I received a comment back in January that I have not had time to address until now. Below is the comment and my response;

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First, I never went begging or groveling for my job back. In fact Chief Corvello offered it back to me prior to the Grievance Panel Hearing but I turned him down because I would have had to take punishment for something I didn’t do. That was something I will never be willing to accept.

Second, I stopped writing for a number of reasons. As I said I won my grievance with the City of Portsmouth and was reinstated to my previous position as a Police Officer. That job keeps me very very busy so my time is much more limited then before.  As an employee of the City of Portsmouth I have certain obligations as an employee that I feel I must follow in my blog postings that I did not have when I was not an employee. If you read my goals when I started this blog you will see that many of my goals have been achieved or are being addressed;

1) Got my job back, received $20,000 in backpay and all my benefits.

2) City Council passed the resolution granting a Public Safety pay plan and finally making Public Safety pay “market based” and comparable to the other Police Departments in the area. The city is hoping to stem the flow of Portsmouth Police Officers leaving for better paying jobs in other departments. Their are issues with the Pay Plan and a copy of the report produced by the consultant “Matrix Consulting Group” is available by clicking here. The city will not answer questions about the plan and refer inqueries to Officer Jim Swann who is the President of the local Portsmouth FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) Lodge. Anyone see a problem with that? He is not in HR or in payroll and the city has no business referring any employee to him regarding their pay. Given the current financial situation I do not believe the city will follow through with this long overdue promise and institute the plan in July. I fully expect the City Council to backout of the deal claiming they don’t have the money because of the “economic crisis” not that I thought they could/would come up with the money to fund this before the crisis. I also have heard rumors that the city is saying that the Pay Plan is “Time in Grade” based. I disagree after reading the Matrix Report. It clearly states “An employee will move one step for each year of service.” Their is no mention of an employee starting over at Step 0/1 if they are promoted. The notion is ludicrous and senior people being promoted would actually receive pay cuts. More responsibility less pay, don’t see the logic in that…

3) See that better management is put in place in the Portsmouth Police Department. I have already made posts about that in the past. To update everyone that is not already aware, Portsmouth has a new Chief of Police, Edward G. Hargis. Thankfully he is from the “outside” and was not one of the people that applied from within. He is already making changes and from what I hear holding some of his executive staff far more accountable then the previous Chief. I am hoping that accountability, ethics and professionalism become the words of the day under the new Chief.

4) Radio System problems are being addressed, very slowly but plans call for a multi-million dollar Motorola Smartnet Simulcast site in Churchland to address the considerable problems Public Safety personel having in communicating using the current generation of portable radios. I am looking into additional details because I am now assigned to work Churchland several days a week and find the radio problem to be of serious concern for officer safety. I have used the new car and fixxed base repeaters that have been installed in some of the police cars and at several sites in the Churchland area. I am not impressed overall with the functionallity of the repeaters. They are a step in the right direction but they have significant short comings. Portsmouth needs a simucast site in Churchland to correct the problems and make it safe for all the city employees that rely on the system for communications. I hope and pray that some public safety official does not have to die to have the radio system short comings addressed.

This was my first post in many months and I have a couple other issues that I will be making posts about in the future but with my current constraints I will not be able to maintain the same level of posts as before.

Portsmouth is in financial crisis and appears to be the first city in this area to start laying off employees claiming budgetary shortfalls. Could these layoff’s have been prevented? It’s a complex question, but if you look at some of the previous actions of the Portsmouth City Council and the City of Portsmouth Upper Level Management the question might actually be yes.

After significant research several things become clear. First, the City Council saw fit to give the city’s executive management huge pay increases over the past 10 years compared to the rank and file general employee’s including the city’s Public Safety employee’s. Click here to see the Portsmouth Pay Increases Comparison 1998 through 2008 which documents the huge pay increases the City Manager, City Attorney and others in the upper levels of management have reaped in the past 10 years while the rank and file were given pittance pay increases. The data for the graph was obtained from the City of Portsmouth via FOIA and was contained in their own pay plans that the City Council approves each year placing them by ordinance into the city code.

I learned a long time ago that a true leader leads by example and is willing to make sacrifices for their people to see that they are taken care of. That has not been the case in Portsmouth. While the rank and file employees which include Public Safety have had to struggle, work second jobs or part time work to cover their family expenses or were forced to leave Portsmouth and seek employment elsewhere the city management has received significant pay increases. This certainly demonstrates what the Portsmouth City Council thinks about their rank and file employees that do the real work of the city. They don’t…

I am currently working on a study of the cost to City of Portsmouth tax payers every time a Portsmouth Police Officer is forced to leave employment because economically they simply can not afford to stay in Portsmouth.  I don’t have all the numbers crunched nor all the records I have FOIA’d from Portsmouth yet but hope to soon. My estimate from what I have already is that each officer that leaves costs the tax payers in excess of $50,000. You multiply that out with the number of officers that have been leaving and you could have had the funds to provide pay increases over the years. The city has continued to take away benefits from the Police Officers such as take home police cars. They used that as a recruiting tool for years. They would say hey, “we don’t pay as much as some of the other cities but after 5 years you are entitled to a take home police car with city gas to burn.” That benefit was taken away last year from many of the officers resulting in what amounted to a pay cut to many police officers who are already struggling to make ends meet.

