Policies for the Police and Fire Commission

Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission meets tonight at 5:30 PM, to interview patrol officers and consider several policy documents. Those documents appear below, and at the bottom of this post readers will find the video recording of last week’s PFC meeting.

There are five processes or documents to be considered tonight:

(1)  PFC Oath 
(2)  Code of Ethics
(3)  Commissioner Responsibilities and Expectations
(4)  Complaint Process Overview
(5)  Hiring Process and Commission Involvement Policy

Here are a few things to consider, in no particular order.

To his credit, the Common Council member of the PFC – who occupies a different political status in the city by being elected to Council – was the only one from the 11.6.13 meeting who posed meaningful questions of conflicts of interest or of the draft complaint process.   

Code of Ethics.  I’m not sure who wrote the draft Code of Ethics.  Last week’s PFC discussion leaves the actual authorship vague.

(That is, I’m not sure who wrote it, not who typed it.  I’m referring the actual composition, not the word-processing of it.  Writing is a leadership responsibility, not a clerical matter.)

In any event, it’s written in a poor, occasionally substandard English.  Any document may have a few typos, but this draft is littered with errors of subject-verb agreement, misuse of simple words or misspellings, and beyond all that a flowery, rambling prose.  

No one is expecting Augustan English, so to speak, but one should at least have a PFC code up to the standards of our high-school graduates.  This isn’t.  

Beyond the composition, there’s a different point, that’s truly substantive, rather than stylistic: the use of the word stakeholder in the first paragraph (‘Personal Integrity’): “…in order to inspire trust among our stakeholders…”

It’s true that I don’t like the term, and have said as much before, but my objection here is more than rhetorical: the legal obligation is to residents, to citizens, to department employees, but not to some ill-defined group through a buzz-word term that sounds impressive until one realizes that it’s empty. 

‘Stakeholder’ is just an attempt to appear profound and comprehensive without comprehending that for a code, as for good law itself, only concrete and plain terms should be used.  The use here isn’t impressive, but deficient by ambiguity.

Hiring.  The drafts maintain the current and inadequate process of having a “Command Staff” official sit in on the interviews.  I’ve criticized this practice before.  See, along these lines, Police and Fire Commission Interviewing.

Funny, truly.  The department’s leadership in this small, rural town uses the sadly trendy term “Command Staff” to refer to itself, yet it’s so insecure that it dare not let citizens appointed for oversight sit with candidates in a room by themselves.  One would think that a true command staff (think Gen. MacArthur, not anyone in Whitewater) wouldn’t be so insecure over hiring in a town of about fifteen-thousand.       

Complaints Process.  Here one finds the truly absurd and ill-considered work of the author of the complaints process against a commissioner.  

Under the Wisconsin law, itself, the PFC has oversight over the chief of police and the department.  Yet, astonishingly, the complaints process against a commissioner-overseer of the department and chief is assigned to that very chief:

Complaint Against Commissioner.  The same process is used for any complaint.  The complaint [sic] forwarded to the Chief of Police.  If the Chief of Police believes the complaint has merit and violates the intent and meaning of the Commission, the complaint is forwarded to the City Manager and the Police Commission president for review.

This method assures that the police chief will act as interpreter and gatekeeper of the complaints process against a commissioner, even though it is the commission’s principal duty to oversee the police chief and department.  

The incentive for deals, arrangements, and protection of some (and claims against others) based on favoritism is inescapable in this circular arrangement.

Worse, even if there were no deals, it presents the appearance of a conflict of interest – and avoidance of conflicts is the avoidance of both substance and appearance.    

It’s ironic that the president of the PFC, Jan Bilgen, is also on Whitewater’s Ethics Committee, yet seemingly fails to grasp this simple principle.  Had the PFC president understood half of this, the provision would not have been – as it should not have been – even in the draft process.  

That others may have reviewed this provision before the 11.6.13 meeting and let it pass is simply embarrassing.  

For an example of a public body that faced a complaint against one of its members and took the right course of using an independent attorney to conduct the investigation, see School District Investigation Finds Board Member Violated Policies.  

Public integrity is more than a florid litany of what one declares about oneself – it’s the expectation that public officials will, in serious matters, submit to independent and impartial review.  

That’s not what’s present in this draft; Whitewater deserves better than something transparently inadequate.