Chief O'Brien has finally stepped forward and admitted there are problems within the police department.
O'Brien told the commissioners “I do not support any type of ticket slowdown,” “But I empathize with an officer’s need to feel valued and supported. … Morale is suffering due to the impact the current situation has placed us in. You, the commissioners, have the power to impact morale.”......You bet'cha.
We'll try to make some sense out of what is being proposed by Larry Johnson and other commissioners: For the officers working on a holiday, they would be paid time and a half. These same officers would be furloughed on another date. So, instead of not being paid at all for working a holiday, you will be only be paid a half day when it's all said and done. This equals REDUCTION IN PAY!
If you are lucky enough to be off on the holiday as your regular off day, you will not get paid. Again, REDUCTION IN PAY!
Do these people just not get it? We don't want our pay reduced one cent! Especially when commissioners are handing out pay raises to their staff at the rate of 34%. All the while the commissioners are being paid for holidays, while enjoying time with their family and friends.
Burrell Ellis has threatened do deal with the officers taking part in the ticket strike. Threats will get him nowhere.
What do they take us for? We know what we take them for; imbaseasls!
Ticket strike? They haven't seen nothing yet.
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Tuesday, August 10, 2010
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26 comments:
Keep up the ticket strike!!! Until the commissioners understand what a budget is and don't do wasteful spending, keep up the work. They get pay raises, holiday pay, and still hiring people for county positions. How can the county pay new employees if they can't pay the ones they have? Yes Johnson, I know this will put us deeper in the hole. Maybe you need to learn to stop the useless spending!!!
Damn Vernon I thought you were gone! I supported a raise for Public Safety the BOC voted it down. Same shit Vernon ALWAYS said. Man PLEASE sing another song..You guys are all the same Public Safety is always your ticket into office, and we are ALWAYS the first you SHIT ON! Some day you will get what you deserve..SOMEDAY!!!!!!
If I were the BOC and Mr. Ellis I wouldnt threaten any of the fine officers who are paid to protect them.
This isnt over by anymeans, and no you dont understand. It is not about getting back our pay but rather that you apologize for the outlandish payraises you have given out to your staff behind closed doors.
The last I checked they has been no payriase given back, nor have you retracted them.
Instead you want to dish out some bullshit threat, go ahead and tell us there is a quota that we must maintain.
Do you really want that lawsuit hanging over your asses by every citizen in dekalb.
Im guessing if this keeps up there will be recorders court employees standing in the soup line.
So maybe they too should stand up for the police, who essentially provide them a job, along with the judges who's mere existence is thanks to the beat cop.
Damn it's a shame that so many people depend on the poor old cop who gets the most shit from the public and now you.
Remember "A HARD HEAD WILL MAKE A SOFT ASS"
“There is no audit or internal review on who is not writing tickets because per our policy ticket-writing is discretionary,” (Mekka) Parish said. What a lying sack of garbage! It's called PAT's - and the brass runs it almost daily to see who is, and who isn't writing long copy tickets! How do you think the Lieutenant at East knows who to write up for not “producing”! Tickets have been the most important measure of productivity for several years. You take an office who goes out and catches burglars and car thieves and stand him or her next to the ticket bunny who spends the entire shift writing tickets (and forcing fellow officers to cover his or her territory by doing so), and see who gets the Officer of the Month, or recognized as “an outstanding Police Officer”. This department, and this county, has their collective heads so far up their collective arse they haven’t a clue how to fix the horrible problems plaguing this department. And they won’t, until all the officers who can have left for better jobs elsewhere, and the only ones left are the dregs nobody else wants and the people who have already invested too many years here to leave. Don’t expect the idiots in Decatur to suddenly grow a pair or develop a conscious.
First of all let me commend this fine blog for your assistance into this matter along with the news outlets.
This is a great way for officers talk among one another without fear of retribution from supervisors.
Keep up the slow down until you acheive the outcome that is desired.
Remember their are strength in numbers you have the backing of the ones who wear a gold badge.
Congrats DCPD! Now, if only the DCFD would kick in with some dyslexia for insurance billing! God Bless America!
As long as there is a pay cut, we should continue to do exactly what we've been doing. We're not asking for the world! We're not asking for huge raises! If you have money to give bonuses to your staff and to put towards developments in the city of Doraville, you have money to pay us. SO PAY US!
Don't let Ellis or any stupidvisor threaten you to write tickets. County policy is on our side. Ticket writing is not meant to generate revenue. There is no quota. A warning ticket blitz is not a work slow down. If you have a stupidvisor telling you that you have to write long copies, share it here! Let us know about their county policy violations! A quota system could threaten the county's accreditation. Watch what happens to property values if we lose our accreditation because politicians and stupidvisors are imposing ticket quotas!
Until they give us back our pay and our merit raises, the warning ticket blitz should continue!
