Arizona State University Police Department Hall of Command Shame, No Integrity
For some strange reason the command of the Arizona State University Police Department hasn’t been able to staff its campuses with police officers for many years and counting. For 5 years or more ASU Police command has been offering time and a half OVERTIME pay for any officers willing to work more than 40 hours in a desperate attempt to shore up the shortages.
Why with aggressive hiring attempts, heavy advertising, and its own in house promotion department can ASUPD not staff its own campuses? Why is this going on for 5+ years and counting. Even worse, ASU Police can’t staff its own overtime events and has to beg for help from police departments all over the state. Why is this? Because the command at the Arizona State University Police Department are absolute egotistical morons who lack the most important quality in law enforcement INTEGRITY.
ABSOLUTELY NO INTEGRITY WHATSOEVER IN LEADERSHIP
- HOSTILITY TO SUBORDINATES: ASU Police Command makes no secret of its contempt for their own employees. Stories about what they are currently doing to employees, what they’ve done to employees just never die. The truth comes out and employees see the alarming lack of integrity within its leadership and their handpicked successors.
- CORRUPT & EXCESSIVE INTERNAL AFFAIR INVESTIGATIONS: ASU Police Command has a well-known record of conducting themselves without any shred of integrity whatsoever. They make up Internal Affair Investigations without merit and target employees they don’t like while looking the other way for the ones they favor. This is the well-known retention program to cheaply keep employees from being able to move on with a career in law enforcement. ASU Police conducts more “I.A’s” per employee than any police department in Arizona.
- CRONYISM WITH UNQUALIFIED PROMOTIONS: Promotions for ASU Police are already spoken for. ASUPD command has continually rewarded unqualified candidates for promotion over more qualified competition. It’s common for them to restrict who can test for positions, change the rules during the process, and redo a process if they don’t like who’s applying. We’ve discovered that ASU Command accepted invitations for barbecues/poker playing at the Fuchtman household shortly before appointing supervisor novice Katie Fuchtman to Sergeant over much more qualified candidates. Resumes are routinely ignored in promotion processes in favor of subjective oral boards where people can be handpicked.
- NO RAISES FOR YEARS AT A TIME: As an ASU Police Officer you will watch the salary of your counterparts at other departments soar while yours remains stagnant for 5+ years, their overtime compared to your COMP time is a huge bump, plus all the bonuses for STEP increases, training bonuses, makes it a no brainer that you need to leave ASUPD to succeed.
- CORRUPT EVALUATION PROCESSES: All ASU Police employees get evaluations. The “clique” allows one another to write their own evaluations and scores with 4 being low and most receiving 5 or higher. Most ASUPD employees receive the standard 3 as a rule. This allows command to flood the salaries of their friends with money that comes for any raise, but also makes them appear to be a better employee than others not favored, but who work harder and are more qualified for higher scores.
- NO OPPORTUNITES & NO TRAINING: Just like promotions, specialty positions and training are already spoken for. Police officers from real police departments get opportunities for further training in all aspects of law enforcement without the political garbage of ASUPD. After 3 years a police officer at a real police department can expect an opening in any one of many specialty positions and opportunities for more training than you have time for. Remember that training makes you more marketable to other police departments. With ASUPD running short of officers 100% of the time for years that’s a real fear.
- NO SUPPORT FOR THEIR OWN POLICE OFFICERS: Only the friends of ASUPD command, the clique, receive any support when their people within the department come under public scrutiny. Besides getting the support of command you will find these people are the ones receiving the largest amount of public complaints because they are empowered to be rude, violate civil rights, and collect public complaints without any recourse. All complaints will be found unfounded regardless of evidence. The people not favored by command habitually do not get public complaints, but are buried by internally generated complaints IA’s against them.
- NO SAFETY WITH NO STAFFING: ASU Command won’t be out on calls with you and neither will their bosses, so they will never understand when you are grossly outnumbered on a call and you have little or no backup. If a protest or sport crowd is too aggressive and too large or any other priority event should happen it’s time to call Tempe, Mesa, Phoenix, Glendale, and beg for help if they’re not too busy. Great public safety plan.
