Raises to be tied to the logical metrics we've been asking for... just not for us.

Some of our members may have noticed an article in the Courant recently titled "East Hartford Panel Recommends Raise for Mayor." If not, you can find it here.

In short the panel recommended 2.5% raises for Mayor Marcia Leclerc in each of the next 2 years to $100,221, which is a bigger raise than I've seen for the Police Department over a 2 year stretch in a long time. The really interesting part of the article is the panel's reasoning for the raises, which reads;

"The panel based its recent recommendation on increases in the consumer price index of 2.1 and 2.2 percent in 2017 and 2018 and on a Connecticut Conference of Municipalities survey of town with similar populations and nearby communities, according to meeting minutes. “The mayor’s salary is significantly less than the median salary for similarly situated towns,” the minutes say. "The committee determined that the best approach would be to provide a 2.5 percent increase in each of the next two years, which would be slightly higher than the CPI for the preceding two years, but would move the salary range a little bit closer to the overall median salary for chief elected officials in strong mayor forms of government.”"

If this logic sounds familiar to you, it's because this is the same exact reasoning we've used in contract negotiations for years to ask for raises for our Membership; keeping up with inflation and bringing our salaries in line with surrounding Departments. Oddly enough whenever we've made these arguments the Town's representatives have said East Hartford is an economically depressed community and therefore the pay standards set by surrounding Towns shouldn't apply to us.

It's true that East Hartford isn't on the same financial level as Glastonbury or West Hartford, but our Finance Department routinely describes our financial position as stable so things aren't exactly falling apart either. However if we're going to use the logic of considering the pay of surrounding Towns to determine the salary of the Mayor and other Town Hall Officials, why shouldn't it apply to the Police Department as well? After all, the likelihood of our Mayor leaving East Hartford and running in South Windsor or Glastonbury for more pay is relatively low. But the issue of us not being able to attract the best candidates for our Department is very real. Across the State and the Nation the number of applicants for Police jobs is down drastically from past levels, which means more Departments are competing with each other to attract an ever shrinking pool of top qualified candidates. While EHPD does have a few nice benefits, when it comes to attracting new hires and employee retention, nothing speaks quite like cold hard cash in your hand. It wasn't that long ago that EHPD had to cancel an entrance exam due a lack of applicants.

Currently EHPD's top step Officer base pay grade is $74,209. By comparison Vernon and Manchester are paying $84,648, and $84,431 respectively. That's a significant gap that makes a huge difference in employees lives and I'd have to imagine it holds a lot of sway with a top candidate weighing their job opportunities. I don't think anyone would argue that Vernon and Manchester as Towns are particularly more well off than East Hartford. In fact I'd say they're relatively similar and neither one of them boasts a manufacturing giant like Pratt and Whitney or a successful for profit college like Goodwin on their tax rolls like East Hartford does. There doesn't seem to be a good reason why we cant be paid a competitive wage.

We're lucky enough to have a lot of really great cops at EHPD, and if we want it to stay that way, we need to keep our salaries in line with the area Departments that we're competing with for new hires as we've been asking for years. Nobody comes into our line of work looking to get rich, and it'd be pretty bad planning on their part if they did. But I don't think a fair, competitive wage is too much to ask for the value we help bring to the Town.

CALEA: What's the point, what's it cost, and is it worth it?

For the last 5 years EHPD has been working towards Accreditation from CALEA (Commission for Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies.), and over the last 12 months or so the Administration has made a massive push to get the effort over the finish line. The issue we have with it is that this effort has at times come at the expense of the actual Law Enforcement function of our Department as funds and personnel have been cut from operational and investigatory purposes to allow Accreditation to have a blank check book. So the questions have to be asked, what is Accreditation, how much has it cost us, and how can it help the average employee do their job? We're going to try and break down the answers to those questions here in this post.

So first off, what is CALEA? It's a privately run organization under the umbrella of the IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police.) that's run by a Commission of 21 members, only half of whom actually have Law Enforcement experience. This Commission is supposed to develop policies that are considered "best practices" and then convince Police Departments to adopt their policies and give the Commission money for the right to call themselves "accredited" and put a plaque in their lobby and stickers on their cruisers. According to their website, for an Agency the size of ours, the initial Accreditation fee is currently $11,450, with an annual charge of $4,065 every year thereafter, plus the cost of airfare, lodging, transportation, and stipend for the CALEA certified assessors to do their on site reviews. That may not sound like a ton of money, but it's more than we have budgeted to be spent this year on criminal investigation technology (who needs technology anyway?), and almost as much as we have budgeted for SWAT protective equipment for our team that's wearing ill fitting hand me down uniforms if they have uniforms at all.