Lil' Larry need to be careful what he says...some citizen might catch word that DeKalb writes tickets for revenue purposes and not for enforcement purposes; just imagine that class-action lawsuit
Hold on there you little rat you threaten the same officers that you had guarding your home and family just a few months ago. Not smart. You (Ellis) and the BOC have no one to blame but yourselves.
to comment on PATS its simple line officers get back to policing stay out of the ticket books and get into mag court lock the perps up we have plenty out there. use the time we used to us for tickets to make arrest and when they start writing up for what they call none producing then we leak the PATS showing officers who have tons of arrest on good charges are being written up as NON PRODUCERS and have the media ask the question then what is it that officers are not producing and watch the top dogs back pedal
WARNINGS....WARNINGS....WARNINGS......KEEP IT UP BOYS AND GIRLS!!
Restore our pay and our raises, or the warning tickets continue.
There is nothing anyone can do to us for turning in nothing but warnings. If anyone tries to force us to write long copies, they should be outed.
ONE PERCENT!!!???? ONE F'ing PERCENT!
Mr. Ellis /members of the BOC, I'll take what I can get, but 1% is a lot less than the cost of inflation, the continued increases in our pension contribution, and the increases in the healthcare plan!
We've seen officers get raises in the past....then take home less than they did the previous year!
Be honest......Would that not piss you off too?
Hell, the pension contribution went up from very little to what....7%!
DID WE ALL FORGET THAT WE STILL ARENT GETTING RAISES??? OR DID THE COST OF LIVING LEVEL OFF TO THE POINT WHERE NOBODY CARES ABOUT THAT. IM ALL FOR GETTING HOLIDAY PAY BUT IT WOULD BE NICE TO GET AN INCREASE IN SALARY JUST AS IT WAS ADVERTISED TO ME WHEN I APPLIED!!
I commend the officers and this blog for getting the attention of the commissioners and the CEO. Job well done! I think that Chief O’Brien should understand that even if they returned the paid holidays to us tomorrow, this department still has some very serious morale problems. Many of these problems are internal and have little to do with money. But regardless, the officers here deserve to have their paid holidays and I hope they get them back.
Mr Ellis/BOC,
You've got a LOT of very pissed off firefighters and police officers.
I think it was the movie Tora Tora...after the strike on Pearl Harbor, they had a Japanese admiral remark that he was afraid they had just woken a sleeping giant. That scene comes to mind as I read the blog and see the drop in tickets......
Listen my fellow officers, current and retired. It should be very, very obvious by now that Burrell Ellis (CEO) does not care about anyone but himself and his cronies. He is the typical lifelong politician, who knows how to dance around a question without answering it. He is who who is and the sooner we realize that the better off we will be. My fellow officers and citizens please do not fall for the banana in the tailpipe. I implore all DeKalb citizens to exercise their right to vote, and not to give this crook a second term in office. If he is allowed a second term the police department and the county will be worse off than it is now.
Stay safe.
God bless America and DeKalb County!
Well, "Guess what?" Larry Johnson. You apparently take us for idiots. You think we can't do simple math. Do you think that paying those of us who may work on a holiday at time and a half and then forcing a furlough day on those same public safety personnel is just? First of all, typically those who work on holidays are paid double-time. Not time and a half. But your solution amounts to only a half day's pay. You are the idiot for believing we are fools.
At least Ellis, and let me be clear with who I am also very displeased, tried at the outset by proposing to the BOC to raise taxes one mil. That would have amounted to a slight $20 average tax increase per household in order to give us a 1% pay raise (you can keep that insult, Ellis, by the way) and to preserve our (all county employees) paid holidays. In keeping the 1%, hell I bet the tax increase to a county taxpayer would have amounted to even less.
Here is what I would like to know if anyone can enlighten us to the answer. We know the majority of the BOC voted the proposal down. I would like to know which commissioners by name voted "no". Then, we will all know which commissioners, if any, really do care and support not only public safety employees but all county employees.
Let's see. We were threatened by Larry Johnson (with possible further reduction of pay and/or benefits) and Burrell Ellis (disciplinary action) regarding our efforts. Did everyone, and I mean EVERYONE (employees and citizens) catch that? Some show of care and concern for us, huh? That's like pouring salt into an open wound. Both of you are very stupid to have done that. You just motivated our resolve! Keep up your descretion fellow officers now more than EVER!
Oh, I forgot to mention this with an earlier post. By the way, Ellis and Johnson, regarding threatening officers because we are exercising officer descretion again. That is how it has always supposed to have been. But, once statistical software such as PATS came around, we have been pressured to produce (write more and more revenue-generating tickets) than ever before. Officers have been pitted against officers by our supervisors pertaining to "performance" in order to qualify a good rating on an evaluation that should net the exceling officer with what really amounts to a cost-of-living raise for the top 20% of employees. OUR descretion was taken away from us for YOUR descretion. So really, we are just exercising OUR descretion once again since there is no reward for our efforts to please you.
