CALEA is all done, so why are still paying $110,135 annually for it, while critical services go unfunded?

Last month the Administration wrapped up the project that's been their main focus since they got here in 2014 of obtaining CALEA accreditation. There was an earlier post back in July where we went over the high cost of getting accredited and how it's generally useless to the employees and the people of the Town so we wont rehash that here.

What I'd like to discuss is now that we have the accreditation, what's it going to cost us year to year to maintain it, and how it's disrupting the core Police functions of the Department. The finances of the Department aren't really the business of the Union, we don't have any say in what they spend money on. However when we have important training being cut and denied to our members, and our SWAT team struggling to obtain basic equipment they need to do their jobs safely because the Administration claims it doesn't have the funding, it becomes our business.

Shortly after this Administration took Office in 2014 they created a full time position for an Officer to work on Accreditation. Now that we've completed it that Officer has not been pulled from that assignment and continues to work on... I don't know what, while collecting a base salary of $74,209 plus benefits. This wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that we currently have a staffing shortage Department wide. In fact when I asked why we haven't made any more Detectives off our current active list I was told it was because the Chief was concerned about Patrol staffing and didn't want to promote anyone unnecessarily because then they would become ineligible to work Patrol. So they've effectively sacrificed an investigative position that does actual Police work directly benefiting the citizens in order to maintain an accreditation position that no longer serves any real purpose. This seems counterintuitive considering the stated mission of CALEA is to provide Chiefs with "a blueprint that promotes the efficient use of resources and improves service delivery." Doesn't this seem like the push for CALEA has in fact made us use resources less efficiently and been detrimental to our delivery of core Police services?

Furthermore, a part time consultant was also hired to assist with Accreditation at a rate of $31,861 a year. This consultant also still works here despite the job he was brought in to consult on being completed. I did consulting work myself prior to becoming an Officer, and at every job I had as soon as the work I was hired to do was done, I was let go and moved on to the next one. So why is this guy being kept on staff, is he now a permanent employee? What's he doing now?

After the Accreditation was completed, our Department sent a delegation consisting of seven people to the CALEA Conference in Kentucky for a week. That included the entire command staff and the Mayor. That's flights, hotel rooms, and probably rental cars for seven people coming out of our budget that's apparently so strapped we cant afford basic equipment needed to do our jobs. And why was a part time employee taken on a field trip to Kentucky while our Officers are regularly being denied off site training classes they actually need to do their jobs supposedly due to funding shortages? Seems like the Chief has his priorities backwards.

So where could this money be better spent rather than on Accreditation? Let's dive into some of the ongoing issues the supposed lack of funding has created. First off look at our firearms unit. We're down to training once a year with our duty weapons, and when we do get to shoot we're limited in how much we can actually shoot due to a lack of ammunition because we cant afford it. We don't use our firearms frequently, but when we do, proficiency is critical to ensure the safety of our Officers and those we serve. Any firearms expert will tell you shooting is skill that is heavily reliant on repetition and muscle memory, once a year just isn't enough to build that up.

We also have non lethal beanbag shotguns sitting in our armory that our Firearms Unit has been trying to get out to Officers on the road for over a year. But the Admin refuses to authorize the training for these tools so we have another non lethal option available on hot calls. I can only assume this refusal is cost related because there doesn't seem to be any other logical explanation. Holding up the rollout of these shotguns could have the effect of forcing us to use lethal force when we maybe wouldn't have to if there was another option available.

Additionally we've heard from several members of the SWAT team that all of their ballistic vests and helmets are well past their expiration dates and Deputy Chief Hawkins has refused to authorize the purchase of replacement equipment. Yes this equipment is expensive, but once purchased it's good for ten years. Some of our SWAT Officers are wearing hand me down uniforms that are several sizes too big for them, and some of them weren't given any uniform at all and are instead forced to wear their US military issued uniforms or personally owned clothes to calls. How are we so broke that we cant even afford to buy a couple pairs of pants and shirts, but Accreditation has a blank check book?

You may also remember a while back when our 30+ year old SWAT armored vehicle caught on fire while driving on Route 2 and was totaled. That vehicle was never replaced, instead our SWAT team rides around in what is basically a moving van with no armor plating whatsoever. We had an opportunity to obtain a free used armored car from Brinks, all we had to do was go to a conference near Washington DC, fill out the paperwork and drive it home. Somehow DC Hawkins managed to make it all the way down there on the Town's dime, spend a few days hob knobbing at the conference, and never filled out the paperwork to get the truck, coming home empty handed. His explanation to the SWAT team was that he couldn't find the Brinks booth at the convention center. Now ignoring the fact that he simply could have asked someone for directions at any point during the several days he spent there, I've heard from others who were at that conference that the Brinks booth was literally the first thing you saw when you walked in the door. It was so prominent in fact that several people mistook it for the general information booth. I don't know if this is incompetence or intentional, but either way it's foolish to waste an opportunity to get free equipment that we desperately need.

Interestingly enough, when the CALEA on site evaluators came to EHPD to do their inspection, that very day a brand new armored SWAT vehicle appeared in our parking lot for them to inspect. However as soon as they left, the brand new SWAT truck disappeared, never to be seen again. I hear it was on loan from another Department. Does the Administration think our SWAT team is a joke? Do they have no respect or concern for the safety of any of the Officers who train hard to be on it? I cant think of any explanation other than complete incompetence for their actions here. We have highly skilled Officers who've quit the team because it's been so neglected over the years. This leaves both our Officers on street, and the citizens of the Town in a more dangerous position.

Our fleet is in shambles, training is at bare minimum levels, our guns don't shoot straight, and we don't have enough computers for a whole squad to use at the same time, and God forbid you need a pen or a notepad, they wont buy us those anymore either! We don't even allow employees below the rank of Sergeant have access to color printers because the toner is too expensive. And sadly that's just the tip of the dysfunction iceberg.

We all understand this isn't Glastonbury, money isn't falling off trees in East Hartford. But how can you impose such strict austerity upon your employees while spending lavishly on your pet projects right under our noses and expect us to see it as anything other than disrespectful?

Accreditation has been the greatest fraud perpetrated on this Department and this Town in my tenure here. Chief Sansom told the Journal Inquirer "Achieving Accreditation helps safeguard the integrity of this Department and ensures consistent delivery of high quality public safety services. It's a mark of excellence." In our experience as line Officers it's done just the opposite while burdening us with unnecessary policies and requirements that do nothing to better our performance. We implore Chief Sansom, do the right thing, invest in your Department and your employees before you burn this organization down to a smoking heap. But hey, I guess it'll at least be an Accredited smoking heap, right?

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.