By Jim Hart, The West Linn Tidings (Lake Oswego, Oregon)
Although some still fear possible retribution, a few people who have been silent in past months are now speaking out.
They’re frustrated that the problems they experienced in the West Linn Police Department are still occurring.
The exodus of West Linn-trained police officers began a few months after Police Chief John Ellison was hired. A baker’s dozen, one-half of the department’s officers, has left West Linn in recent months.
The exodus continues, with reports of two more very close to receiving job offers from other law enforcement agencies and still more seeking jobs elsewhere.
The two most recent withdrawals include a seasoned detective and the West Linn High School resource officer; both were hired by the Lake Oswego Police Department.
Among the officers who have spoken to the Tidings, the most common complaint is job morale, but Ellison emphatically denies that there is low morale in his department.
In fact, he initially refused to answer any questions on morale. “I’m not even going to speak about that,” Ellison said. “We can talk about statistics, but that is a ridiculous remark (about low morale), and whoever made that remark is wrong.”
Citing an inflexible attitude, an employee said anonymously that the chief alienates his staff by making unreasonable demands.
“Only wanting things done his way is what has destroyed the West Linn Police Department,” said an unnamed current employee of the department. “He has everyone afraid of him, because of the way he explodes.”
In the past few months, a number of officers, fearing reprisal for speaking out, would only speak to the Tidings off-the-record. But several people recently decided to add their name to their comments.
For example, Scott Anderson, who now works for another law enforcement agency, says the police chief’s military style of leadership and management of employees is viewed by his staff as a direct threat.
Ellison admits to firing two officers and handing out three discipline penalties, but says that’s not many in one year. One of the firings is still in arbitration and sources close to the officer say the issue also could go to civil litigation.
Officers complain of threats
But Ellison defends his actions, although he does admit that his styles of leadership and management are militaristic.
“My management and leadership styles are probably both military-oriented,” he said, “but I don’t deal with everybody in the same way.
“We’ve had a change in leadership in the department, and the department is going a different direction. I like the direction the department is going, and I think we’re doing the right thing and we’re going to continue to go that way. And if we lose officers along the way, I’m sorry about that. But along the way we’re also picking up people that believe in what we’re doing.”
After the firings, Anderson said the chief and Lt. Vic Lancaster sent a memo to officers by e-mail and put a copy on the officers’ bulletin board requesting more parking enforcement on two streets in the chief’s home neighborhood. Later, another memo chastised the officers because a car parked across the sidewalk overnight near the chief’s home, remained unticketed.
“Then, another memo from the lieutenant said if we didn’t start writing tickets in that neighborhood, we’d be on foot patrol,” Anderson said. “And that’s a threat.”
In the lieutenant’s words from the memo: “I know this sounds threatening, and it should.”
But Ellison says the memos were sent because there were more complaints of parking violations in that area of the city.
Anderson also complained of what he called a quota of citations that the chief and lieutenant were requesting.
A memo last May, written by Lt. Lancaster and Chief Ellison said: “Effective immediately, each patrol officer will have an average of one citation per day. That is 20 citations, moving or non-moving, per month.”
The threat came in another sentence in the same memo: “How can you justify their (officers’) employment with the city if they are doing nothing?”
Losing this many officers with a new chief is unprecedented, according to Anderson, who worked under Ellison for 10 months before leaving West Linn.
“I have not heard of any department anywhere that lost this high a percentage of officers so fast with one personnel change,” he said. “One guy comes in, and 12 people leave, three or four more have applications out and two get fired. That’s just unheard of.”
But the chief says that’s not true.
“Everybody has turnover when you have a new chief coming in,” he said. “It’s part of the job.”
Speaking as a resident of West Linn for more than 40 years and as a law enforcement officer for nearly 25 years, Kim Klusmann is appalled at the state of the WLPD.
“He (Ellison) has, so far, destroyed the capability and efficiency of the police department to protect out community and has basically left the citizens of West Linn to police themselves,” Klusmann, who works for a different Clackamas County law enforcement agency, wrote in a recently published opinion.
“Why should we, the taxpayers, have to finance the failure of the police chief to build on what was already in place? Instead of building on the foundation of a highly trained and professional organization, the chief has torn the police department apart.”
Anderson says he was happy at West Linn until the new chief changed working conditions and the atmosphere in the department.
He admits filing other applications and getting job offers over a number of years while employed at West Linn, but in each case, when he weighed the new department with West Linn’s, he decided to stay where he was because it was the best choice.
“It was always that West Linn was the best choice,” Anderson said. “But this time, it wasn’t even close. I’m very happy where I’m at now (another agency).” Ellison says he has tried to find out why people are leaving.
“We’ve done everything we can to investigate that,” he said, “to try to find out if, in fact, it is something that I’m doing or if it’s just a different direction the police department is going.”
