At last week's Town Council meeting, Mayor Leclerc proposed a new Administrative position within the Police Department that she wants to call "Assistant Chief." We currently have four Deputy Chief positions (Two of which are vacant after DC Chris Davis' recent departure.) who report directly to the Chief and sit above the Lieutenants in the chain of command. The new proposed position will sit above the Deputies and just below the Chief. You can find the new proposed job descriptions by clicking this link and skipping to page 24. You can also watch the proposal being made at the Town Council meeting by clinking this link and skipping to 22:33.
Reading the job description, it appears as though this new Assistant Chief is going to absorb most of the higher functions currently assigned to the Deputy Chiefs and will become the only person who deals directly with the Chief. So it seems logical to assume that Deputy Chiefs will be getting pushed down the ladder to make room for this new rank that's going to be absorbing some of their job duties.
Where I think this is going to cause a problem is that we are already in a position where our Lieutenants and Sergeants have basically become redundant, especially in patrol. This redundancy has been the subject of several grievances, infighting, and other issues in my tenure on the Executive Board, as Sergeants and Lieutenants fight over their overlapping job functions and related pay. The Department currently treats Lieutenants and Sergeants as completely interchangeable and only defines them for Patrol purposes as "Supervisors" rather than individual ranks with unique functions, responsibilities, and staffing levels. In fact over the last few years we've seen squads run only by Lieutenants with no Sergeants, and also squads run entirely by Sergeants with no Lieutenants. What's the point of having multiple ranks if they can both do the same job?
So if you have this problem of two overlapping ranks, it's seems counterintuitive to add yet another rank to the mix. If you add an Assistant Chief and push Deputy Chiefs down the ladder, they will naturally encroach on the higher job functions currently performed by Lieutenants, effectively becoming "Super Lieutenants." This in turn will push Lieutenants further down into the realm of Sergeant's duties and make them even more redundant, exacerbating the problems we already have. In a sense you're cutting more slices from the same pie, without making the actual pie itself any bigger. We're not adding any divisions to the Department or increasing in size, in fact we're smaller now than we used to be.
This issue of redundancy was not always the case. If you look back to the tenure of Chief Mark Sirois, he ran the Department with just two Deputy Chiefs, half of what Chief Sansom has had. At that time you had one Deputy Chief manage the outside functions of the Department, i.e. Patrol, and the other manage all of the internal functions. He managed to do this by utilizing his Lieutenants as what they should be, upper management. Lieutenants in that era had more responsibility, independence, and a more clearly defined role in the Department. Lieutenants could run individual units and had Sergeants beneath them who managed the actual day to day operations of the Officers and Detectives.
Chief Sansom changed this arrangement by having Deputy Chiefs running individual Divisions of the Department, like one who just manages the Detective Bureau, one just managing Dispatch, and another who only manages IA with a few ancillary duties thrown in. This setup just adds more layers of bureaucracy to the chain of command and in my opinion impedes our efficiency. Our Lieutenants are more than capable of carrying out these duties with minimal Supervision, they don't need to be micromanaged by a swarm of Deputies.
I think a better solution is keep us at two Deputy Chiefs as we currently have, who report directly to the Chief. Then utilize Lieutenants as actual managers, and give them a clearly defined role and the ability to make more decisions on their own. On the Patrol front give unique, clearly defined job descriptions to both Sergeants and Lieutenants and corresponding individual minimum staffing levels for each job. They are separate ranks for a reason, they should not be considered interchangeable, or made to do each other's jobs.
The proposal is not all negative however, the Mayor does mention that she wants to open up the new, neutered Deputy Chief rank to Union members. I know some members will disagree with my assessment because they want the opportunity to get the Deputy Chief's position themselves or have another Union member get it. However, I'd argue that while this appears to be a positive on the surface, they will still be locking our members out of the top two positions in the Department. There's no reason for this, and in fact prior to Chief Sansom's tenure it wasn't the case. Both Chief Sirois and Deputy Chief Vibberts came from within our ranks as did several other previous Chiefs. The decision to lock us out was an arbitrary change made by Town Hall, and if they wanted to they could undo it just as easily and open up the opportunity to ascend all the way to Chief up to our members once again. In fact I think that's what they should do and it's what I've been arguing should happen for the last year and a half.
Reach out to me and let me know what you think.
