Broken Blue Line
First: In this age of razor-thin budgets, the rift between Nielsen and some of his troops has cost the City of Eureka a whole lot of money. The city has spent over $100,000 to hire outside private investigators and legal advisors to deal with a flurry of workplace complaints at Nielsen’s EPD, according to City Manager David Tyson. And there’s no sign that these ongoing expenses are going to go away anytime soon.
Second: The rift that has divided the department almost from the moment Nielsen came on board is about to explode.
From one point of view — that of Chief Nielsen’s supporters — it might be said that the current trouble within the EPD began the moment he was hired.
Nielsen was brought in from the Multnomah County, Ore. sheriff’s office as someone who could clean up the department and help resuscitate its internal malaise and heal its horrendous public image. In the months leading up to April 2007, when Nielsen assumed command, the department had shot and killed several civilians — one of them a 16-year-old boy with a knife, another a mentally ill woman barricaded in her downtown apartment and armed only with a flare pistol. Public confidence in the EPD was at its nadir. The department suffered chronic staffing shortages. It cried out for reform.
The new chief answered that call, firing people and reassigning them nearly as soon as he took over. In the months that followed, he disbanded the department’s SWAT team and slashed its overtime budget, which affected both the activities and paychecks of sworn officers. He announced that he would ask the state Department of Justice to investigate officer-related shootings on his watch in place of the Critical Incident Response Team, which is composed of officers from several local agencies, including the EPD.
Given the pace of reform, supporters might say, it’s no wonder that some members of the old, tight-knit EPD might rebel.
From the point of view of his detractors in the department, though, Nielsen has been a power-hungry chief who serves up arbitrary retribution against dedicated staffers — and who, furthermore, has wasted city resources and punished employees who have become aware of his misdeeds.
The most well known of these allegations originally appeared on an anonymous blog called Above the Law, which first appeared in early 2008 and has since been mostly erased. The blog, authored by someone using the pseudonym “Frank Serpico,” served as a rallying point for anti-Nielsen forces, presumably inside the department.
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13 Comments
Comment / By pogo / July 2, 2009, 7:04 a.m.
why would you want to resuscitate malaise? Morale, maybe, but morale is always internal. Maybe you should avoid using French. And stick to short words.
Comment / By Hank Sims / July 2, 2009, 7:16 a.m.
Good point.
Comment / By Mike Goldsby / July 2, 2009, 10:48 p.m.
So this story on the Times Standard website, alleging internet harassment, attracts anonymous comments that eventually cause them all to be taken down?
Is that weird or predictable or sad? I feel like it resuscitated my malaise.
Comment / By Charles / July 3, 2009, 6:15 a.m.
Well, with removal of the last EPD chief, the city looked at bringing someone in who was not a local good ole boy to the city.
They were at war with him from day 1.
Comment / By Kate / July 3, 2009, 3:42 p.m.
Good Ole Boys in Eureka will dig in and be ferocious in order to keep their illegal and immoral activities secret. These people don’t care that poor people and middle class are getting poorer, they only care that they stay in power.
Comment / By Carol Conners / July 4, 2009, 8:08 a.m.
Having been a victim of anonymous blog comments, I find all this quite distasteful. Not your writing about it, Hank, but personal attacks on public figures regarding their private lives. Anyone with a computer can type absolute lies when they are anonymous. A friend of mine sent me a link to the Above the Law blog and I looked at it once. IMHO, it looked politically motivated. I felt like I need to take a shower after reading it. Yuk.
Comment / By Magdeline Pereira / July 4, 2009, 2:51 p.m.
EPD female officers/employees need to be treated with the utmost respect and kindness. Imbecile jokes and pranks from male chiefs, reveal unevolved lowlife exploiters, ejaculators and perpetraitors whos’ DNA need to be eradicated from the human genome.
Comment / By lol / July 5, 2009, 12:49 a.m.
When organizations change there are always people who find themselves unable to change with it. They tend to work themselves out of the organization in time.
I’m certain that this vocal group of anti-Nielson employees will be little missed when they eventually move on. Sorry folks, but if you spend the bulk of your time inciting lawsuits and creating drama within a team unit you are doing a bad job.
No matter how you feel about tactics, behavior or whatever it’s important to act in a professional manner and continue working toward your official job goals. Sabotaging the operations of the PD over petty, small-time fueds regarding a couple of people’s career stagnation is not called for.
Anyone with two brain-cells to rub together can see what’s really going on here.
Comment / By backstabbed / July 5, 2009, 10:51 p.m.
If anyone with a BRAIN had done a real background on Garr he never would have been hired. No one asks why a road deputy was shoved into a closet in a jail and left there until he found another job to go to–YOURS. Geezus, someone opened the door and this clown walked right in.
Comment / By john q public / July 6, 2009, 4:33 p.m.
To backstabbed/aka mcso: Poor baby. Still holding your little immature grudge after all this time. You need counseling bad. You apparently don’t know that it was more than 1 person with a brain who contacted the dept up there & did a background. I bet it really pissed you off when the council down here voted unanimously to give this guy a 5 yr contract because of his good work. You are probably still bringing embarassment to yourself up there. And, by the way, this paper was a little late in their investigating. A grand jury exonerated the chief from all the petty complaints that 2 folks filed, and 1 of them just quit. Get a life, you poor sap.
Comment / By Hank Sims / July 6, 2009, 4:51 p.m.
And, by the way, this paper was a little late in their investigating.
A little early, you mean.
Comment / By john q public / July 6, 2009, 8:47 p.m.
Yes, true, you’re right. NCJ just dredged up, sensationalized & exaggerated old news, did no new creditable research, certainly didn’t get all perspectives, and now they look silly in light of what the grand jury said.
Comment / By magdeline pereira / July 17, 2009, 3:10 p.m.
I nominate Lyn Soderberg for Chief of Police, Eureka, CA and may the Nacho chips fall to the Blessed Peacemakers, USA