Mayor David Dodds says it is that the department is going to full-fledged community policing, which is not what is wanted by the officers hired by former chief Terry Hart.
He also blames the Portland Police Bureau’s hiring policies for taking local officers away.
“They pay more than West Linn does or is likely to,” Dodds said. “And we’re transitioning essentially into a different culture (community policing), so it’s not that unusual (to lose personnel).”
Drug seizures diminish
Anderson says the reason the department is not seizing very many drugs now is because the officers aren’t aggressively seeking out those people who are involved in manufacturing and distributing.
“The new officers are not trained,” Anderson said. They’re not experienced; they’re not motivated; and they’re probably anxious and in fear of retribution for doing anything.”
Everyone who has talked to the Tidings has said fewer drugs are being seized now compared to a year ago or two years ago or more. According to statistics provided by WLPD, the number of drug-related incidents in West Linn has dropped 38 percent in the past year.
“When you’ve been seizing ever-increasing amounts of dope, and then you have a huge turnover of experienced aggressive officers, and then the amount of arrests and dope seizures go down, they’re correlated,” said Mike Zoormagian, a West Linn reserve officer and chairman of the city’s budget committee.
“You don’t have these experienced, aggressive officers on the street being proactive and making arrests and seizing dope. But that doesn’t mean the amount of dope in the city has gone down, because I can assure you it has not.”
In Anderson’s opinion, the department has lost most of its ability to ferret out and identify drug pushers.
“You can train anybody to write a parking ticket,” he said, “but to find dope you have to know case law, search-and-seizure law, be analytical and skeptical by nature, be able to recognize where they are in the community, and find a legal way to investigate the crime, search and seize the drugs and put together a case for the DA. It’s a very complex case.”
Chief Ellison adds that it’s more difficult nowadays to find drugs than it was a few years ago.
“That’s because people are getting more inventive in the ways they conceal their drugs,” he said. “I wouldn’t say there are less drugs being used out there, because I don’t think we’ve made a dent in the numbers of people who are still using drugs.”
Most other types of arrests are in lower numbers, according to West Linn Police Department statistics. Anderson says it is a sign that the officers are busy doing other things.
“The things that matter,” he said, “felonies and misdemeanor arrests and speeding tickets are down,” he said while looking at internal reports of officer activity. “The only things up are people calling the police - so they have more problems - and parking tickets are up. Everything else is down.”
Low morale
To emphasize the feeling of low morale among police department officers, former evidence technician Phil Chaney says there isn’t much incentive to move to another department.
“Everybody who leaves West Linn gives up their seniority at West Linn,” Chaney said. “They’ve all gone to new departments and started at the bottom, in terms of seniority, and they are on a lower pay scale than they were at West Linn. That’s not my definition of career advancement. And they take a pay cut and get the least desirable (graveyard) shift.
“But every one of them have told me that it’s a real pleasure to go to work today.”
Those comments fly in the face of views expressed a couple of months ago by Ellison, who alleged that the officers who were leaving the department were looking for career advancement and placement on specialized teams not found in small departments like West Linn.
“Are we running anybody off?” he said. “No. Did we want any of those guys to leave? No. But a lot of those officers are wanting bigger and better things - upward mobility.”
But Chaney says it’s the low morale that is driving away the best officers - employees with the best resumes.
“Low morale is shown by talking to the guys and the fact that they’re disgruntled and leaving the department,” Chaney said. “If job morale were good, they’d all stay there. But some actually don’t have the qualifications/abilities to go to another department, and wouldn’t be as good a candidate.”
But Dodds says the officers’ dissatisfaction lies in the difference between Hart and Ellison.
"(Myself and a number of people) were not exactly overjoyed with the way the police department was running under the previous chief,” Dodds said. “I was not at all happy with how it was operating under the previous chief, so a definite change needed to be made. And if that means there’s going to be turnover to accomplish that, then so be it.”
An employee of the WLPD, who fears retribution, said the Tidings could publish comments if the em-ployee was not identified.
“Morale has been crushed by the way things are being run,” the employee said. “The biggest thing is that officers are not being trustedS It was made quite clear that the cameras are in the cars to watch the officers. And that just sent a message that they are not trusted by their command.”
Anderson says it also is a problem that only the best officers who have been trained by West Linn for from four to eight years are leaving. Besides the fact that the city has spent many tax dollars to train these people, it leaves the department with a hole in its continuity of leadership. After the most experienced employees retire, Anderson said, there won’t be another generation of very experienced leaders to follow.
Zoormagian confirms what Anderson said. “As a group,” he said, “these men who left were all supposed to represent the future of the P.D. The city put a lot of time and money into getting these guys trained.”
12-hour shifts/overtime
One reason for the lowering job morale, according to Anderson, is the repeated 12-hour shifts. Due to the large number of people leaving in such a short time and the time it takes to train new officers, Ellison has had to assign his patrol officers 12-hour shifts to cover each day.
