In IBPO Arbitration Victory, Sergeant’s Demotion Reversed
August 11, 2009
A veteran sergeant with the Wolcott, Connecticut police department has had his demotion to patrol officer reversed after a panel of arbitrators ruled that the town did not have just cause to demote him.
"The town's claim that it had just cause to demote the sergeant didn't hold water," said Michael Brady, the IBPO attorney who represented the sergeant at arbitration. "The town failed to admit that its policies were contradictory, and the town relied on previous discipline and training that was either inapplicable or non-existent. The arbitrators recognized that and restored the officer to the rank of sergeant."
Reasonable delays to a non-priority call response
On a night in July 2008, the sergeant was working the overnight shift with two officers, the minimum manning requirement. They were responsible for covering all of Wolcott, which is home to about 17,000 people in 22.6 square miles. The sergeant’s regular duty was to supervise the officers on his shift, but he had many additional duties including maintaining the laptops in the cruisers, maintaining and fixing the Intoxilizer machine, maintaining the log book, reviewing other officers' daily activity logs and the reports, warrants and affidavits filed by every officer in the department.
The department had received several calls about kids breaking a bottle on the road in one of the neighborhoods. The sergeant learned of the calls only after the third call came into dispatch. He characterized it as a non-priority call and advised dispatch to send one of the officers to the scene. One officer was waiting for a tow truck for another vehicle in town in accordance with policy, while the other was transporting an arrestee back to the station. The sergeant advised the officer waiting for the tow truck to attend to the bottle call as soon as he was cleared.
When the second officer returned to the station with the arrestee, the sergeant advised the officer on proper booking procedure, secured his own weapon, and entered the holding area to check on the prisoner. He assumed that the first officer had cleared his tow truck call and was on his way to the bottle call. But some 15 minutes after the sergeant had learned about the bottle call, a resident of that neighborhood called dispatch again to complain that there had been no police response yet. The sergeant contacted the first officer, who told him that the tow truck company had sent the wrong vehicle and was getting another one to the scene. Unfortunately, the officer did not inform the sergeant that a crowd was gathering at the scene and he thought it inadvisable to leave until the correct tow truck could remove the vehicle.
Meanwhile, the second officer was having trouble getting a proper reading on the Intoxilizer. While the sergeant fixed the machine, the first officer cleared the tow truck call and headed to the bottle call area. That officer reported that he found the complainant loud and swearing. The officer found one small bottle near a curb, but saw no other damage near the area. The caller complained to the mayor’s office the following day about the shortage of officer personnel. The town demoted the grievant a few weeks later, citing previous discipline given the grievant on the subject of responding to serious calls.
IBPO attorney pokes holes in town’s justification
At arbitration, Attorney Brady described the factors in play that night:
- The town claimed it had given the sergeant remedial training when, in fact, it had teamed him with a senior sergeant for only a few months in 2003 or 2004 when the sergeant was supervising very junior officers during a rash of burglaries in the town.
- The sergeant has many administrative duties at the station in addition to his duties supervising officers, including fixing a malfunctioning Intoxilizer machine.
- Only two officers, instead of the typical four, were on duty on the night in question.
- “Implicit in this instruction is that the grievant be aware that a call is serious,” wrote Brady in his case. The grievant was not notified of multiple calls on the bottle issue, the reason for the arrest involving the car to be towed, or the problems at the scene of the tow until well after the beginning of each incident. The grievant decided to stack the calls based on the information he had at the time of each incident, and even after more information was available, the calls themselves were not serious ones requiring his physical presence.
But the key to the arbitration was the town's claim of prior discipline. The chief mentioned in his demotion letter to the sergeant a January 2007 letter calling for the sergeant to respond to all serious calls for services, a reprimand that would be expunged in one year if no further discipline were issued. Brady argued that the prior progressive discipline the town cited was inapplicable. The reprimand in January 2007, an earlier reprimand and a brief suspension in 2002 were all too old to be considered in this case. The town clearly did not give the grievant the training or counseling more appropriate in the situation than the demotion. Even police management used a counseling, not actual discipline, when another incident occurred within one year of the January 2007 letter. The town did not abide by its own rules.
The panel of arbitrators ruled that the key element of the town’s "just cause" should be given no weight, and therefore the sergeant should be restored to his prior rank.