Within the past few months, two very major state entities–Arizona Department of Corrections, and Child Protective Services–have been under major scrutiny, due to issues ranging from fiscal mismanagement, low staffing, to poor leadership. Many Arizona lawmakers have began to ask the question…what else is happening at the state level?
ADOC has been critically understaffed for years; according to an article written by abc15.com, it is common practice to have 2-4 officers watching anywhere from 100-200 inmates. Staffing is so bad it has created an unsafe environment for its employees; ADOC averages 335 officer assaults A YEAR!! Or what about the ridiculously low salary most of its corrections officers make (about $31k), yet ADOC’s budget is $1 billion dollars?! (Sound familiar?)
CPS has also had their dirty laundry aired all over the news media. Since 2009, nearly 6,000 cases received from the CPS hotline hadn’t been investigated. One of CPS’ former employees has also come forward and stated that low pay and staffing issues make it impossible for CPS to function effectively (Again…familiar territory). The situation at CPS is so critical that a member of the legislature’s CPS oversight committee stated, “The public must know that this neglect of duty will never happen again and that the people responsible for this disturbing practice are held accountable. In addition, a long-term reform of the agency is warranted to restore public confidence.” Furthermore, a representative from the State House has asserted the director of CPS (Clarence Carter) must be removed for the agency to succeed. “Either the governor or Carter — one of them needs to go. This is another state agency that’s failing under her.”
Both the situation at ADOC and CPS parallel the problems that ASUPD is currently having. Mismanagement of personnel and money by higher-ups leads to staffing problems, low work productively, and high employee turnover. These state agencies which have gone largely unchecked for quite some time are starting to face scrutiny for their mismanagement…how long will it be before ASUPD and Chief Pickens’ names are also thrown into the mix?
If the chief can’t fix the department, fails to acknowledge problem after problem, year after year, especially the clique that destroyed the department, then it sure is time to get outside resources involved. The safety of the kids depends on it. If I was the chief I seriously wouldn’t be renewing commander contracts and would be firing a few sergeants.
He needs to send a clear message to the people under him that it’s game over for the clique. He needs to send the message he’s serious about fixing the department. More than sending a message he would remove the worst offenders who put the department in the situation it’s in. New hires are leaving one after another before probation is up. What does that say?
If he does nothing the people above him will blame him for his inaction, remove him, and leave the cancer. He can be the scapegoat or make someone else the scapegoat.
I hope ASUPD is next. Did anyone here see the To Catch A Predator series on TV? Do you remember the satisfaction of seeing the predators getting caught and taken away in cuffs to jail? That’s where a number of people are at here. The problems of our department have been problems for so long and for so many that they went from professional to personal and it didn’t happen overnight.
The chief is pouting about this all being a personal attack against him. Really? This isn’t about just you. Imagine you had to go work with the people described in these posts, imagine they were your bosses, and there you go. You wouldn’t like it, you wouldn’t want to work here with them so why should everyone else be fine with it? Figure it out, you have all the information required to fix the problem.
An outside entity looking into how our department would be a good thing, we need new perspectives, new answers for old problems otherwise we will be in the same mess over and over, year after year until the problem people are gone. We suffer as a department from most people not having some experience with a working leadership model.
Most of the people here have risen through the ranks under a self-defeating leadership model and have adopted it as their own. You have people who are commanders now who complained about it like any one of the troops would, now they are doing the same thing. It doesn’t make any sense.
For the civilian fucks who can’t tell a cardboard sign of a security guard from a living police officer it will take a huge critical failure to meet a police situation. Nobody, no matter how many doctorate degrees they have will get it until then. The department is going down in flames and they let it burn.
Apparently the top tier of command have blown magical smoke up the asses of the right people because nobody seems to give a shit. I don’t want to be the guy with his ass hanging out because JP and his winged commander monkeys get rewards for failure and nothing really bad has publicly happened yet. Shameful wanton neglect of the public’s needs. A lawyer will get rich over it, we’ll pay the real price for our boss’s lies to his boss. More and more of us don’t want to be here when that happens.
Now that the chief has apparently given up on the Chief’s Advisory Board and won’t be attending he will have plenty of free time to meet with state legislators, state employees who get paid a lot less than him, about why the police department is unable to meet expectations on so many levels.