- TOXIC WORKPLACE STRESS: ASU Command systematically creates an environment so full of stress for its employees that morale has always been low unless you’re new. The longer you remain in the department the more you will understand all the above issues to be entirely true. You will spend 40 or more hours a week at a place you will increasingly dislike because of the gross mismanagement of the department by corrupt officials throughout the command structure whose only care is their own career.
- NO REDRESS FOR GRIEVANCES: ASU Command identifies anyone who has a problem with their supervisor or anything their supervisor does as a problem. You become the problem for professionally attempting to address an issue. This effectively creates a US & THEM mentality that the command at ASUPD fully believes in without exception. It was that way under Chief John Pickens and his band of bobble-head idiots and it remains that way under the equally unimaginative, think inside the box, Chief Michael Thompson and the band of bobble-head idiots he inherited from Pickens. You become the problem for professionally attempting to address an issue. This effectively creates a US & THEM mentality that the command at ASUPD fully believes in without exception. It was that way under Chief John Pickens and his band of bobble-head idiots and it remains that way under the equally unimaginative, think inside the box, Chief Michael Thompson and the band of bobble-head idiots he inherited from Pickens.
The Arizona State University Police Badge Recycling Service Costs the taxpayers & students 100’s of 1000’s annually in lost officer hiring and training costs with liability around every corner.
This post is spot-on regarding ASUPD command and the toxic culture it has cultivated over the years.
Until the current command is permanently removed, along with some of their infamous underlings, nothing will change within ASUPD.
The good news, however, is the opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
There was a lot of hope Chief Mike Thompson would clean up the place once he was gifted the position. Nobody had any hope the sloppy command Pickens left in his wake would change.
When nothing changed it was clear that Thompson was in bed with them and gave his approval of how they treated people. Absolutely disgusting, he should be ashamed of himself.
It’s absolutely shameful that these people are not only still in law enforcement, but that they are profiting off their incompetent leadership.
The list you made is accurate, all 10 issues. What I can’t understand is how do their bosses not understand their failure to get the job done year after year. The same issues come up repeatedly and no consequences.
Chief Thompson is proving to be just as incompetent and corrupt as Chief Pickens was.
Their bosses know exactly what is going on. However, they choose to ignore the problems and not hold anyone in command accountable.
Written documentation has been presented to Morgan Olsen and Kevin Salcido over the years detailing the countless problems within ASUPD as a direct result of an incompetent and self-serving command staff.
As usual officers are leaving and they’re absolutely oblivious or indifferent to all the reasons why. Is Pickens still running ASUPD or what? No, he’s busy not sitting on his butt doing nothing all day with no proof he did anything.
Mike Thompson and the Pickens clown posse are running the same old game of using the buddy system to pick and choose who gets the goodies.
Wait till we lose some more officers, they will take the money and use it to fund another useless do nothing supervisor line to keep people from leaving. Genius.
The blog is saying 5 years and counting for staff shortages, but it’s been going on much longer than that. The shortages are more noticeable because ASUPD finally established minimum staffing levels for some areas over the last few years. For many years it was common to have 1 officer on patrol at every satellite campus and only 1, 2 maybe 3 on patrol in Tempe.
They needed all the money they weren’t paying officers to boost supervisor ranks. Each officer on patrol had 2, 3, or more desk warming supervisors. People rarely leave if they are a supervisor because they get paid significantly more and do significantly less work. Officers leave all the time.
Some in the ASUPD command staff and some of their subordinates could be in trouble for past misdeeds and illegal activity.
Please read today’s front page article in The Arizona Republic, dated 02-25-2016, by investigative reporter Ann Ryman.
I enjoyed reading it. If they are still telling their bosses not to worry, they will have some explaining to do and it won’t take long to show they’re lying.
Wow! Just read the article by investigative reporter Anne Ryman.
