It's been so long since we've promoted a chief from within that I'm having a hard time remembering who he was. What we have had is a series of musical chiefs brought in to "shake things up". With all the benefits we've heard promised from outsiders who come in to "shake things Up" one would think our city would be free of gangs, police brutality, snow emergency towing, and every other malady blamed on our police department by now.
I've spent the last 3 decades as a rank and file grunt worker in public and private sector organizations. The first of these was the now merged Continental Baking. Shortly after I started our bakery's general manager, who hadn't really done anything wrong, was summarily blamed for the poor sales of our primarily white bread product. A bright young wonder boy from Georgia told this veteran who'd worked his way up through the ranks to clean out his desk and escorted him to the door, then took over as the new general manager. After 2 years of trying to "shake things up" said wonder boy retreated to Georgia to run his original bakery into the ground. Shortly thereafter instead of promoting our best mechanic they brought up a drunken idiot from rural Iowa to run the garage. The best mechanic took a management job at Ryder and the incompetent stayed for over a decade to destroy that department's morale. Over 14 years at Continental I outlasted 4 bakery managers each of whom was transfered in to "shake things up." They never succeeded in that goal, but they managed to run the company into the ground.
December marks my tenth year at the Postal Service. Back when I started we still had a lot of old timers who came up through the ranks as managers. They often brought decades of relevant experience to their jobs, and they got on well with their charges. Since then the Postal Service has been trying to "shake things up" too, intentionally bringing in supervisors who have no experience in the department they've been promoted into. One of the first of these was my department head, and after 10 years in transportation he still doesn't have a clue. Another wannabe manager jumped from my department to one he also knew nothing about- he lasted 6 months and over a year later the discrimination and harassment complaints are finally dying down. The exception to this rule was the one woman manager who transfered into my department after being downsized out of another completely unrelated management post. She actually took the trouble to learn the department and our work and was an excellent manager. Sadly she transfered out at the first opportunity, chased off by the previously noted incompetent department head.
So how does all this apply to Minneapolis Police and the selection of their new chief? To the labor and police haters, sorry, but you clearly don't understand what a union does. Most of a union's disputes with management are in the areas of fair assignment of overtime pay, scheduling, and such. Discharges are thankfully rare, given that it costs about $50,000 in member's dues money to take them to arbitration. When I served on the executive board of a thousand or so member Teamsters local union most discharges were dealt with fairly quickly without resorting to arbitration. Usually either the employee had done something totally indefensable like theft or assualt or management overreacted to a petty offense. In the former case we gave up on getting reinstatement and hopefully got the fired employee unemployment compensation at most. In the latter the employer after cooling off a bit usually reduced the punishment to a warning. That left us with about a case or two a year worthy of arbitration, and I suspect the Minneapolis' police federation has had similar experience. So the cop haters can forget about firing half the department, it ain't gonna happen.
What will likely happen is that given his past reputation (cops use the internet too) Chief McManus will start with a distrustful department and it'll go downhill from there. After a year or two of rising crime and falling police morale we'll find out one day that Chief McManus has just been hired as chief in a bigger yet city... the Peter Principle at work!
hangin' on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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