Yes folks, you heard that right. In the face of factual evidence, both Chief Pickens and Morgan Olson managed to convince the folks at the Fulton Center that the posts on indeed.com and this blog “aren’t real” and the majority of ASUPD’s employees are pleased as punch to come to work everyday.
We’d like to offer a challenge to those folks who are convinced that everything at ASUPD is A-OK. We understand your skepticism about the facts presented here by random internet posters; after all, we have the benefit of knowing you folks and how you operate, but the same can’t be said about us. Even if you completely discount what is being said here, we challenge you try and obtain your own answers through one of these methods:
- Create an anonymous survey, distribute it to the line-level officers and PAs, and tell us what you see.
- Assess the department’s retention rates (heck, even do five year retention rates!) and tell us what you see there.
- Look at the exorbitant amount of sick time being used (check out this article on “The High Cost of Unhappy Employees”).
We think these three tactics will shed some credibility on this site and our assertions.
It’s important to note that our intentions with this blog AREN’T to personally attack anyone. That being said, you’re all public figures paid for the taxpayers of the State of Arizona, and subsequently, your professional credibility is fair game. You have a duty and obligation to serve the people of the State of Arizona and students/faculty/staff at ASU, as well as uphold the law. If we as law enforcement officers are negligent or reckless in our jobs, we’re held accountable IMMEDIATELY…command staff and above are NO EXCEPTION.
The reaction on behalf of ASUPD’s admin as well as the university has been shocking for a blog with supposedly “no merit”. Going to the extent of tracking down IP addresses for posters and commenters that have maybe committed a policy violation (at most) is ridiculous, and is walking the very fine line between legal fact finding and illegal searches/curtailing of free speech.
We’ll end this discussion with two quotes that really speak to the core of the issue here…ones we’ll hope will cause some relatively intelligent person at Fulton/whatever to question the desperate motives of ASUPD to keep its dissenters silent.
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.”—Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Ashcroft V. Free Speech Coalition
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”— Harry Truman