While we're on the topic of money, let's look at how much this project has cost the Agency overall. Everyone working at EHPD over the last few years has become familiar with our motto, no not the Serving with Pride and Integrity one, but the real one you hear every time you actually need something to do your job, that's right; "There's no money in the budget." But somehow despite this Admin mantra, money has always been found to keep the Accreditation Department going at full steam.

So let's do some rough math, for about 5 years now, we've had one full time Officer assigned to Accreditation, let's assume an average base salary there of around $71,500 over that time period, that comes out to about $357,500. They've also hired a part time clerk to assist with Accreditation who's been there for at least 4 years I believe, at an average base salary of about $30,000, which comes out to another $120,000. About a year ago they also hired on another full time civilian "Research Analyst" to assist at a base salary of $73,160. There's also a Deputy Chief tasked with overseeing the entire process at $99,915. Additionally there have been several Lieutenants in and out of the process as well through the years at varying degrees of involvement, each one making around $90,000 average base salary over this time period. Now let's not forget that for several months before the on site visit this past June the Administration also pulled an Officer from Patrol and an Investigator from our Narcotics unit to work in Accreditation full time, each one pulling a base salary of $73,474 and $74,146 respectively.

So just looking at these rough figures you can see we are easily in the hole to this process for between $500,000 and 1 million dollars over the last 5 years. And that's without calculating overtime (which has been substantial.) or benefits, or all the other employees who were pulled from their main jobs to help out with Accreditation here and there over the last five years. 

Additionally many Departments who obtain Accreditation have to keep someone on staff full time as a compliance Officer, whose sole purpose is to ensure the Agency stays up to date with the latest from the Commission and prepares everything for the triannual re-certifications and walk throughs. I assume we would keep the full time Officer we already have in that role at a base salary of $74,209, which brings the annual cost of maintaining Accreditation with CALEA fees to $78,274 plus benefits. If they choose to also keep the part time clerk on staff at his current base salary of $31,861, that raises the annual cost to $110,135, which coincidentally is $10,135 more than we currently have budgeted for overtime for the Criminal Investigations Division to actually work on cases.

Now the real issue here isn't that the Administration is spending inordinate amounts of money on this pet project, it's that while this money is being spent other parts of the Department are rotting on the vine due to a lack of funding. For example; Patrol Officers are no longer all issued cameras for taking crime scene photos, instead only a handful have them. Our SWAT vehicle caught on fire and burned up due to neglect and disrepair and now years later it still hasn't been replaced. Our Evidence truck leaks and has mold issues and hasn't been fixed. Live fire handgun and rifle training has been cut down to only once a year, and I'm constantly hearing from employees that they are denied access to outside training courses they need to advance their careers and subsequently, the quality of the Agency. The worst of all in my opinion is our Detectives and Investigators being denied overtime they need to follow up on cases and come out to crime scenes to investigate serious crimes that occur in their off hours. Our Detectives want to come out and work these cases, but often times they haven't been allowed, why? Because "there's no money in the budget." These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

These are real issues that not only negatively affect us as employees, but also the people of the Town who are losing out on better quality Police Services. I think having a properly trained and equipped Patrol Division and SWAT team ready to protect you, or an actual trained Detective on scene to investigate when you're a victim of a crime is more important to the average East Hartford resident than being able to say their local Police Department is accredited by a Commission no one outside of Law Enforcement has ever heard of.

This brings us to our final points, how can CALEA Accreditation help us as employees, and what's the purpose? We've seen the constant raft of new policies come down with CALEA citations over the years, sometimes they're minor changes to existing policies, and other times entirely new ones. In some cases we've gotten new and useful training we didn't previously have because CALEA required it, like CPR and Defensive Tactics, other times, it's a complete waste, like having the entire membership sit through an All Hazards training class where the material really only applied to Supervisors. It's been a bit of a mixed bag but overall there hasn't really been anything yet that completely changes the way we do our job, we've pretty much carried on as we have been for decades. So I'd argue Accreditation really hasn't done much at all to improve working conditions, or give new resources to solve cases for the average employee. What it has done however, is sap monetary resources from things that could have improved the Agency more substantially.

Here is where I have a really crazy idea, if CALEA Accreditation is really about bettering the Agency by enacting these new policies, then why not just put the policies in place, but forego the costly Accreditation process completely? There's nothing stopping the Department from doing this, and as an added benefit, they could choose to enact the policies we like and that would actually benefit us, and ignore the ones that don't. And they'd be free to modify any of them as they see fit to make them work better without having to conform to CALEA's strict standards. Under this method, we'd get all of the benefits of Accreditation without any of the cost or other downsides. The Agency would be improved and a substantial amount of money would be saved, which is important for a Department that's always struggling for funding.