Ticket-writing (the long copies), per policy, is not about generating revenue. It is about taking a corrective action warranted by an offender who needs remediation with the seriousness of the violation considered. But to go from a "performance expectation" of two long copy tickets per day to six, ten, or more (a 200% or more increase per officer) of the same is nothing more than creating more revenue. For YOUR descretionary use since it certainly is not coming back to us in any way. Further evidence of this motivation is the creation of specialized units in each precinct whose soul mission is to write revenue-generating tickets, tickets, tickets on top of Special Operations already does.
We complied as we were expected to do. We wrote more and more and more. Sometimes stacking motorists with multiple citations when we otherwise would not have. We have been busting our asses for years trying to please in hopes to receive our meager pay raise. And all of our efforts have been in vain. We have been rewarded by you, the CEO, and you, the BOC, with loss of merit increases, loss of cost-of-living increases, aging equipment, and now loss of paid holidays.
Let me enlighten you to something by first asking you all this question? Why has DeKalb had an escalating crime rate, loss of businesses and foreclosures on such a massive (and alarming) scale, corruption and nepotism in the school system, the loss of Dunwoody, and a public safety system with a serious morale problem? The answer is very simple. I know because I grew up in this county. It's the failure of the DeKalb County Government. Once the DeKalb County Government no longer took public safety seriously by treating us fairly and with respect and keeping our numbers and equipment adequate for the needs of the county, businesses and people left. And they continue to do so. And that's your tax base leaving with them.
Honestly, thanks to you and your predesessors of the past 15 years, I don't know how you or your successors will ever be able to fix this crisis. It sadly appears that DeKalb County is on the path to bankruptcy. I can only hope I am proven wrong. We will all see won't we?
Let me tell you something, "if" there is evidence that a particular officer is purposely writing fewer tickets then he is a hero in my eyes.
He is doing what is best for his fellow officers and I will stand up and be heard about the issue.
Dont dare threaten the fine officers who is standing up for what is right!!!!!!!
Boyer for one. I'd bet Gannon and Radar too. They're the next ones up for re-election. The first time, when the merit increases were voted down based on a millage increase of less than $20 on a $150K house, Burrel , Radar, Gannon and Boyer.
To Anon who commented with a reply "Boyer for one...", thank you for that information. Like I said earlier, a 1% pay increase would not even buy me a McDonald's Happy Meal for lunch, let alone cover cost-of-living increases, pension increases, and insurance increases. And so you the commissioners, and therefore residents of DeKalb County, are opposed to a slight tax increase that would amount to about $20 more per year for a $150,000 home. Your safety is not worth another $20 per year just so we can maintain our paid holidays?
Let's do the math, shall we. $20 divided by 365 days in a year equals 0.0547945 cents per day! For a $150,000 home! A nickel! A nickel per day so your public safety "servants" don't have to give up, at my pay rate anyway, $1,715 per year. A resident's $20 versus funding $1,715 of a paid holiday that I and all other employees were told we would get. I am forced to unwillingly sacrifice $1,715 so a resident can save $20! That is really shameful of you. And selfish!
One other thing. Has anyone looked at current job posts by the county where the county mentions "10 paid holidays and merit salary
increases, subject to funding;"? Boy is that doesn't speak about the current state of DeKalb County. So, come on, who wants to come work here?
Keep in mind folks, these folks in the BOC all have corporate 9 to 5 day jobs that are in addition to their BOC compensation. Could you imagine if they had to take furlough days at their main jobs and the reaction we would have from them? Keep in mind, public safety like sanitation does the work that nobody else wants to do. When you have an emergency or simply don't want to be bothered, who do you call first? When they take too long, who do you call again?
Police are supposed to main law and order not generate revenue. Law and order takes first priority over revenue. I would rather see traffic units abolished and place into communities that need them (Kenningston anyone). Everyone's favorite white shadow O'Brien has finally stepped up and said something but keep in mind who he has to answer to. Sheriffs on the other hand can take bolder stances as they answer to the voters.
Apparently, these folks realize how dumb their constituents really are. They know they are not going to be challenged and they know they are going to be easily re-elected.
As for the east Lt. writing up officers for productivity this is easily resolved. First of all he's certainly not the sharpest knife in the tool shed. Utilize your FOP and PBA attorneys if written up as the same rules and regulations would have to be applied county wide. If he's not bright enough to smarten up after that, which he probably isn't, then file punitive harassment suit taking from his pocket personally as well as lien on home until the suit is settled.
DCFR would love to do our part, but we're screwed just as bad. If we fail to get a signature on a PCR (required for billing) 3 times we get fired. Period.
The higher-ups swear that EMS is a money-making business. They never mention that we spend roughly double what we collect. The cost of operating is crazy. The daily paperwork/process just to check off the unit is little more than job justification by someone at HQ.
DCFR is just as fed up as DKPD. I wish there was more we could do to help give the comissioners the wake-up call they so sorely need.
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