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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - Pi
12 October 2006

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Ravenstahl orders probe of top

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl said Wednesday he has told city lawyers to investigate a top aide accused of engineering the promotion of a city police detective and quashing a disciplinary report against the officer.
The allegations surfaced in an e-mail police Cmdr. Catherine McNeilly sent to the mayor and council in which she accused Operations Director Dennis Regan of impeding her attempts to discipline Acting Detective Francis M. Rende for what she called an abuse of sick time tantamount to "incompetency, conduct unbecoming an officer" and "neglect of duty."

McNeilly said Regan intervened because he lives with Rende's sister, Marlene Cassidy, who is Ravenstahl's executive secretary.

The mayor said he will "decide how to move forward" if city lawyers find evidence of wrongdoing, but declined to elaborate. McNeilly is under investigation for releasing Rende's disciplinary record.

Ravenstahl likened the inquiry to one he ordered of Councilwoman Twanda Carlisle's spending on outside consultants when he served as council president.

"When I was on council and things were brought forth -- allegations were brought forth -- I looked at them, I took them seriously and then took action, and I plan to do the same in this case as well," Ravenstahl said.

The mayor said it would be inappropriate for the director of operations to encourage a police officer's promotion or interfere with an internal disciplinary matter.

"As a general rule, the mayor should be the person that does all that activity," said Ravenstahl, who on Tuesday withdrew his nomination of Regan as public safety director.

McNeilly said in her e-mail that she had serious concerns about Regan's nomination by Ravenstahl.

Regan declined to address McNeilly's allegations.

"What is there to talk about? You want to assassinate my character some more? I have nothing to say," Regan said.

McNeilly, who oversees the North Side station, included the disciplinary action reports on Rende in the e-mail she sent Monday to the mayor and council.

City police and the Office of Municipal Investigations are investigating whether McNeilly's release of Rende's information constitutes a breach of law or policy.

"I don't think, ethically, that I should talk about this," McNeilly said. "But I will say that I'm not the one who did anything wrong. (Rende) did."

Rende, who must complete a 90-day probationary period before becoming a full detective, couldn't be reached for comment.

McNeilly claimed Rende, who made $95,383 last year in base pay and overtime, was spending as much time on side jobs as on his police duties.

In May, another police officer admitted he gave Rende permission to use his password to log on to the police bureau's computer system to sign up for off-duty jobs, according to internal police documents. Officers are given passwords to limit the number of side jobs they take.

Information about disciplinary matters is confidential and may be released only by the police chief or director of public safety, said Bryan Campbell, attorney for Fraternal Order of Police Fort Pitt Lodge No. 1.

McNeilly's e-mail raises questions of "privacy, confidentiality and ethics," said Bruce Ledewitz, a professor at Duquesne University law school.

In June, McNeilly initiated disciplinary action against Rende, accusing him of calling in sick 37 times over four years so he could work various side jobs. In August, before Mayor Bob O'Connor died of brain cancer, McNeilly alleged Regan tried to confront her about the report. She implied in her e-mail that Regan withdrew her complaint without her consent and engineered a promotion for Rende.

Yet a memo to McNeilly in August from Deputy Chief Earl D. Woodyard said the disciplinary action report was withdrawn based on the advice of city lawyers because Rende was not counseled about the sick leave and because the infractions were more than 120 days old -- the statute of limitations in the police contract.

Campbell said McNeilly's complaint against Rende was flawed from the start and would have failed with or without Regan's influence. He said he did not know if Regan intervened.

Campbell also said Rende wasn't officially notified of the sick-time violations before McNeilly filed the disciplinary report.

"Clearly, if they tried to take that to an arbitrator, he'd have thrown it out," Campbell said.

City lawyer Hugh McGough said police disciplinary action reports are confidential.

"The rule is that personnel files are confidential and the contents will not ordinarily be made available without the employee's consent," McGough said.

McGough said that he is trying to determine whether McNeilly's e-mail constitutes a breach of city policy and that any penalty would be decided by the police chief.

McNeilly's husband, former city police Chief Robert W. McNeilly Jr., has long expressed his dislike for Rende. Robert McNeilly, who left his city post in January as Mayor Bob O'Connor took office, disagreed with a city arbitration panel's decision to reinstate Rende in 2000 after a South Side woman claimed he sexually assaulted her.

"Officer Rende should never have been allowed back to his job because he's a bad cop who makes all cops look bad, and I was trying to clean up the department of that kind of element," Robert McNeilly said during an interview shortly after he left his city job.

In the 1999 South Side incident, Rende responded to the woman's home for a domestic violence report. He later returned to the woman's home while off-duty, at her request, to see if she had filed a protection-from-abuse order against her husband. The two then engaged in a sex act, according to an OMI report.

The report indicates Rende's account of the 1999 incident to OMI investigators was inconsistent with what he told his superiors.

He was suspended and faced termination in 2000. The arbitration panel reinstated him less than two months after Rende filed a grievance challenging his suspension. He was ordered to participate in counseling and the city's Employee Assistance Program.

He was admonished to follow department rules regarding attendance and sick time. The sick leave policy was instituted by Chief McNeilly.

This isn't the first time Catherine McNeilly's writings have stirred controversy.

In 2001, when O'Connor was running against then-Mayor Tom Murphy, McNeilly and her husband hand-delivered an anti-O'Connor letter to their Brookline neighbors who displayed O'Connor campaign signs. The letter was written on the commander's personal stationery and composed off-duty. Murphy later reprimanded her.

Catherine McNeilly suffers from multiple sclerosis and left work in May 2001 because of her illness. She returned to her job in three years and in the interim threatened to sue the city if she wasn't allowed back. She passed a series of medical tests and was cleared to return to duty in May 2004.

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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - Pi12 October 2006

Ravenstahl orders probe of top

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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - Pi
12 October 2006