meeting to exercise his First Amendment rights.

It was January 2023, and Conlon was upset after learning the mayor and city attorney had conspired to knock an aldermanic candidate off the ballot. He rebuked the Board of Aldermen for doing nothing about it.

A few days later, Ballwin police Chief Doug Schaeffler ran Conlon’s name through a criminal database known as the Regional Justice Information System, or REJIS. That’s the system most police departments in the St. Louis region use to track criminal charges and the backgrounds of suspects. It also includes driver’s license and vehicle registration information, among other details.

It is a misdemeanor for a police officer to use the database without a proper law enforcement purpose.

So why did the police chief run Conlon’s name and potentially gain access to private information?

That’s what Conlon wants to know.

“Do all Ballwin citizens that complain about shady dealings by the city government have a criminal background search conducted on them?” Conlon told me. “Did the chief do this on his own, or did he do it at the request of the mayor, the city attorney, or someone else at the city of Ballwin?”

Conlon only found out last week about the search. And it turns out he is hardly alone, according to an internal police report. He is one of dozens, and possibly hundreds, of Ballwin residents and others whose names were run through the REJIS database for unknown reasons.

They include waitresses and bartenders, employees of fitness clubs and cigar lounges, people who complained about Ballwin on Facebook, and people who emailed the chief to raise questions about a towing contract.

In the past four years, Schaeffler ran more than 1,000 names through REJIS, with many of the names found to be questionable by other Ballwin police officers, according to the report.

This past December, Schaeffler was fired as police chief after four years in the job. City officials initially did not reveal a reason for the firing.

Schaeffler later sued the city, claiming he was ousted in retaliation for instigating an investigation into Mayor Tim Pogue. In response, Pogue revealed that an investigator found the former chief had violated several department rules — including misusing the criminal database.

Conlon obtained the report on Schaeffler’s use of REJIS through a Sunshine Law request. The use of the database, and the names of people searched, are now also the focus of a lawsuit by a former alderman.

Schaeffler’s attorney did not respond to my requests for comment.

It’s unclear if there’s a criminal investigation into the issue. Ballwin officers started looking into the chief’s use of the database last September. By February, they had compiled enough information to suggest dozens of searches were “very questionable,” their report says.

The police department forwarded a report to St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell seeking charges of “misuse of official information.” Bell’s office recused itself because of a conflict of interest, and the report eventually landed with St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore. A spokeswoman says Gore’s office is reviewing the case.

Officers who compiled the database logs as part of their report shared the logs with Ballwin City Administrator Eric Sterman and the city’s human resources director to help identify the names of people who were searched and help determine whether the searches were inappropriate.

Among the cases cited in the report:

In 2020, Schaeffler searched several friends, neighbors and salespeople he was doing business with. He also searched a major and chief deputy from another police department, a retired FBI agent and a fitness club employee.

In 2021, Schaeffler searched the owner of a bourbon distillery, somebody who had filed a complaint against a Ballwin police officer, a person who complained about Ballwin on Facebook, people from a business that were doing work on his home, and a person who was cleaning his house.

In 2022, he searched former Alderman Kevin Roach, a waitress, several relatives and “a Ballwin resident who frequently calls Schaeffler to complain about things.”

In 2023, he searched Conlon, patrons and employees at bars he frequented, people he met at a cigar lounge and people he “has had issues with.”

One officer in the report recounted an incident in which he was asked to run a report on a friend of Schaeffler. The chief wanted to check on criminal records because his friend had been rejected from purchasing a firearm after a background check. The officer said when he told Schaeffler there wasn’t a “legally sufficient reason” to run the report, the chief became “visibly agitated” and “hurried to his office.”

‘Left in limbo’

The search in January 2022 of Roach, the former alderman, is particularly problematic. That was about the time that Pogue, the mayor, and City Attorney Robert Jones were working to remove an aldermanic candidate from the ballot. Jones later reimbursed the city for his legal fees on the case, and he was issued a letter of admonition by the Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel for the state.

Roach was at the center of revelations about the incident, filing complaints with state officials about the actions of Pogue and Jones.

Schaeffler’s search of Roach was on Jan. 24 — the same day that, according to Jones’ attorney bills, he and another lawyer at his firm were researching the “Safe at Home” program.

That’s a state program that allows victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking — and their family members — to keep their addresses out of public records. Missouri law makes it a felony in certain circ*mstances to try to access the address of a Safe at Home participant.

Roach is in the Safe at Home program. He’s convinced the police chief’s search was somehow connected to Jones’ research on the program that same day.

“As soon as I saw that date, I knew what it was,” said Roach, who lost his re-election bid in April.

In May, Roach sued Ballwin because it only provided him a redacted copy of the report into the chief’s use of REJIS. While the report details dozens of likely improper REJIS searches, it redacts many other names and many details of searches.

The suit claims that city officials “were attempting to prevent all the other REJIS search victims from learning that the Ballwin police chief was improperly searching them.”

Officials “knowingly and purposefully violated the Sunshine Law in order to conceal the Ballwin Chief of Police’s misconduct from his victims,” says the suit, filed by Clayton attorney Mark Pedroli.

The Sunshine Law has a provision that says victims of a crime may obtain “a complete unaltered and unedited incident report concerning the incident and may obtain access to other records closed by a law enforcement agency.”

The law says that if a government body wants to redact a report that a crime victim has requested — to, for instance, protect an ongoing investigation — it has to get a judge’s permission. Ballwin didn’t do that.

“It would have been the right course of action for them to bring this matter before a judge to make a decision,” Roach wrote in an email to me. “Since they failed to do so, I am taking the initiative to pursue this through legal channels.”

Ballwin is being defended in Roach’s lawsuit by attorney Peter Dunne. In an interview, he defended the redactions in the report provided to Roach.

“The issue wouldn’t even exist had the charging authorities made a decision about whether or not they believed a crime occurred,” Dunne said. “We’re sort of left in limbo with that decision left unmade.”

If no charges are filed and the investigation is over, the record becomes fully public. If an investigation is ongoing, there are provisions that might allow redactions, with approval from a judge. But Dunne says he doesn’t know the status of the investigation.

“It puts the city in a difficult spot trying to balance the criminal investigation and Mr. Roach’s right to the document,” Dunne says. “It left the city no choice but to respond in the way they did.”

The city isn’t the only one in limbo. So are Conlon and Roach, and hundreds of Ballwin residents who might not know their personal information was obtained by a police chief who has left behind several unanswered questions.