No February Meeting

 Once again unfortunately this month's regular meeting will be cancelled. We do intend to hold a meeting next month since the weather should have (fingers crossed) warmed up enough by then that we can resume doing them outdoors.

Personnel Appeals Board Update

 We were scheduled to resume the PAB hearings virtually last night after nearly a year's delay due to COVID concerns, with another hearing scheduled for tonight. Unfortunately one of the panel members didn't show or wasn't aware of the hearing and it was cancelled. Tonight's hearing was also cancelled due to some miscommunication about scheduling that we thought had been ironed out. It's very disappointing and ridiculous that this process has been unnecessarily dragged out this long while our members have patiently waited. 

Even the Mayor chimed in during the hearing to voice her displeasure with all of the delays. But we'd like to point out that this process could have and should have been wrapped up over a year ago had the Town not insisted on pursuing their gag orders to block the people involved from publicly speaking about what actually happened with the test scores. Or they could've just not done what they did that caused our members to file appeals in the first place. Of course we can't disclose what happened here due to said order, but needless to say people don't usually pursue gag orders to cover up totally legitimate behavior, so read into that what you will.

So this process drags on further, we have new dates scheduled though the end of next month now. Remember this test was initially given back in the Spring of 2019. The Town has been unable to fill these Sergeant vacancies since then, and in fact more vacancies have opened as more Sergeants have since retired. I can't imagine how many tens of thousands of dollars (or more) the Town has spent paying overtime to existing Sergeants to fill in for the vacancies that should have been filled by these candidates over the last 2 years. Nor can I calculate how much income the candidates have lost out on due to the actions of the Town in this matter. Hopefully someone can do that math and find a way to make these members whole.

So What Did All That Cost?

 It was brought to my attention the the Chief took offense to one of our previous posts ( click here ) where we discussed how he was having our Officers do constant "security checks" on the personal property of local Politicians who have routinely demonized Police Officers, on the taxpayer's dime. Apparently at the root of the Chief's frustration is that he felt I incorrectly implied that he was giving favorable treatment to these individuals because of their status as Politicians. So I did a little research to see if I was wrong to characterize it as I did, here's what we found;

From January 16th through January 20th (5 days) EHPD dispatched 289 "Security Checks" to the homes of 4 local Politicians including John Larson, Jeff Currey, Henry Genga, and Jason Rojas. Yes you read that right, two hundred and eighty nine. That's about 58 times each day that an Officer was pulled from their regular duties and dispatched to check on these politician's homes. 113 of those checks were just for John Larson, that's about 23 times per day. Mind you that during that entire time, Mr. Larson was actually in Washington DC, so we were sending Officers to check on an empty house 23 times a day.

Based on my experience while these checks were going on, each one took roughly 15 to 20 minutes for the Officers to travel, check on the home, and clear. When you add that all up, it equals up to about 96.33 man hours spent over those 5 days conducting these 289 security checks. Multiply that by the hourly top step wage of an East Hartford Officer and it comes out to approximately $3,690 spent over the 5 days. That's not an Earth shattering amount of money, but it seems like quite the expenditure for an Administration that has made a habit of not even sending Detectives out to shooting calls, or put together details to target the epidemic of car break in's and thefts because they supposedly can't afford to pay the overtime to do these necessary Police functions.

To validate further however, I wanted to see if these security checks are something that the Department routinely does for all citizens regardless of their status as Political figures. So we checked to see how many security checks the Department has dispatched over the course of the last five years prior to January 16th 2021. Unfortunately, we found zero, not a single one. Based on these pure and simple facts, I don't see how Chief Sansom can deny that these Politicians received treatment not afforded to the run of the mill East Hartford resident.

Now we all understand, we're Cops, and we routinely have to do things we don't like and put our personal feelings aside and just do our jobs. But to strip on duty Officers from their regular duties patrolling the Town to act as security guards for Political figure's private property just seems wrong. We have private businesses in Town who request Officers to provide extra security for them on a regular basis. In those cases the Department doesn't pull on duty Patrol Officers, instead they have the business hire an Off Duty Officer at their own expense and pay them overtime to provide the business with the security they need. Even the Town has done this in the past to have Officers watch over the site of fairs and events (i.e. Riverfest, Dragon Boats etc...) the night before. Isn't that what should've happened in this case?

 I'm not even going to get into how the Administration never shared with the membership why we were doing these checks or what we were supposed to be checking for, or if there was any threat to us in doing them. But I'd just like to point out the fact that the way that they did this whole thing just shows how completely out of touch Chief Sansom is with the people who work for him, and he doesn't seem to care.