August 30, 2017 at 4:05 p.m.
Hook should face civil service charges
Hook should face civil service charges
However, get yourself locked out of the front door - sometimes literally - and watch out. If the Brotherhood could get away with it, they'd put you in prison for chewing gum wrong.
Or whatever else they might claim. Take the case of Oneida County detective sergeant Sara Welcenbach, who long ago got locked out of the front and back doors and who the county is now trying to have fired by the county's grievance committee.
According to the Brotherhood, she stole about $1,200 in drug-unit monies, and committed a whole lot more sins, including stealing a camera and then having an accomplice with access to the sheriff's department sneak it back in.
Of course, the Brotherhood can't prove any of this, and the reasonable doubt in this case is really reasonable. Like, so reasonable that prosecutors dismissed felony charges against Welcenbach for some of the same offenses the county wants to fire her for.
Prosecutors no doubt concluded they had no way to prove theft beyond a reasonable doubt, given the number of instances other people had the opportunity to have taken the money - a fact some officers conceded during the grievance hearing in July.
Indeed, while the agreement to drop the charges called for Ms. Welcenbach to repay about $1,200, it stresses that that is not an admission of guilt, and she will have the money returned if missing or misplaced receipts are found. In fact, the deferred prosecution agreement ordered her to take an accounting fundamentals class.
That's telling, for it indicates more sloppiness than anything else - a fact underscoring testimony at the grievance committee showing an overall departmental sloppiness when it comes to bookkeeping and audits and all that detail stuff.
Of course, unlike with criminal charges, the grievance committee doesn't have to conclude that Sara Welcenbach is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; they could just take the sheriff's word for it, and that's no doubt exactly what the sheriff and the civil service commission are hoping for, a gullible committee not too interested in dragging out a decision much past lunch.
Don't get us wrong. We are not saying Welcenbach is not guilty. It's just that there are way too many holes and gaps to prove she is, as prosecutors must have quickly recognized.
Which brings up a couple of points. The first is, it seems the sheriff and his posse are way too interested and obsessed with hanging something on Welcenbach - anything, really - to get her fired, while they look the other way at serious misconduct carried out by other personnel in the sheriff's office.
Some of them even get promoted.
Take that camera incident. After Ms. Welcenbach left the department on Aug. 6, 2014, never to return, officers discovered that a pricey camera was missing. They searched for it, even in Welcenbach's old office, and could not find it.
And so it was obvious: Sara did it! You can almost hear them shouting with glee. They were still smug at the grievance hearing, even though, interestingly and tellingly, she has never been formally accused of taking the camera.
There's a reason for that: The damn camera showed up again in, of all places, Welcenbach's old office.
That would be Welcenbach's locked old office. The one she had not returned to because she had no access to the sheriff's department.
So how did this certain thief, Sara Welcenbach, get the camera back in the office? Teletransporter?
It's actually easily explained, our Sherlock Holmeses of Oneida County retort. She had an accomplice come in and put it there!
And how do they know that? Because they just know, they testified.
And who would that accomplice be? Why, they don't know and they don't care!
That's right, convinced that Welcenbach had contrived to have the camera she stole returned, they made no effort to find out who that accomplice might be, even though the pool of people with access to Welcenbach's locked office should be relatively small. They just changed the lock instead.
Because Welcenbach was obviously guilty, there was no need to worry about the accomplice, though it might occur to others that such an accomplice, if such an accomplice exists, could still be up to no good inside the agency and with broad access to people's locked offices.
Not that we're cynical at all.
And so the testimony went, on and on. Others had opportunity to take monies found missing from an envelope in her vacated desk, for instance, but don't worry about that: Welcenbach did it.
And who knows, maybe she did. But, curiously, far more egregious behavior has taken place, posing a more tangible and physical threat to the residents of Oneida County, and the department and the sheriff have so far looked the other way.
We are talking specifically about captain Terri Hook and her three-year span of silence that allowed an officer accused of rape to run free in the department and in the county.
