Michael A. Jackson’s confirmation hearing to lead the Maryland State Police on Monday should be a friendly affair.

Jackson, a former state delegate and state senator, has allies on both sides of the aisle after 10 years as a legislator and a career in law enforcement that often brought him to Annapolis as an advocate.

There is at least one person who has tough questions for Jackson, though: former Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo, whose two family dogs were shot and killed by Prince George’s County sheriff’s deputies during a botched drug raid in the summer of 2008.

Jackson was the county’s elected sheriff when the incident made international headlines. Even after Calvo was cleared of all wrongdoing, Jackson defended the operation, saying in 2010 that he’d “do it again.”

The raid on Calvo’s home came during a string of similar incidents where sheriff’s deputies busted down doors, shot household pets and frightened innocent county residents. The incident led to an FBI review, a lawsuit and a new law requiring greater scrutiny of SWAT teams in Maryland.

“His record as sheriff is really a blighted one for Prince George’s County,” said Calvo, who no longer lives in Maryland, in an interview after Jackson’s appointment. “If he stands by his record in Prince George’s County, it seems like a profound step backwards.”

Others who worked with Jackson while he was sheriff painted a different portrait. Linda Thornton Thomas, the president of the Prince George’s County NAACP, said Jackson was a collaborative leader who worked with the community and reminded her of the affable sheriff on the Andy Griffith Show.

As colonel of the Maryland State Police, Jackson will lead more than 2,200 sworn and civilian employees, including troopers at 23 barracks dotted across Maryland and a criminal investigation bureau. He takes over at a critical juncture for the agency, which has faced persistent questions about its internal culture and treatment of Black troopers.

A Maryland State Police spokesperson said Jackson was not available for an interview ahead of his confirmation hearing and did not respond to a list of questions for this story.

As a lawmaker, Jackson has made comments that suggest his views may have shifted in the 16 years since he led the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office. During heated legislative debates over police reform after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, Jackson positioned himself as a law enforcement insider who understood the need for change.

“Police reform is necessary,” he said in 2021. “I’ve taken those hard stands among my colleagues. Those hard stands … cost me a little bit.”

As a young man, Jackson left a job working in electronics to join the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office. A veteran of the Marine Corps Reserve, he had resisted joining law enforcement for years, he said in 2021 remarks, because he had seen the kind of treatment his community received from police in Prince George’s County.

“One thing I know is, if you want to change, you’ve got to be the change that you want to see,” he recalled in 2021. He ran for sheriff and won in 2002, taking over an office responsible for court security, serving protective orders and eviction papers, and executing arrest warrants.

Thornton Thomas, the Prince George’s County NAACP president, said that Jackson was a responsive and thoughtful leader as sheriff. He answered the phone when she raised concerns and tried to find solutions that worked for everyone.

“He was comfortable working with the community,” she said. “He appeared to be very transparent and he was empathetic. Those were the things that caught me and to me, that is what makes a good sheriff.”

The Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence named him their Law Enforcement Person of the Year in 2007.

But Jackson had a mixed record as sheriff. Several years into his tenure, a string of incidents involving Prince George’s County sheriff’s deputies made the news, including the raid on Calvo’s house.

As Calvo recounted in an op-ed, a SWAT team and county narcotics officers forced their way into his home on July 29, 2008, and fatally shot both of the family’s black labs during a four-hour ordeal. Deputies broke down the door, handcuffed Calvo and his mother-in-law, and interrogated them near the bodies of the two dead dogs, Payton and Chase.

Police would later say that Calvo and his family were the innocent victims of a drug-trafficking scheme that involved sending shipments of drugs to unsuspecting recipients and intercepting the boxes before they arrived.

A month after the raid, Jackson said an internal review had found the deputies’ actions justified.

Nearly two decades later, Calvo still remembers Jackson’s refusal to admit anything had gone wrong in the raid.

“The way he managed that and handled it after the fact raised meaningful questions about his judgment, about his philosophy, about innocent people,” Calvo said.

There were other, similar incidents. In 2006, sheriff’s deputies entered a woman’s Greenbelt apartment without proper documentation, punched her, pepper sprayed her, and charged her with assaulting a police officer.

She won $261,000 at a trial in 2009, where jurors found the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department liable for negligent training of the deputies.

“The way forward is never to repeat the mistakes of the past,” the woman’s lawyer, Cary Hansel, told the Banner in a statement. “If [Jackson] is confirmed, we hope that he will bring a proactive, reform mindset to the job.”

Another woman sued after deputies searched her home without a warrant and threatened to kill her dog in 2007, according to reports from the time. She won a small sum of money in court, and her lawyer declined to comment.

The same year, deputies questioned an Accokeek couple in their home — despite being informed they had gone to the wrong address — and shot the couple’s 5-year-old German boxer, Pearl, who was barking in the backyard. The couple settled a lawsuit over the incident in 2009 and did not respond to requests for comment.

After eight years as sheriff, Jackson ran unsuccessfully for Prince George’s County executive in 2010. He spent the next few years working for former Gov. Martin O’Malley’s administration. Then came a fateful meeting with then-Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., who urged Jackson to run for a newly formed House district.

He won the seat in 2014 and spent the next six years in the House of Delegates. Since Jackson had previously served as a local FOP president and led the Maryland Sheriffs’ Association, many lawmakers already knew him from the halls of the State House.

Jackson was appointed to the Maryland Senate in 2021 and won reelection to the seat the following year. He became a key voice in the debate over police reform, which flared in the General Assembly following the murder of George Floyd.

Former Sen. Jill P. Carter, who worked closely with Jackson on police reform policies, said she believes Jackson is the right person to address what she described as ongoing problems over the treatment of Black troopers in the Maryland State Police.

The U.S. Department of Justice in 2022 opened a civil rights investigation into complaints that the agency’s written and physical hiring tests discriminated against Black and female trooper applicants, leading to a $2.75 million settlement in 2024. The DOJ dropped the case soon after President Donald Trump took office last year.

Jackson’s predecessor, Col. Roland Butler Jr., faced a difficult confirmation hearing to lead the state police in 2023, when lawmakers — including Jackson — raised concerns about his responsiveness to the issues raised by Black troopers. Despite those objections, Butler was confirmed and became Maryland’s first Black state police superintendent until his retirement last fall.

Gov. Wes Moore tapped Jackson to take over as acting superintendent in October. Jackson has already met with employee groups and traveled across the state to introduce himself, said Mike Sekscinski, the president of the Maryland Troopers Association.

“He has already demonstrated his willingness to dedicate time to understanding and addressing the day-to-day concerns of both retirees and active members,” Sekscinski said.

MSP still faces a proposed class-action lawsuit over its treatment of Black troopers, and the issue remains in lawmakers’ sights.

“The agency still has a problem in that regard,” Carter said, “and I think Michael Jackson is the person to grapple with those issues.”