June 22, 2016 at 4:35 p.m.
Sheriff Hartman gets it wrong again
Sheriff Hartman gets it wrong again
Even after losing a case in which he attempted to keep allegations of rape within his department sealed, even after he took bad advice to keep those records salted away, even after he squandered thousands of taxpayer dollars in a case that should never have been brought - even after all that, the sheriff hasn't learned a thing.
With such a record of bad judgment, one would think Hartman would be willing to try to learn some new tricks and would welcome help from his committee of jurisdiction. But maybe his inability to learn is the reason for his bad judgment in the first place.
And so the sheriff shuffled over to the public safety committee meeting last week, where he was asked what he thought about being subjected to more oversight and accountability.
His answer was: Not much.
"My comment would be, at some point you have to trust your administrators, and, if you don't trust your administrators, you should replace them," Hartman told committee members.
That's a ridiculous statement, overused by incompetent administrators who fear having their work and their command of their jobs reviewed. Its very utterance by a public official should foreclose any true trust in that administrator.
True trust is never blind trust, for, as Ronald Reagan loved to say, "Trust, but verify."
Trust in a public official is a necessary condition for good, efficient government, to be sure, but it is not a sufficient condition. Indeed, sufficiency requires verification, the element that provides our system with its greatest strength, that of checks and balances.
Without true trust, one is left with only blind trust, and that ends up becoming empty trust, bankrupt and bereft.
As was pointed out in the public safety committee meeting, everyone from the president on down is subject to the verification of checks and balances, and those afraid of checks and balances should not be trusted at all.
Indeed, can one imagine a scientist striving to win a Nobel Prize being afraid to have her or his work verified in peer-reviewed journals? In the science world, the peer-review process provides the necessary oversight to authenticate important work, as well as to point out flaws that need to be corrected so the work can become even stronger and more important.
In the political world, the various branches of government peer review each other in the same way. And yet Hartman wants no peer review by elected officials. Given his recent judgment, we can understand why.
All of which brings us to the public safety committee, whose members contributed their own ridiculous statements to rival that of the sheriff's. They wondered, for instance, if they, as the committee of jurisdiction for the sheriff's department, had any jurisdiction.
Say what?
Others worried about micromanaging the sheriff's department, which should be the least of their concerns. Here's a news flash for the committee: You can't micromanage an open field when you live so deep in the dark forest that it takes light years for sunshine to reach you.
Instead, the committee should worry about its vast errors in the other direction, that is to say, its lack of any oversight whatsoever, not to mention the sheriff's department's defiant noncompliance with the county code concerning committees of jurisdiction.
Under the code, the sheriff's department "shall report" to the public safety committee. It does not do so, in any meaningful way at all.
That it does not is painfully obvious. When some committee members are unaware the department is being sued in federal court; when committee members are unaware that a probe involving an officer placed on paid leave has dragged on for nearly two years, with the officer not working but still being paid; when the committee was unaware that records being litigated in court pertained to an allegation of rape within the department, and was unaware of the rape allegation itself; when committee members are unaware the sheriff decided to conduct the rape allegation investigation internally instead of getting an outside investigator, then obviously the sheriff's department is not reporting substantively to the committee.
In fact, it appears to be reporting to no one. It has become a rogue agency, and that's especially dangerous when the rogue agency is a law-enforcement department.
It's also obvious that the committee is not living up to its responsibilities as a committee of jurisdiction by demanding reports from the sheriff's department. It has clear code authority to do so, and it has policy leverage by having budget and expense approval authority for the sheriff's office.
To be fair, the county code is itself murky when it comes to delineating the responsibilities of the public safety committee and the civil service commission. The county should immediately clarify the vagueness and downright omissions of the code when it comes to the sheriff's accountability.
In the meantime, though, the public safety committee has enough authority to rein this department in and get a grip on what is going on inside the agency.
It's embarrassing and absurd for elected officials to have to read things in the newspaper or hear things on the street to find out what is going on in the very government whose policies, actions, and affairs they have been elected to conduct. That's why we elect them.
Trust is a hard-won thing, not something you hand out like candy to administrators who have done nothing to earn it, much less to administrators like Hartman, who has presided over the worst public debacle in the sheriff's department we can remember.
Right now, we can't trust the sheriff's department to honestly and transparently carry out its law-enforcement responsibilities, and we can't trust the public safety committee to hold them accountable if and when they don't. We can't even trust them to know when they don't.
Both ships need to be righted, and soon.
Comments:
You must login to comment.