Does EHPD Really Have a Lying Problem?

 In the past 11+ years that I've worked at EHPD, up until a little over a year ago I had only seen one non-probationary employee terminated, and I can't remember hearing of anyone being found guilty of lying. Yet somehow, in the last 15 months or so we've had five members investigated for "lying" and four terminations. So what's changed? Let's look at a brief overview of some of these cases of alleged "lying" and see if we can figure it out.

In one case we had an Officer with over 20 years on the job, who stated in an Internal Affairs interview that he was escorting a lost motorist to the highway. He was asked where he began the escort and at first wasn't sure, but after being pressed for an answer eventually gave a location. The IA Investigator went to multiple businesses along his route and asked to view their security cameras. Two of the businesses complied, one near where the Officer claimed he began the escort, and another near the end. The camera near the starting point didn't show the vehicle the Officer described behind his cruiser. However, the camera near where the escort ended did in fact show the exact car he described as the very next vehicle on the road a short distance behind the cruiser. 

Now any reasonable person would take that information and figure that perhaps the Officer was mistaken about where exactly the escort began, but clearly the escort did occur based on the second camera confirming his story. However this wasn't enough for our IA division, they still accused the Officer of lying about the escort, and Chief Sansom terminated him. 

Then we had another case that has been detailed here before, where two 20+ year veteran Officers were accused of making statements to members of a construction crew on a job site during a conversation. There was no evidence other than the statements from four workers, who actually contradicted each other on some points, and one of whom even admitted that he was on a different job site in another part of Town when the conversation in question occurred, and didn't actually witness anything first hand. However when the Officers denied the accusations against them, they were also charged with lying simply because they disagreed with the people who were accusing them. By this standard, you're not even allowed to defend yourself against an allegation without being called a liar. Apparently due process isn't a thing we do in East Hartford any more.

Lastly we have the most recent case involving a car chase of an armed felon in a stolen vehicle that ended in a crash. Here again the Officers were asked numerous questions about exactly where they were at precise times during the incident, over two months after it happened. Prior to the interview IA had already pulled surveillance footage, and GPS data from the cruisers. But IA didn't allow the Officers to view any of this information before answering their questions. Some of this data was actually pretty inaccurate however, and months later when the Officers were finally allowed to see it after the investigation was over, they found that it seemed to show one of the cruisers in different locations at the same time, and at one point even shows a cruiser moving backwards. Note that at the time this incident occurred we did not yet have body cameras.

Despite all of these inconsistencies in the evidence, when the account the Officers gave put them a couple hundred yards away from where IA thought they were based on videos and GPS the Officers were never allowed to see, they were still charged with lying by IA. Keep in mind that even based on the evidence from IA, the Officer's cruisers were still so far away from the suspect vehicle that they would have been out of visual contact with it well before the crash even occurred. So really their exact position on the road was kind of trivial to the substance of the case itself.

This is a pretty dangerous standard to have for an investigation in the era of cameras being everywhere, including on our bodies. In this case the Investigator has all of the footage and evidence, but you're not allowed to see it. But if the answers you give to the questions solely from your recollection don't match up perfectly with what's on the video that you can't see, then you're branded a liar. This doesn't make sense. 

The IA Investigator goes on to claim in his report that Police Officers are special in that they should have the ability to perfectly recollect everything that occurs during "stressful" and "chaotic" incidents without error. This is simply and obviously untrue. Police Officers are regular people, we get tunnel vision when we're stressed, and sometimes the exact order of events gets crossed up. We've all been through the trainings where we saw Officers who were interviewed after critical incidents and incorrectly recollected how many shots they fired, or where exactly people were at a given moment, etc... Scientists have even studied this phenomenon in first responders specifically and found that even in those who are expected to handle it, stress still causes the impairment of memory.

So what's changed in the past year or so, have veteran EHPD Officers just gone nuts and decided to start lying about minor details en mass? I personally don't think so. You see, this sudden flip of a switch from Internal Affairs where everyone is suddenly lying, coincided with a change of personnel running the division, namely Lt. Joe Ficacelli, who is the lead IA investigator. His name has come up here before, where we mentioned how he himself was terminated from his former employer, the Hartford Police Department, while he was in the Academy after they found some "inconsistencies" in the information he provided during his background check surrounding his steroid use and car crashes (click here for story). Is he looking for some kind of redemption for his past by making these accusations against others? I don't know.

