A recent story out of New Orleans claims the city inspector general (IG) report on a sex crimes unit within the New Orleans Police Department
found that many reported case of rape and other sex offenses had not been investigated at all. Some cases had documentation of investigative work, when none was actually done. In other cases, detectives attempted to cover up their lack of effort by creating sham, back-dated reports of work they hadn’t bothered to do.
The NOPD already has a long-standing problem with image and lack of public confidence. This won’t improve the situation.
Altogether Too Common
I have no personal knowledge of what happened in the NOPD sex crimes unit, but I have seen similar problems in other agencies. Police employees are allowed to go months, sometimes years, without doing any meaningful work. They often enjoy inflated compensation because they put in for overtime hours they never worked, or incentive pay they weren’t entitled to. Calls don’t get answered, paperwork never gets done. Harder-working cops have to take up the slack, and public faith erodes when the misconduct is discovered.
Often, the people who engage in this behavior are never called to account for it. When their misconduct is discovered, they are penalized by not being able to do it anymore. When they are senior employees, they are allowed to walk out the door with their inflated pay and “spiked” pension, and collect money they aren’t entitled to for the rest of their lives.
The reason these folks get away with it the same the reason they were able to do it in the first place: Their supervisors were phoning it in. They never reviewed time cards or reports, never checked up on their subordinates. The bad actors aren’t disciplined because that would necessitate asking, “Who did this person report to,” and that would cause trouble for the supervisor. It’s better for their career to settle it quietly and not reveal that the supervisor wasn’t doing his or her job.
This applies especially to upper and middle management. Some agencies hold their upper managers’ feet to the fire and see that they continue to be productive, even when they have promoted into managerial positions where they are not performing traditional law enforcement work. COMPSTAT, developed at the NYPD, is often useful to this end. It makes senior managers immediately and directly accountable when their numbers reflect rising crime or inefficient use of resources.
Unfortunately, it can also be the tail that wags the dog. It can cause commanders to order officers to produce X summonses or Y stop-and-frisk reports every duty tour, whether there is justification for the actions or not. Like any management tool, it has to be used ethically and wisely to be effective.
Senior executives who are called on to keep better tabs on their subordinates will sometimes laugh this off. “He’s a captain, not a rookie. He doesn’t need supervision.”
They forget — or fail to admit — that anyone can fall into a pattern of carelessness and entitlement. The first time they sign off on a report they haven’t read, they consider that might be a risk. The 50th or 100th time they do it, the apprehension is gone.
One Egregious Example
Someone noticed that a commander’s total compensation for the previous two years was about twice his base pay. Commanders don’t get a lot of overtime, so this was curious. Closer inspection of his time cards revealed that he had routinely put in for as many as five flavors of on-call pay at the same time.
Employees who were on call for emergencies received four extra hours of regular pay for every 24 hours they were subject to call. It stood to reason that if you were on call to be the hostage negotiator and they needed you instead as a SWAT team member, the same cell phone or pager would work. By demanding pay for five varieties of on-call, he more than doubled his pay for most days. An interesting wrinkle to this was that he had put in for the extra pay even when he was out of the country.
How did this happen? The deputy chief he reported to signed his time cards for over two years, apparently never reading one. The commander was quietly asked to retire, but with a pension at least 60 percent higher than he would have received otherwise. The deputy chief emerged unscathed.
Trust But Verify
Gordon Graham — the public safety risk management guru (and the only guy on the planet that can make that topic interesting) — is fond of reminding us that most incidents of police misconduct can be traced to ineffective supervision. Police work isn’t a job where a supervisor is always watching over your shoulder. That autonomous aspect is one of the things that appeals to many cops. There has to be considerable trust placed in individual officers, based on good training and assessment of character.
This doesn’t mean that anyone should go indefinitely without someone reviewing their work now and then. Some days you’re just more enthusiastic about the job than others. It’s the supervisor’s job to ensure this doesn’t get out of hand, and that the employer is getting the right amount of productivity out of each employee.
As the cold war wound down, President Reagan spoke about the United States’ policy on making sure that the Soviet Union was holding up their end of the deal on reducing the nuclear weapon stockpile: “Trust, but verify.” This isn’t a bad policy for police supervisors at every level. Everyone’s work should be checked now and then, and no one should resent their boss for doing it. If your agency’s culture is one that permits people to work without accountability, it might be time to try and change that.
