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flintknapper wrote:

tfrazier wrote:

flintknapper wrote:tfrazier wrote:

Like a salty old sergeant at Greenville P.D. told me when he was blemishing my beautiful stack of commendations with my first reprimand, "Get over it. If you don't have a stack of reprimands at least as thick as your stack of commendations, you ain't been doing your job."

I'm guessing the sergeant said that more for your benefit than anything else. Surely, he does not support the practice of poor performance (the basis of the reprimand) on a 50% scale as compared to good procedure. To say otherwise is to admit he "expects" behavior worthy of reprimand at least half the time from his officers. Worse yet, he condones it.

Well, anyone who has been in law enforcement any length of time, especially in a smaller department OR in a politically charged Sheriff's Office will probably agree that reprimands are not always appropriate, and are sometimes used to make an officer a scapegoat. Sergeants, Lieutenants, Captains, etc are human, too, and sometimes they lose their objectivity just like everyone else. Just like sometimes the commendations stack up for the "golden boy" who happens to be the Captain's son's best friend from high school.

And 50/50 reprimands vs. commendations is actually pretty believable if you work in a department where the top brass is regularly giving officers three-day suspensions without pay because they exceeded the "20 mph over the speed limit maximum" pursuit policy in chasing down an armed robber. Or ordering commanders to write up officers every time a released prisoner showed up claiming the officer put the hand cuffs on too tight, IMMEDIATELY after hearing the complaint and without giving the officer any opportunity to respond. That's the sort of thing that causes 30 of 32 officers to form the first ever patrolman's union in a town...and gets the K9 officer on the front page of the paper as the president. Having served under three different chiefs, two were outstanding. One gave me an indefinite suspension without pay (that means "fired" in Civil Service) because my dog chewed up the seat belts in the K9 unit and I refused to pay for them (that means I organized the troops and formed a union). Then I got fired again over trumped up stuff when they discovered it wasn't legal to fire me for not paying for the seat belts (meaning for forming a union). I was reinstated and received back pay. Twice. And I was still there when he turned in his resignation. So there you have it, the background on why I tend to so aggressively defend individual officers and try so hard to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But the point I'm trying to make over all is that I have suspicions that this whole episode may have been a bit unfair. The media vilification of this guy just nauseates me. He did a 'bad' thing...that doesn't automatically mean he is a bad person and should have his entire career destroyed.

And yes, I am a political conservative, and don't like to admit that I was once an AFL-CIO Union affiliate president, but when you need union attorneys, you need union attorneys.

Well, that does make things more understandable in your case.

Sounds like...in the end, you and the dog came out on top. The dog was probably just a little stressed.