What I do know however, is that Lt. Ficacelli was asked about his past with Hartford back in December of 2020 while he was testifying under oath in a hearing before the State Labor Board. But when the Union attorney began asking him about what happened to result in his termination, according to the transcript Lt. Ficacelli stated that he was "vindicated" in civil court. He then went on claim that he believed he had signed a non-disclosure agreement with the City of Hartford that would preclude him from speaking about the matter in the hearing. The Hearing Officer then stated that if he was the subject of an NDA then he couldn't be required to answer the questions about his termination.

So naturally this piqued my curiosity, and we made a few phone calls to the Hartford Police Department and filed an FOI request. After some time they were able to dig up the agreement that Lt. Ficacelli had cited to get out of answering the questions during the hearing. Upon review of the document we found that the City did not admit to any wrongdoing in terminating Ficacelli, and even had it clearly written that they were only agreeing to the settlement to avoid paying further legal costs fighting his lawsuit. The City merely agreed to sponsor Ficacelli to attend the POST Academy on the explicit condition that once he completed his training, the City would NOT employ him as a Police Officer, and he'd have to seek employment elsewhere. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't describe signing an agreement that states you're not going to get a job from an employer who terminated you, as being "vindicated." 

Additionally, paragraph 5 of the settlement clearly states that while Ficacelli is not allowed to speak of the details of the agreement to the general public, he is allowed to discuss it if compelled by "compulsory process of law." Such as testifying under oath in an official proceeding before a body such as the State Labor Board. So he actually shouldn't have been allowed to refuse to testify, and mislead the Hearing Officer.

So using the standard that Lt. Ficacelli has applied to the people his office has investigated, wouldn't these inaccurate statements that he made, under oath, also qualify as lies? Perhaps he mis-spoke, or mis-remembered some of the details? Well that reasoning didn't seem to resonate with him when he was the one doing the investigating. What we know is that he hasn't been investigated, or even written up, so I guess it's not lying when he does it, just everyone else? Seems like a bit of a double standard.

Racial Disparity In How EHPD Internal Affairs Cases Are Handled

Since I've been involved in the Union Executive Board I've noticed trends in how Chief Scott Sansom's Administration has handled disciplinary matters in our Department. Some trends are easier to spot than others. In one case that you may have heard of there was a dispute between two of our members and a contractor, Paramount Construction who was doing work for MDC in our Town. The dispute stemmed from the fact that when the contractor hired for the job in the morning they had said they were going to pay whichever Officer was hired from a certain time in the morning. But by the end of the job a different foreman was on site who refused to pay the Officer who worked the job the hours that the morning foreman had said they would before the Officer was hired. The Officer who worked the job called his Supervisor who had spoken to the morning foreman and there was a verbal disagreement. Ultimately the Officer's overtime slip was signed buy the Contractor, but the Officer decided he was not going to submit the slip to payroll for payment because he knew there was some disagreement over it and he didn't want to cause a problem, meaning he effectively worked the job for free, he was never paid. The Supervisor in this case did not work the job and never claimed or demanded, or attempted to collect any payment for himself.

Disputes over hours worked are not out of the ordinary here at EHPD, we can cite several examples of similar complaints. However in this particular case the Department took the extraordinary step of putting the employees involved on Administrative leave and initiating a criminal investigation. This investigation took nearly 2 months of going back and forth between the Department and the State's Attorney's Office while they tried to figure out what they could charge these Officers with until they finally settled on Attempt to Commit Larceny 2nd, despite the fact that neither one ever attempted to collect any payment. We don't know the specific details of the allegations because the Department has refused to show the warrant to the Officers or their attorneys at the direction of Chief Sansom.