A contributing factor to the current financial crisis is the continued trend over previous years to spend, spend, spend but not build up a contingency fund to cover just such a financial crisis. The city has an obligation to provide for a functional and safe court facility but instead they have invested in hotels and traffic circles.

The city contends that it was the consultant’s independent study that determined the positions were not needed.  That very well may be the case but unfortunately the city has no choice but to lay people off because of poor fiscal decisions made in the past. Had it not been a financial crisis because of poor decisions the city would not now have to place dozens of it’s employee’s into a crisis of their own. Portsmouth claims that it’s work force is a family, if that’s the case I suggest they start making sacrifices at the top to help some of their family at the bottom. The increased salaries given to management over the past decade were not even comparatively close to the raises the rank and file employees have received. The amounts involved actually could fully fund a number of the positions that were eliminated or provide funding to transition those employees to other positions within the city.

Below is the latest radio spot from the Portsmouth Fraternal Order of Police Lodge. They are attempting to generate support among the citizens of Portsmouth for better pay for the Portsmouth Police Officers. I fully support this endeavor and wish them well on a quest that typically falls on deaf ears in the Portsmouth City Council.

Over the previous 10 years the City of Portsmouth has provided significant pay raises to the executive staff of the City, i.e. City Manager, City Attorney etc. The pay raises given to the general and public safety employees has been significantly less during the same period. I am in the process of collecting and processing 10 years worth of City of Portsmouth Pay Plans to document this inequitable distribution of pay raises. Hopefully I will have that post ready in the next week or so.

Click to the right to hear the latest FOP Radio Spot Portsmouth FOP Radio Spot Number 2

If after you read my post or listen to the ad and want to help out, click the link below to go to the Portsmouth FOP page that has all the contact information to voice your concern to the Portsmouth City Council.

I had a good laugh today when I received an email with an audio attachment. It’s one of those funny things that’s sad. It starts off as a recruiting ad, kinda, but is actually a very well done parody of the current retention problems facing the Portsmouth Police Department. The Portsmouth Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) lodge had the ad made and is going to be airing it on various radio stations starting Monday.

I received permission to place it on my blog from one of the Officers of the Portsmouth FOP.

The Department has one very positive note for the junior officers that are hired. Once trained, then Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) certified Basic Law Enforcement Officers they can then find a job at any other Commonwealth of Virginia Law Enforcement Agency. A little over 10 years ago the City of Portsmouth changed their retirement system from a city run pension plan to the Commonwealth of Virginia “Virginia Retirement System” (VRS). By doing this they made a city employees retirement “portable”. You can now leave Portsmouth, go to any other Virginia state agency or municipality that is also under VRS and continue on with all your time from Portsmouth credited to you under your new agency for your retirement.

When you look at the pay differential of the local police departments (click here for area police pay comparison) you will see that Portsmouth ranks at the very bottom for pretty much everything. The question then becomes, why would a Portsmouth Junior Police Officer stick around in Portsmouth when they can go almost anywhere and get a pay raise in the thousands of dollars. Given the turmoil, mismanagement, politics, unfair treatment, inadequate compensation and poor working conditions how can you blame them for leaving? You can’t, but that doesn’t seem to concern the City of Portsmouth. The starting salary of a Portsmouth Police Officer is in the neighborhood of $30,000. It takes about a year from start to finish to train one to become a patrol officer and get them DCJS certified. You are talking about losing an investment of about $40,000-$50,000 every time a trained police officer leaves the department. Because Portsmouth Officers do more with less, handle more varied types of police cases due to the high crime rate (click here for Hampton Roads cities crime statistics comparison for 2006) they are far more experienced in a few short years then most of the other departments in the area and are popular applicants with the other departments. These departments avoid the $40,000-$50,000 cost to train a new officer and the applicant gets a pay raise in the thousands of dollars depending on the department that hires them.

Click the link below to listen to the ad, it’s accurate, funny and sad.. Portsmouth FOP Radio Recruiting Ad

If after you read my post or listen to the ad and want to help out, click the link below to go to the Portsmouth FOP page that has all the contact information to voice your concern to the Portsmouth City Council.

Powershift is reassigned, specialized units are now task with handling calls for service and Portsmouth says they are spending to much on overtime to handle their required day-to-day law enforcement functions. Check out the various document links in the paragraphs below that outlines these major changes that impact the safety of the public and of the police officers working the streets in Portsmouth.

