Thursday, October 23, 2014

Time for a Follow Up

One of my readers reacted violently to the story in the Journal this morning for its lack of questioning of the Mayor on his panicking over APD officers retiring.  He suggests the following questions that an enterprising reporter might use to followup on this story.  I agree this story still has legs.

1.  Ask officers who have left or appeared at the recent city retirement seminar to ask them why they were leaving.  Not done.
2.  Ask Berry if this has anything to do with the DoJ? Not done
3.  Ask Berry if the turmoil with Chief Eden and Mayor Berry’s leadership of APD  is causing any retirement?
4.  Ask Berry why he got rid of the longevity bonus in 2010, and didn’t he think that action would cause this crisis?
5.  Ask Berry to prove that the APOA agreed to give up the longevity bonus in 2010.
6.  Ask Berry why Rob Perry, in the 2013 Journal article, saw this manpower crisis coming, yet here we are a year later and Berry did nothing to stop it.  In fact Berry did finally sign a contract with the APOA this summer, yet there was no mention of longevity bonus in this contract.  Why?  Does Berry  know what is going on?
7.  Ask Berry why he is going to try again (he did this every year he has been in office) to dump APD retention problems on the state pension plan (PERA).  Every year the legislature has told him NO, so why doesn’t he fix it at Albuquerque’s level and leave the PERA system out of it.
8.  SB 27, which revamped PERA was done in 2012.  Why is this such a crisis now?  Didn’t Berry read the changes and know they were coming?  The changes to PERA have been known for almost 3 years, a good manager would have planned for them back in 2012, why didn’t Berry?
9.  Ask Berry if he knows the number of public pensions going bankrupt in this country?
10.  Ask Berry why he would do something that harms pensions just to get Albuquerque (the town he has run for five years) out of trouble?  Is this being a good manager or is this passing the buck to someone else?
  

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post. Berry crying on the front page of the Journal that between 100 and 200 cops will be retiring and blaming it all on changes in PERA is downright lying to the general public and his continued refusal to take responsibilty for what he has done to a Department he called a year ago one of the best departments in the country. Berry is the one who got rid of all the incentive pay bonuses as a cost saving measure and now wants to reinstaste them.

There are other reasons cops are getting out. Rank and file are overwhelmed and over worked with calls for service with only 430 out of a department of 900 cops taking over 1.3 million calls for service a year. The department is seriously undermaned already without the retirements. APD has been seriouly mismangaged starting especially when Berry appointed Darren White as Chief Public Safety Officer, not to mention the current incompetant fool we have as Chief and the pending DOJ consent decree.

Morale is the lowest it has ever been in the history of the Department. Why would any one in their right mind want to continue to work for a train wreck like APD when they can retire and go work somewhere else? Berry is on the path to becoming the worst Mayor in Albuquerrque histroy, even worse than Ken Schultz, a convicted felon. But the public still thinks Berry is a nice guy and he will run for Senate or Governor in 3 years and has a good chance of at least getting the Republican nomination.

Anonymous said...

Berry lies and the Journal prints.

Welcome to Albuquerque the town of no accountability

Anonymous said...

Loosing 100 to 200 police officers junst may be just the very thing APD actually needs to start restoring the Department, change its image and restore public confidence. All 100 to 200 officers all will havee been on the Department for the past 20 years. The Department of Jusitice found a "culture of violence" that you could argue took full root about 10 years ago when Officer's Smith and King were killed along with 3 ctizens by John Hyde. Cops got far more agreessive to defend themsleves after these killings and trainig changed dramatically. It can be argued that not until there is a 100% turn over of all "rank and file" cops as well as top management will there be a complete cleansing of the "culture of violence" found by DoJ and changes in attititude by rank and file. Poor training and the type of new cops just may gut this theory.

Anonymous said...

this article caught my eye, why not ask how much we in ABQ have spent on settlements???

NYPD pays out over $400 million in settlements
Muckrock - As part of an ongoing investigation, MuckRock’s Todd Feathers asked the NYPD for a list of all civil rights lawsuits brought against the department. To his surprise, what he got was every case brought against the NYPD since 2009, and how much those cases cost them. To all of MuckRock’s surprise, that amount is almost half a billion dollars.

We’ve only just begun to look through the data, but already there’s a couple interesting take-aways: one, the sheer volume of capital that is being spent on settlements, and two, that the overwhelming majority of these cases end with the NYPD at fault. While’s there a handful of Zero Disposition and Administrative Closing statuses, the Settlement category outnumbers them three to one.