Maybe there really is something in the water in Connecticut. While Norwalk is struggling with the concept that all might not be right in the blue waters of the Norwalk Police Department, up the coast is the eerily similar tale of Madison police department. Comparing the details, though is not the point, its the idea that long running failure of nipping and tucking isn’t rooting out the problems. Cosmetic platitudes isn’t helping things. From the Courant:
The biggest problem facing the Madison Police Department isn’t the dizzying list of brazen, on-duty crimes by officers, from burglaries to the electronic stalking of women to receiving oral sex from prostitutes to ripping off taxpayers through workers’ compensation fraud.
The thorniest consequence, the one facing most crippled police departments, is this: The climate of corruption is so deeply seated that just removing the bad cops — the painful process going on now with no clear end in sight — may not by itself bring radical, permanent change.
“The ‘rotten apple theory’ is a farce,” said Neal Trautman, who’s been teaching police officers about moral dilemmas for 20 years through the National Institute of Ethics, which is based in Mississippi. “These problems are cultural, and they’re created over a period of years. Just removing the bad apples is a way of the dodging the truth.”
Who’s to blame in a situation like this?
“If a chief’s been there a long time, then he owns part of it, and the police commission owns the rest,” said Michael Buerger, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green University in Ohio and a former police officer.
The Madison police, with a $3 million yearly budget and a spacious $5 million station, serve a shoreline community with hardly any violent crime. But problems in the 22-member department, led by Chief Paul D. Jakubson for the past 10 years, have resulted in the recent firings of four officers. A fifth faces a termination hearing; one more is still under investigation.
Here’s an example of the extent to which shoddy work and criminal behavior became part of the agency’s culture:
Officer Joe Gambardella was confronted by local marina owner Bruce Beebe in June 2006 after an alarm was tripped at his business. Beebe ran out in his underwear to investigate why the alarm went off and encountered Gambardella in his cruiser, driving away — after allegedly stealing equipment from Beebe’s shed.
All Gambardella said to his sergeant, Tim Heiden, about the incident was that he had had a weird encounter with a guy in his underwear. Gambardella was later charged in that burglary, and in October 2006 he would be suspended when he was caught on videotape stealing lobsters from Lenny & Joe’s Fish Tale.
“In hindsight, you’ll always find something that could have or should have been a trigger,” Jakubson said in an interview last week.
He said the same held true for the long-running misconduct attributed to another fired officer, Bernard Durgin, who was charged in October with making dozens of illegal computer queries dating back to February 2006. The names he ran included his ex-fiancee, her new boyfriend and 10 women he met in his second job as a security officer at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Durgin’s boyhood friend, convicted felon Albert LeClaire, would tell internal police investigators that he brought two prostitutes to Madison to service Durgin “30 to 40 times.” Durgin was out on injury leave for 468 days between 2000 and 2006; he was later found to have worked on at least a dozen occasions at the hospital, beginning as early 2003, while getting disability pay from the police department.
The department began an investigation after Durgin, co-founder of the Poor Boyz Motorcycle Club, flashed his Madison badge last summer in front of New Haven officers in defense of a riding buddy, ex-felon Gerard McAfee, who was fighting with the officers. Durgin and his friends had been stopped for reckless driving — on a night when Durgin had called in sick.
“No one suspects a police officer is a criminal. As soon as we heard even a rumor of misconduct we investigated,” Jakubson said. “Yeah, I’m upset. It’s upsetting to know that people think they can get away with this behavior. But I didn’t foster any belief in the workplace that you could do this stuff and not face consequences. These are grown men and trained professionals. What caused these people to do this? I can’t climb inside their heads.”
‘How Much Did Those Hookers Cost?’
Trouble has come in waves for the Madison police. It has destroyed the public trust and has hampered officers on the job.
“How am I supposed to believe that when I need help and I call, that they’re going to deal with the situation in an effective manner?” said resident Charles O’Meara, a registered nurse who lives on Durham Road. “I mean, my friends from out of town are calling me up making jokes about our police department. ‘Hey, how much did those hookers cost?’ There’s just no defending this conduct.”
The damage done by rogue officers has hurt the department in other ways. There’s a telling passage in the internal affairs report about Officer Matthew Sterling, who was fired in January after he patronized strip clubs, massage parlors and a house of prostitution in Bridgeport that was under investigation by police there. The report refers to unrelated accusations of sexual misconduct in 2003 against a former Madison officer who had been running the Madison Police Explorers, a youth group.
“This officer engaged in sexual activity with a female explorer that he was entrusted to mentor. Due to these events, our agency additionally lost support regarding proposals to assign a school resource officer to the school system. Patrolman Matthew Sterling was allowed to take over [as adviser to the explorer’s post] in an effort to rebuild the credibility and reputation of this agency,” the report says.
Scandal has dogged the department since the early 1990s. Current and former town officials said in interviews over the last three weeks that the betrayal and disgust residents are feeling now is the legacy of ineffective chiefs and 25 years of cronyism on the police commission.
In the black and white world of comic book heroes, commissioner Gordon would never stand for anything tarnishing Gotham’s police force, including the dark knight vigilante who prowled the streets fighting the likes of the penguin, the joker and Harvey Dent.
source: The Courant, When Badges Are Tarnished: Troubled Madison Police Force Facing Crisis Of Confidence, By JOSH KOVNER, February 17, 2008
