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| NEWS > 23 January 2007 |
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Ex-chief who helped officers c
PROVIDENCE — Former Police Chief Urbano Prignano Jr. helped four police officers cheat on their written promotional examinations and manipulated promotional interviews in order to help six officers, according to disputed evidence contained in previously secret grand jury transcripts and other records made public yesterday.
Prignano directly or indirectly helped four officers to cheat on their written exams in the late 1990s and win promotion, according to the disputed evidence: Lieutenants John J. Ryan and John F. Glancy, who were promoted to captain, and Detective Nicholas A. Carda... Read more
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San Francisco Chronicle - San
23 January 2007
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Audit rips police complaints o
San Francisco's civilian police watchdog agency is mismanaged and suffers from understaffing and poor morale, auditors from the city controller's office have found.
"OCC management does not meet standard expectations for performance and management accountability,'' according to a draft of the audit obtained by The Chronicle.
Agency director Kevin Allen, who recently resigned citing health reasons and is leaving next month, declined to comment on the document, saying it is not in its final form.
The Office of Citizen Complaints was created in 1982 to investigate complaints by citizens of police misconduct; it reports to the city Police Commission.
Louise Renne, the commission president who requested the audit in May, also declined comment.
The audit will be presented to the commission Wednesday night. Auditors found that the agency fails to perform its basic mission of timely investigation of citizen complaints against police, and they raised questions about ethical standards at the agency.
In 53 percent of its cases between 2003 and 2006, the agency failed to meet its deadline to complete and report its investigations within nine months. Meeting those deadlines is crucial because under law the police chief and Police Commission in most cases have only a year to file charges upon learning of officer misconduct.
The agency sometimes let complaints simply sit on a desk for more than a month before even starting to investigate, the audit found. A full 59 percent of all delays were unexplained, according to the draft report.
Two investigators out of the staff of 16 accounted for 39 percent of the unexplained delays, the report said, yet they appeared not to have been held accountable for any inaction.
The auditors, who relied in part on a survey of agency staff, found that management "has not demonstrated the required tone for integrity and ethical values.''
According to the report, workers complained of falsification of timecards, misuse of city cars, freelance employment and improper behavior -- and that management failed to act when workers failed to meet performance standards.
None of the allegations of misconduct were investigated in the audit, however.
Perhaps not surprising given the findings, 72 percent of workers surveyed by auditors said morale at the agency wasn't what it should be.
The Office of Citizen Complaints is funded as part of the city's general budget written by the mayor and approved by the Board of Supervisors -- and auditors suggested it has been shortchanged.
The report noted that agency investigators handle double the average caseloads of the equivalent agencies in Albuquerque, Los Angeles and New York.
The audit recommended hiring more investigators to keep up with the work.
The agency also failed to meet city reporting requirements related to how many cases and complaints it has handled and the outcome. It hasn't issued an annual report since 2002.
"The OCC's failure to issue annual reports in recent years is of deep concern to parties that used to rely on these reports, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California,'' the auditors wrote.
The audit concluded by finding that complaints handled by the agency have dropped 8 percent from 2001 to 2005 for no discernable reason. The agency is now taking fewer phone and more mailed-in complaints, the audit found.
Some police commissioners have suggested that phone complaints have dropped because investigators may be mailing out complaint forms so as to avoid being assigned the complaint handled over the phone.
"We were unable to determine whether there was an intentional cause for this shift,'' the audit says.
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