Officers work four consecutive 12-hour shifts, then take three days off. That requires paying eight hours of overtime per officer each week, plus overtime for hours spent in court on “days off.”
“The 12-hour shifts are hard on morale,” he said. “All they do is work and sleep, work and sleep. And if you’re on a night shift and you have to go to court in the daytime, you can imagine what that does to your sleep.”
“It’s an indisputable fact,” said Zoormagian, “that when you work people 12 hours a day, four days in a row that the efficiency of the officers is much lower. And that’s witnessed by the lower number of arrests and smaller amount of dope seized.”
Also contributing to low morale, Ellison is reported to have written a pursuit policy that is quite different than the Interagency Pursuit Agreement, which every other police agency in Clackamas County has signed. In effect, Anderson said, West Linn police have very little discretion to begin a pursuit.
“In my entire time there (at WLPD),” Anderson said, I don’t remember a single accident being caused by a pursuit.”
But Ellison defends his pursuit policy, saying he is interested in everyone’s safety.
“My philosophy is this,” he said. “I don’t want officers chasing for misdemeanor violations, because I don’t want to have to go out and knock on some parent’s door to tell them that 16-year-old ‘Johnny’ was killed while being chased by our officers for running a stop sign.”
Ellison said he wants whatever chases occur to be for the “right reasons.” Anderson complained about the lack of trust in officers’ judgment about when it’s appropriate to chase a suspect.
He also accused the chief of not trusting officers by reducing communication with the city’s administration.
“He gave us a directive,” Anderson said, “not to talk to anybody in city hall or city council without going through him first.”
Ellison counters with his “open door” policy.
“I’ve got an open door policy,” he said, “staff does, mayor does, council does, and if these officers have other reasons (for leaving) than what I have stated, then they need to come forward with that.”
City bears extra costs
The extra overtime, plus salary costs for the 17 weeks each new officer is being field trained by local officers adds up quickly. In August, Lt. Lancaster estimated that training costs, which also includes overtime for training officers, for at least eight new officers over a couple of years would cost West Linn about $2 million - even though their three months at the law enforcement academy only costs West Linn the officers’ salaries.
And with all of the extra expenses, local citizens have to put up with lower levels of law enforcement.
While looking at internal reports of individual officers’ activity, Anderson noticed that the number of arrests as well as traffic violations had decreased 40 percent comparing July 2002 to July 2003. At the same time, calls for service increased 8 percent and parking violations rose 32 percent.
“Most of the felonies in 2002 were drugs like meth or heroin, guns or serious crimes,” Anderson said. “That means there are a lot more of the dangerous people out there not being arrested by WLPD that were getting arrested pre-Ellison.”
Community policing
But Ellison says that proves that community policing really works. If the police are out there checking on the little things such as parking violations and open garage doors, the criminals will notice that and choose not to stay in West Linn.
But he admits that officers don’t like to do some of the new things.
“They think doing vacation house watches is a job for a security firm,” Ellison said. “But we’re going to police the community the way it wants to be policed, and if that means spending 10 minutes checking a house - instead of spending 3 to 4 hours taking a burglary report and six months to follow-up to try to clear it - we’re going to do the 10 minutes on a security check.”
Anderson says the changes and the threats have officers on edge.
“He is articulating community policing well,” Anderson said, “but he’s not putting it into practice because he has everybody so scared to go out and do anything (requiring initiative). People are getting sus-pended and fired and threatened, left and right, for taking initiative.
“You can train anybody to write a parking ticket. It doesn’t take much training or experience, intelligence or initiative to write a parking ticket. It doesn’t take any of the things you want in your police offi-cers.”
West Linn is ‘laughing stock’
Local citizens as well as out-of-town law enforcement officers are asking the question: What is happening in the West Linn Police Department?
“It’s really tragic what’s happening over there,” said Zoormagian.
“Everywhere I’ve gone in the state, and I contact a lot of people across the state as a trainer and as a cop,” said Anderson, “almost without exception the first question is: ‘What the hell’s going on in West Linn?’ It’s to the point where West Linn is the laughing stock.”
As a West Linn resident and chairman of the city’s budget committee, Zoormagian is concerned about the potential for excessive expenses in the coming months. “As a citizen of the city,” Zoormagian said, “I’m extremely concerned about the loss of experience (in the police department), and the little effort that was put forth to maintain the experience.
“But from a financial standpoint, and in my role as chairman of the budget committee, I’m concerned about the expenditures that we’re going through to hire and train all the new people in a department that’s already cash-strapped. The city is very, very tight for money.”
Besides the financial picture, there’s the disruption taking place in the department, as well as the poten-tial for compromised law enforcement. “All of the guys that have left are huge losses for the P.D.,” Chaney said, “and I feel very sorry for the citizens of West Linn. All of the guys that have left are young and energetic. And that’s sad.”