Contrast what happened in this case to what happened in a similar case just a few months earlier at EHPD. The case number for this is PSB 2020-18. In that case one of our members filled out an overtime slip for one and a half hours that the employee was found to have not actually worked, except in this case the employee actually submitted the overtime slip and attempted to get paid for the unworked hours. During the course of the IA Investigation it was also found that this employee had left work early and come into work late several times without prior authorization. In this case however there was no criminal investigation, nobody was put on Administrative leave, and there were no warrants completed, and the State's Attorney's Office was never even consulted or made aware of it. In fact despite the IA complaint being sustained and the allegations being more serious than they were in the other case we discussed, the only discipline issued in PSB 2020-18 was Verbal Supervisory Counseling, they were basically told "hey don't do that again."

Why is there such a disparity in how these two parallel cases were handled? The only difference we can see is that the two Officers who got criminally investigated are both African American, while the Officer who was given verbal counseling is White. This raises another question though, which course of action was the appropriate one? Did the White Officer get the standard treatment for this type of offense while the Black Officers got screwed over, or was the treatment they got the standard procedure while the White Officer was "hooked up?" Historically when we look back at other people who've been investigated at EHPD for similar offenses, they all seemed to have gotten treatment similar to what the White Officer got in PSB 2020-18, which implies that the Black Officers are being treated especially harsh.

We can go back a few years and find several other examples of White employees being written up and investigated by IA for the same exact allegations of inaccurate overtime slips, and not a single one of them was put on Administrative leave, or criminally investigated.

Our Internal Affairs division is headed up by Deputy Chief Chris Davis formerly of Manchester Police, and most of the investigations including these two, are conducted by Lt. Joe Ficacelli, the disgraced former Hartford Police recruit who was fired from that Agency. Are they the ones influencing the disparity between how these cases are handled with their recommendations? Or does the responsibility ultimately fall at the feet of Chief Scott Sansom who has the final say over what discipline will be issued after a case is completed?

We saw this pattern again in another IA case last year where an African American member was being investigated for a routine citizen complaint stemming from a traffic stop by Deputy Chief Chris Davis, but DC Davis missed the contractual timeline to complete the investigation (180 days). This issue had happened not long before with a White Officer, and in that case Chief Sansom was obligated to close the investigation due to them going over the timeline. However when the same exact issue occurred with the Black employee a short time later, Chief Sansom stated that "the timelines don't matter," and proceeded to issue discipline to the employee anyway in violation of our collective bargaining agreement. That matter is currently under appeal at the Labor Board, but it's another prime, contemporaneous example of Chief Sansom and Internal Affairs handling disciplinary matters for African American employees more harshly than they do for White employees, even to the point of breaking the contractual rules to exact punishment.

Unfortunately we've also seen this trend in other areas of the Department. A few months ago Chief Sansom decided to shake up the Traffic Unit. He removed an African American Officer from the Traffic unit, and when that Officer asked why he was being removed and if it was due to his job performance he was told that it was just because he had been in the unit for a long time and they wanted to give other employees a chance at that position. However at the same time the Black Officer was removed from the Traffic Unit, Chief Sansom allowed a White Officer who has been in Traffic nearly twice as long to remain in the unit. So is there one timeline for "too long" for Black Officers and another separate, longer timeline for White Officers?

We see it once again in the case of another African American Officer who was terminated years ago inappropriately, and eventually had his termination overturned by the Labor Board. When he was re-hired several years later he signed an agreement with the Administration stating that they would do everything in their power to help him get re-certified as a Police Officer. Recently when this Officer had his hearing before the Board, the only thing they required from Chief Sansom was a letter stating that he endorsed the employee being re-certified. Chief Sansom refused to write the letter or make any recommendation on the Officer's behalf in violation of the agreement he signed, that issue is now the subject of a lawsuit.

Chief Sansom's Administration has previously been the subject of multiple lawsuits by his employees for discriminating on the basis of disability and gender, one of which is pending, and the other was resolved via a settlement. So it's not surprising that we're now seeing a pattern of potential racial discrimination as well.

As a Labor Union we demand equal treatment for all of our members, regardless of race, gender, or any other reason. The fact that our Administration appears to be giving preferential treatment to certain employees over others is deeply troubling, especially when it appears to be based on race.