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.
What the suit alleges
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 Star Tribune.
Drozdowski's role in the department
Drozdowski is a more-than-20-year veteran of the Duluth Police Department who most recently ran the Behavioral Health Unit and led the crisis negotiation team. He was heavily involved in community response programs, took part in local specialty-court and mental-health response work, and volunteered with St. Louis County search-and-rescue efforts. Earlier coverage of those initiatives and his public comments about the unit's goals were documented by Northern News Now.
Investigation and city response
The lawsuit says the city brought in Soldo Consulting to review Drozdowski's complaints, paying the firm $15,000 for what the suit characterizes as a cursory review that produced no meaningful action. According to the filing, Chief Ceynowa then lodged a complaint against Drozdowski, an internal investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, and yet he was still placed on leave and ordered to complete a psychological fitness-for-duty exam. The complaint describes those steps as a strategy to push him aside rather than address the issues he raised.
"We’re doing our officers an injustice when we’re not correcting [issues]," Drozdowski told the Star Tribune.
Broader department context
Drozdowski's lawsuit lands in the middle of an ongoing public debate over how Duluth police use force and how the city disciplines its officers. That backdrop includes a 2020 on-duty shooting that led to criminal charges against an officer, a later acquittal, and a separate civil claim that the city settled. Local reporting has also highlighted arbitration battles, disciplinary decisions that were reversed, and persistent community concern about how the department applies its own policies. All of that context, the complaint suggests, is part of why Drozdowski decided to go public. As reported by the Duluth News Tribune.
Legal implications
The lawsuit cites Minnesota's whistleblower and human-rights laws and accuses city leaders of retaliating against Drozdowski for making confidential reports about officer conduct. Through the courts, the complaint seeks remedies that could include damages, a settlement, or changes to city and department policy, depending on what comes out in discovery and how a judge or jury views the claims.
What comes next
The suit, filed March 1, will now work its way through the civil court process. City officials have declined to comment, pointing to the ongoing nature of the litigation. Drozdowski says he brought the case not only to address his own situation but to force internal reforms he believes are necessary to make both the department and the wider community safer.