While many believed for a while that Hook was a victim's advocate and thus legally bound to keep Welcenbach's confidentiality when Welcenbach confided to her about the rape in 2011, Hook said, under oath, she was not an advocate.
Than means, as she herself acknowledged in her testimony, she was bound by county civil-service rules to report the rape allegation to her superiors. And that she did, she said in her defense, by telling her supervisor at the time, Lt. Lloyd Gauthier, whom Welcenbach had also told.
But Gauthier didn't do anything about it. He didn't launch an investigation, and he did not inform his superiors, which he was bound by the same civil service rules to do.
Hook knew this, and yet she did nothing about it, except, as the attorney for the county's prosecution effort put it, grapple with it for years.
Almost three years, to be exact.
Hook also acknowledged on the stand that Gauthier did not order her not to tell the sheriff. They were all friends, she testified, and so it was a recommendation. Hook chose to go along.
What Hook chose to do at that moment was to go along with a serious and flagrant violation of the civil service code - an allegation that by all rights and in all decency should have been reported to the sheriff.
The sheriff himself said under oath how important that information was to him: "I was concerned that, if I don't look into this, then I am going to potentially have a deputy that's committed a violent crime continue to patrol a rural county by himself where he would have contact with other females and victims of crimes such as domestic violence, and there are other sexual assaults where he has taken those complaints. That's a serious allegation and we needed to investigate that and figure out what happened."
Hook knew how important it was, too, when she explained why she finally went to the sheriff in 2014: " ... I told him that I was telling Grady that day what Sara had told me because I could not go forward knowing that there was this possibility that Lee sexually assaulted Sara, and he would be promoted to detective sergeant and he would be out there supervising employees, going out of town with other employees."
Yet, because of Hook's and - according to her - Gauthier's silence for three years, all those things happened. Lech patrolled a rural county by himself, he had contact with other females and victims of crimes such as domestic violence and sexual assault, he went out of town with other employees. A man accused of rape was wearing a badge and on the loose in a squad.
It was, as Hook and Hartman said, an impermissible situation to allow without an investigation, and yet it happened. And, we might add, if Lech is indeed innocent of the charge, an investigation would have cleared his name way back when before all this mess occurred. He gained nothing by Hook's ongoing silence.
So someone needs to be held accountable. That someone is captain Terri Hook.
For one thing, though we assume Hook isn't perjuring herself, Gauthier has not given his side of the story, and, conveniently, he's now chief of the Rhinelander Police Department, so he can't be disciplined for not telling the sheriff, either way.
And, while Hook did report the allegation to him, she should not be let off the hook on such a technicality. For there is another civil-service rule that comes into play at this point: An officer can be disciplined for "(a)ny other act or omission contrary to good order and discipline, or constituting a violation of any of the provisions of the rules and regulations of the Department."
Terri Hook knew the sheriff needed to know. She knew Gauthier did not tell the sheriff or launch an investigation. She acknowledges that Gauthier did not order her to keep quiet. What she did was choose to stay silent and keep the sheriff - first Jeff Hoffman, then Hartman - in the dark.
That is an act of omission of information that adds up to a violation of her duty to report an alleged crime by a fellow officer. That she finally decided to do the right thing almost three years later, and three years late, does not excuse that omission.
Hook should face civil service charges.
Finally, there's that thumb on the scales of justice. If Ms. Welcenbach stole $1,200 or whatever the amount, and the evidence is convincing, then she should be terminated. If not, she should be reinstated.
But if she did and she is, that act, as serious as it would be, is hardly as egregious as letting an alleged rapist operate in the county for nearly three years, potentially endangering the safety of many. The sheriff does not seem concerned that his captain let that happen. And so we ask what sheriff Grady Hartman is going to do to ensure that his officers report crimes allegedly committed by fellow officers? How is he going to restore the badly damaged credibility of his department? What he is going to do to make Oneida County citizens comfortable in trusting the integrity of the officers they interact with and to feel safe doing so?
There's only one way, and that's to demand accountability when bad things happen.
A very bad thing happened, and now is the time for accountability.
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