Of course this won't happen, because Accreditation was never about bettering the Agency. It's about padding resumes for the handful of people at the top involved with it, and it's about earning clout within the IACP, presumably help set certain individuals up for their next jobs after EHPD. That's why they don't care about how the Department is actually running on the ground floor, so long as they can slap a CALEA sticker on it and say "look what I did" before they walk away, all at the taxpayer's expense.

Commenting issues fixed

I got some feedback that people with iPhones were having problems leaving comments on our posts. I've adjusted the page formatting so the issue should be resolved and everyone should be able to comment. Now you'll just be taken to a separate page to leave your comments instead of having them embedded underneath the post.

And yes if you select Anonymous, the comments really are Anonymous, we can't see any data about who posted it, IP addresses or anything else other than the comment and the timestamp.

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Status of the current Sergeant's Promotional Exam Scandal

Over the last few months EHPD has been administering promotional exams to fill vacancies for Sergeants, with at least 3 vacancies now and more expected to be opening up shortly. Unfortunately the Town's Human Resources Department has been hard at work botching the whole process from the beginning. First with the written exam, HR gave the applicants the wrong test, instead of taking a Sergeant's exam they were given a test for Lieutenants. Now some blame does lie with the company who sent the wrong test forms, but how did nobody at Town Hall look over the forms they got and verify that they were the right ones? The number and content of questions was different, yet nobody in HR noticed until the Officers taking the test brought it to their attention.

So a second written test was given, this time with the actual test they were supposed to take, and several people passed and oral board interviews were set up. By most accounts the questions on the oral board weren't very difficult and most candidates walked away confident that they had done very well. So cue the surprise when the results were released a few weeks later and a few people failed to obtain a passing score of 70, and nobody else managed to score above a 72, barely a passing score. Though one candidate did actually manage to surpass the 72 threshold, yes one candidate somehow pulled off a perfect 100% on the oral board panel, an unheard of score, and even more shocking, the 28 point gap to the next closest candidate. This perfect score was able to elevate this candidate to the top of the Sergeant's eligibility list despite the fact that they had one of the lower scores on the written test by a fairly wide margin.

Now this seems a little shady, nothing like this has ever happened before in our Department. I have a lot of faith in the quality of our cops, but I find it hard to believe that someone is really 28% better than such a large number of experienced Officers. I also find it hard to believe that so many great cops could barely pass an interview that they all thought was relatively simple. Obviously eyebrows were raised, complaints were voiced, and explanations were asked for, this is where things went from kind of fishy, to flat out, unbridled dirty.

Cops here have questioned their test results before, recently even. All they ever had to do was contact the HR Director Santiago Malave and ask to see their test and interview results and scoring sheets, and his response was always to come on down to his office and he'd show them to you. That is, until this test. When some of the candidates contacted Mr. Malave's office about examining their results this time they were told that they had to wait 15 days from the posting date to view their results, though Personnel rules only give them 14 days to contest their results. So the question is how can you contest results that you're not allowed to see until the deadline for contesting them has passed!? When these candidates contacted Mr. Malave personally about seeing their results they were met a response telling them they would have to submit an FOI request for them, which seems odd given the past practice of transparency. Nonetheless, they submitted their FOI requests and awaited their results... which they never received.

Mr. Malave refused to release the test results to the candidates under a provision of Connecticut's FOI law that gives an exemption to releasing information that may reveal test questions. This is a ridiculous exemption to claim since the candidates requesting the information ALREADY KNOW THE TEST QUESTIONS! They were there in the interviews, they were asked the questions, claiming an exemption to protect your testing methods and secrets from the people who already know the information is reaching at best.

So what is Director Malave so desperate to hide that he is going to such great lengths to keep these test results secret? The stench from this case is wretched and threatens to destroy any faith in a process that is supposed to be fair and impartial. What's the point of participating in a process that is obviously crooked?

As such the Union has filed a grievance on this matter, we've also submitted requests for the test results, notes, and scoring sheets under FOI and MERA, which Mr. Malave has also denied. There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Malave is hiding something dirty, his behavior is completely out of line with the norms one would expect of someone in his position. He's using the Town's attorneys to help him keep the results secret which raises the question, why go through all this trouble and controversy instead of just producing the results and showing that everything was done legitimately? We do intend on getting down to the bottom of this and will let it play out to the end, however far it goes.

For now the list is frozen at least until the candidates work their appeals through the Personnel Board. All the Union is asking for is that the Oral Boards be re-done, with a new panel and new questions to give everyone the fair shot they should've had from the beginning.

We'll do our best to keep everyone up to speed with the latest on this subject.

First post

Welcome to our new blog. We'll be using this space in conjunction with our Facebook page to put out information to the public about the goings on of our Union. Stay tuned for future posts.

Francesco Iacono, President
EHPOA