As everyone knows the economy has been in a downward spiral for a little while. When the economy is not so good then tax bases can take hits as part of the fallout. Portsmouth is no different then most other cities, it has revenue issues. Revenue issues impact city services, cutbacks are the norm, doing more with less, hiring freezes etc etc. These cutbacks have to be prioritized and the last place to cut needs to be public safety. Now I am the first to say I don’t know what has happened in other departments but I will show clearly what happened to the police department. They have cut off ALL overtime with the exception of Court over time. Because police respond to essentially random events it is difficult to predict required manning levels in advance. Portsmouth has had a sworn officer authorized strength of 250 officers for sometime, before I was employed and I had been their over 4 years. The way the department dealt with not having enough officers to deal with the day-to-day calls for service was to authorize overtime. Their are times when a whole shift would be held over because of a major incident such as a homicide or robbery. A perfect example of this occurred about a month ago at the American Legion Hall on Peach St. The American Legion had rented the hall out for a “birthday” party. When police were finally called their were HUNDREDs of people inside and outside of the facility. Several Police Officers were hurt trying to regain control of the disorderly group of young adults and juveniles. The incident occurred at shift change and it required BOTH shifts to deal with the magnitude of the incident. In fact I was told by one supervisor that the event would have overwhelmed the midnight shift and that they would have had few if any officers to deal with anything that might have happened during that incident. The evening shift was held over for almost two hours to assist midnight with the incident. Later on during the pay period (within two weeks) the public would be short a full shift of officers for two hours to make up for the two hours of overtime they used that night.

Portsmouth is a small city with a big city crime problem. They have needed more officers on the street for a long period of time but they have dealt with it by using overtime. Now with the current economic situation they say they don’t have the money. To that I will paraphrase what a City Counsel member said at a recent counsel meeting “when we have a project we really want to do we can usually find the money”. To that I say that cutbacks to public safety organizations are fraught with risk to the officers and to the citizens.

Now anyone putting in more time then their normal work week (ie 42.5 hours or 40 hours) are required to “RT” it (a Portsmouth scheduling code) meaning that by the end of the two week pay period they will have to leave early, or come in late or any other way to prevent them from getting paid money for the time they might have worked over during their two week pay period. As an example of how that works the people that worked two hours overtime for the American Legion incident would have to leave two hours earlier on another day prior to the end of the pay period. That day (or evening) that patrol shift is short an officer (or more then one) for that period of time. Less officers on the street to protect and serve, less officers to come to the assistance of their comrades if an officer needs help.

Click cutbacks_memo_1 to see the memo outlining the staffing changes. To make up for the shortages other specialized units now are required to answer calls for service. So that could mean that NIO’s will be out of there neighborhood, TRU-Street crimes units are answering calls for service instead of working on neighborhood drug problems, you get the idea. The “Powershift” was a small group of officer permanently assigned to work 5pm to 3am Wednesday to Saturday. This covered the shifts that statistically had high volumes of calls and provided a group of officers that allowed an organized shift transition covering the time at the end of evening shift and the beginning of midnights when their are few officers on the street to cover calls.

As I start pulling statics from various sources I think I will be able to show that Portsmouth needs an increase in authorized sworn officer strength to maintain a safe and efficient law enforcement organization. They have been using the overtime as a stop-gap measure for years and it appears that the money is no longer available for whatever reason. Again Portsmouth must learn to balance it’s economic efforts with it’s requirement to provide Public Safety services. Holiday Inn’s, Traffic Circles and River Front Crystal lights don’t make the streets safer they just make them prettier. Someone in the Portsmouth government needs to start reevaluating Portsmouth’s spending priority’s and bring Public Safety back to the top of the priority list not the bottom. Portsmouth has the lowest paid Police Officers in the area with the highest crime rate. Click Area Police Pay Comparison to see a pay comparison made in July 2007 of the various local Police Departments salaries. Portsmouth ranks at the bottom on virtually all of them. Click Hampton Roads Cities Crime Statistics Comparison for 2006 to see a crime statistics comparison for the various localities showing that Portsmouth has the highest crime rate in the area when the crime statistics are converted to make the comparison by a 50,000 person population base.

The City of Portsmouth management needs to start looking at the realities of the situation and doing a better job prioritizing there spending. Safety First .. Economic development later ..

Below is a compilation of the current pay for the Portsmouth Police Department I obtained via FOIA. The low appears to be lower then anywhere else in the area. I will be posting updated comparisons as soon as I get data from the other cities.

Pretty sad given the crime rate in the city and the number of High Crime - High Drug area’s the officers are forced to work in with increased risk to them because of the environment.

Last Modified On: Thursday, April 17, 2008 11:44:20