The Fort Smith Police Department and Civil Service Commission survived yet another end around attempt by the Fort Smith Chief of Police this week when two officers filed and won a grievance, only to be denied the promotion that fueled the grievance in the first place.
So they won. But they lost.
Stay with me here.
The bottom line? The FSPD pays "consulants" a hefty sum to conduct testing and oral interviews for promotions. Heck...sometimes even certain individual members of that consulting group gets taken out to lunch individually by certain individuals, an action that probably constitutes a conflict of interest.
But that's a story for another day. And "conflict of interest" is standard operational procedure for half these miscreants anyway.
So here's the Cliff Notes version.
Three officers who had tested for a sergeant's position during the last round of Dash and Dine remained on the eligibility list, which is supposed to be maintained for a year after the testing. That list was certified by the FSCSC in late July of 2017.
A spot came open on September 7, about three weeks before the year for the last testing eligibility list expired.
Seems pretty cut and dried.
The officer named to the spot should come from the existing list. And did. Eventually. Kinda sorta.
But there is a twist. Ol' Never-Say-Die-Nate decided on his own that the list should be invalid because he has sixty days to name the replacement. So since he obviously didn't want to name any of the three officers on the existing list to the position, he would just hold another round of testing (at a ridiculous cost to taxpayers) using the same group of people that came up with the list he had in hand that he wouldn't honor in the first place.
Just keep rolling the dice until they come up in your favor. And hand out those promotions based on cronyism.
Two of the three officers filed a grievance. It just so happened that it was the two remaining highest graded officers on the list. And that pesky Civil Service Commission voted 5-1 in favor of those two officers and told the Chief that he had to choose an officer from the list for the promotion.
So he did. He choose the third ranked officer on the list. You know. The one that didn't file a grievance. And who, as a female, would further the agenda of simulated diversity.
I'm not going to comment on the demographic breakdown on the vote. That would be politically incorrect.
Nothing against the officer that got the job. I hear nothing but good things about her. She's just an unwitting pawn in a game of retaliation and misdirection.
Personally, I would resent the whole "I didn't want you in the first place or I would have promoted you in the first place but you turned out to be a good option for me to use to gig someone that had the audacity to file a grievance against me" mentality that seems pretty evident.
But that's just me.
Forgetting the fact that the city would be out the money for the new testing and they also threw some more money down the rabbit hole in legal fees to appease those that write the checks to the lawyers, this whole thing just reeks.
You have an administrator in the department that is hell bent to do things the way he wants to suit his personal whims and agendas and he is coddled and protected by the next level of administration that was intimidated into hiring the guy in the first place.
Which has made for such a lovely working environment for all of the officers.
And speaking of intimidation. It is my understanding that there was a group of individuals in attendance at the Civil Service Commission that supports the madness and anything associated with appeasing the powers that be that attempted to "stare down" the commission during the vote.
I ain't saying it happened. I'm just saying someone said it happened. And one of those in attendance that has so accused thought nothing of intimidating a rookie cop in the past to get out of a an expired tags ticket. So it fits the pattern.
One officer I talked to kind of invoked the old Clint Eastwood movie "The Drowning Pool" when he said coming to work every day is like standing in a sealed room that is slowly filling up with water.
Hundred's of years of experience have walked away from the department in the past few years to keep from drowning.
And the water just keeps on rising.
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