Echoes of Tennie Pierce – LAPD officer gets a $3.1 million bonus thanks to his bosses’ misconduct
For the fifth time in the last three years, retaliation by LAPD brass against officers who report misconduct by their bosses will cost taxpayers a lot of money.
Does LAPD have a problem? Is there still a code of silence? Is retaliation against whistleblowers common?
You be the judge — actually, you don’t have to. A jury did that job Monday and awarded Officer Robert Hill, a 25-year veteran, $3.1 million because he was transferred from Northeast Division to Newton Division for refusing to back 
down on his complaint against Sgt. Gilbert Curtis.
Hill who was a senior lead officer reported that Curtis, listed as Hispanic in LAPD records, stole money from the Youth Explorer Program and used racial slurs like “wetbacks” and went around saying things like, “If God loved them, why did he make them black?”
LAPD brass decided the two just didn’t get along (Curtis filed a police report in 2005 claiming his subordinate had threatened to kill him) so they separated them by moving Hill to patrol in Newton and exonerating Curtis of wrongdoing.
That was a big mistake — retaliation of such a terrible nature that Hill “should receive $3 million for pain and suffering in addition to $127,500 in lost earnings.”
I don’t know about you but I’ve faced worse retaliation than that for my big mouth and I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t have eaten spaghetti with dog food sauce for the $2.7 million the city originally agreed to pay firefighter Tennie Pierce for his pain and suffering — or even the $1.6 million he finally got (the rest going to his lawyers who didn’t have to eat dog food).
Is the jury system the problem? Is the City Attorney’s office incompetent? Does LAPD brass protect its own and punish underlings? Is there no workplace discipline in city government?
Batten down the hatches, Chick’s got another audit of suspicious contracting at L.A.’s port
Everyone who’s ever owned a boat knows it’s nothing but a hole to put money in. L.A.’s port is much the same except the port’s hole sends money out to contractors, often in a manner best described as pay-to-play.
City Controller Laura Chick slammed that practice in a 2003, followed up in 2005 and is issuing another full audit today so we’ll be finding out if real progress has been in protecting the public’s money.
Here’s what she said three years ago:
“It is time the Port of Los Angeles comes fully into the 21st century, and that includes opening itself up to public scrutiny. One significant step forward that the Harbor Commission must take is to publicly adopt and implement a sound leasing policy”
Who the #$%^ is trying these cases for the City?
Three million in EMOTIONAL DISTRESS damages for being transferred to a different division?!
We need a City Attorney who spends less time issuing press releases, and more time ensuring that the City’s trial attorneys have the right skill set for the job they’re doing.
“Is the jury system the problem? Is the City Attorney’s office incompetent? Does LAPD brass protest its own and punish underlings? Is there no workplace discipline in city government?”
YES!
There is discipline in the workplace but like so many other parts of the government bureacracy, it’s not evenly applied since there’s no real legal training and some of it is wrong. The managers frequently come up from the ranks in government, and they do what the person did before them. That’s how they learned. The don’t know about what unlawful employment practices are because they often were not trained, and if so they were not reviewed in their performance and decisions.
Another hidden danger is that some of the trainers are outright wrong. There is federal law and there is state law and some don’t distinguish one from the other and you need to know both. So that’s rarely scrutinized except by other trainers and then you see how well people react to being corrected on the law.
Even the lawyers in government are spotty in their knowledge of employment law. Some are good and know what the law actually is, and some think they are good. But you will have managers who don’t even take things for legal review because they “know” what to do- which of course, they don’t.
Another factor for illegal treatment creating exposure for liability is that WITH a proper advisement, the manager or other decision maker will be totally hard-headed and NOT follow the advice, and apparently, no one follows through to know that. Or if the legal advice came from externally from the department, the department superiors don’t know of the manager’s intransigence.
In the county, it’s a crap shoot as to jutst who knows what, from a standpoint of accurate legal knowledge. There’s lots of violations and retaliation, but many workers don’t know there’s a legal remedy, and the bosses continue to act in their “loose cannon” fashion.
The county and city are lucky more employees don’t sue for all the bad handling of situations they do. And nobody catches it until it’s a done deal.
I think the private sector makes accountability quite a bit more definite and heads will roll for bad decisions. In government service, who is in charge? Often the heads will roll, but the wrong ones, which is what appears to be the case for the police case.
Employees who have gripes have to decide if they want to risk becoming an outcast and not getting proper redress in that system, having to go to an attorney and being persona non grata at the same time, or just accepting it. The latter is often the case, fortunately for legal exposure, but not for morale or productivity.
The jury awards are an entirely different story- proving liability looks to be the more difficult hurdle.
SKiperring a boat has constantly been a dream of mine, enjoyed reading your website.