Maybe the lawsuit and public exposure of ASUPD’s wrongdoings will finally bring about positive change within ASUPD.
I personally knew some of the fine police officers and police aides that were drummed out of the ASU PD over the years.
A civil lawsuit is a step in the right direction to start holding public administrators and their department heads fully accountable.
Everyone who has worked there knows of the problems and knows that there are so many legal issues that are ignored. The problem is that people rarely sue. I’m glad to see this is coming out. I hope Dr. Crow opens his eyes to the corruption going on right under his nose.
Dr. Crow notice? Dr. Crow is at the center of the corruption. Cowardly little Mikey Thompson takes his marching orders from Dr. Crow. Don’t fool yourselves, Crow is as culpable as the rest of them.
Karma is real and this stuff is about to get real too!
You have virtually the same individuals running the department that John Pickens installed years ago.
Maybe the civil suit recently filed will bring about much-needed personnel changes at the command level and below.
They didn’t change a damn thing by removing Pickens and replacing him with that two faced lying Thompson. He’s an embarrassment to law enforcement in this state and I hope the truth about him is known.
Everyone was surprised they kept the same management in place that were under Pickens. Are people supposed to believed he was solely responsible for everything that happened? That’s a bold assumption and one that is hardly reasonable.
That assumption is one that the administration over ASUPD likes to put forward because it never can admit mistakes have been made. Even in removing Pickens ahead of the scheduled date they made up a fictional job and gave him another 150,000 or 160,000 to sit in an office and stare out the window of the University Services Building.
The New Times embarrassed him and the University by exposing the fraudulent use of public dollars to silence and pacify this disgraced police chief. I can’t wait for the court of public opinion to weigh in on the lawsuit. Everyone’s phone has been ringing non-stop since the initial filing with more information coming out in one week than information being shared in one year.
This department has no secrets, everyone knows where the bodies are buried, and hopefully this is all discovered when this case goes to court.
I work for a different University PD, I noticed ASU was hiring and tried to do a little digging, found a number of concerning comments on Indeed. I’ve been through Clery training and looked at the crime log and clery stats ASU reported and immediately noticed something was wrong. The stats at ASU were absurdly low! Where I work it’s less than 1/4 of the ASU student body yet we’re showing triple the stats! That’s not even remotely possible, unless of course ASU is Mayberry, I’d only work there if I could clean sweep it from the top and run the show to try and make it right. Cops have enough grief these days from the outside we don’t need it on the inside.
The reason the crime stats are incredibly, impossibly low, is because they are. ASUPD Command intentionally and fraudulently reported low numbers blaming everyone but themselves for the problem once it was identified.
They covered up too much to the point where it is unbelievable and finally people are starting to take notice!
Every family of every victim has cause to sue the department administration and the university on this fraudulent cover up that made the campus appear safer than it was with a skeleton crew of police officers on patrol.
They have so much to answer for and many people to answer to. People are going to be knocking the door down to try to get in on the latest lawsuit against them. There have been other successful lawsuits! This isn’t the first folks.
There’s always been a management problem with ASUPD. You have decades of police department management by largely poorly educated people who ignore the law or are ignorant of the law, who are keeping many secrets from their bosses, and who attempt to make everything look A OK despite the truth. With these issues you are going to run into problems and occasionally lawsuits.
I have worked at many places, public and private, and I never worked for management more dishonest and hostile towards employees than the management in charge of ASUPD.
Finally some brave souls had the inner fortitude to stand up and say enough is enough to the corruption, favoritism, falsifying crime statistics, bullying, etc.
We look forward to seeing how the civil suit plays out as our intelligence suggests there might be some in command and below in deep kimchi!
Everyone in the department is talking about this wherever you can talk without being thrown into an internal investigation “I.A.” for talking….no joke, this happens at ASUPD!
You can get a I.A. for talking about nothing profane or prohibited by human resources, only because a supervisor thought it might be negative. These people are goose stepping Nazis.
I see a lot of names left out of this suit.