There are a few updates on the search for a Public Safety Director in Mankato, MN, a search for which Whitewater Police Chief Jim Coan is a candidate.
First, there’s a story in the Mankato Free Press, entitled,
“Public Safety Candidates Go Public,” about the search for the next public safety director for Mankato. The story has two photographs of Coan during his public interview for the position. There’s no particular meaning to the photos, but they are odd. The larger of the two shows Coan walking away from the podium after his presentation, and both can be found on the right side of the story to which I have linked, above. The full — uncropped — photo produces quite an effect. I’ve been asked what I think of it; I have no particular view. Readers are free to make of it what they’d like.
Second, there’s also a video clip with remarks from each of the four candidates, available online at Fox affiliate KEYC TV. Coan’s remarks run from :40 to :55 in the video. (There’s no option to embed the video, but it’s online at the KEYC website.) In his remarks, Coan says that
I would hope to instill pride and enthusiasm in what we stand for and what we can accomplish to build close relationships, partnerships with the community and also to develop a sense of pride for what we stand for and what we could get accomplished.
Third, there’s a companion story at the Mankato Free Press about the Mankato Joint Civil Service Commission, a body that performs some of the functions of Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission. Yet, it reportedly performs them with considerably more diligence than Whitewater’s PFC.
Some months back, in a post entitled, Has Whitewater Police Chief Jim Coan already hired a trainer for Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission members? I teased about how the agenda for a PFC meeting allotted a scant twenty minutes to interview two patrol officer candidates. Wisconsin law requires the PFC to approve officer appointments, and I thought it was absurd that the agenda allotted only twenty minutes for two interviews.
Predictably, at the next Whitewater Common Council meeting, defenders of the Whitewater PFC were quick to note that the agenda was obviously, inexplicably in error, that the PFC had actually allotted fifteen minutes or so to each candidate’s interview. This defense was, itself, absurd, because that’s still a paltry amount of time for a task so important. Still, the clueless defenders of Whitewater’s PFC must have thought that they had hit on a compelling explanation of our PFC’s interviewing process.
They were wrong. A look at how Mankato, MN’s Joint Civil Service Commission conducts patrol officer interviews confirms that Whitewater’s practice is shoddy and inadequate. In the Mankato Free Press story on their JSCC, one learns that
Even when the commission is interviewing a pool of potential patrol officers or firefighters, the group of three spends hours questioning candidates. Those interviews are usually in person
and the list of questions is completely different.”
For a slate of candidates in Mankato, hours; for a slate in Whitewater, minutes.
If one waits long enough, one can find refutation of every lie, excuse, and exaggeration behind the shoddy and inadequate practices of the Whitewater Police and Fire Commission.
Those who thought they had an answer for the paltry efforts of the Whitewater PFC were wrong; the defenders’ response reveals only ignorance.
Since Chief Coan, himself, wants to be part of the Mankato force, and presumably thinks it’s a place of which he’d like to be a part, one might ask if he’d acknowledge Mankato has a more thorough process. (One might ask, too, about whether our PFC members have consistently and always conducted their candidate interviews — however speedy — without Coan or a senior police leader watching over them. Independent oversight requires as much; anything else is a sham.)
By the way, in the Mankato Free Press‘s story on their Joint Civil Service Commission, there’s a clue about the prospects for Coan’s candidacy there. In any event, Whitewater will know soon enough. The effort for the quality police leadership that our city deserves will be just as important regardless of events in faraway Mankato.