August 1, 2018 at 6:51 p.m.
At Oneida County sheriff's department, dysfunction rolls on
At Oneida County sheriff's department, dysfunction rolls on
Whatever one thinks about the actions of the Dane County district attorney to dismiss the charges - and we will have more to report on that - it's a good time to put the entire case in local perspective and to underscore an important point: This matter is at its very core the quintessential example of a sheriff's department being mismanaged, and its employees out of control.
Simply put, sheriff Grady Hartman is leading - if that's the word - a dysfunctional department, and the dysfunction just keeps rolling along.
It's also giving the county a black eye.
In the Lech case, the dysfunction of the department sprawled out into Dane County, and across the whole state for everyone to see. It's not a good reputation for our county to have.
After all, a publicly dysfunctional sheriff's department encourages bad actors, while low morale hurts the county's ability to hire and retain the best personnel.
Let's not forget, either, that the sheriff's department forced The Lakeland Times to go to court to win the Lech investigatory records, which the sheriff tried to keep under lock and key.
That lawsuit cost county taxpayers $50,000, but, had the newspaper not prevailed, the public would never have known about felonious charges made by one officer against another.
Had we not prevailed, the reasons for Lech's abrupt resignation would never had been known.
Had we not prevailed, we may never have known about the sloppy way certain officers are allowed to break civil service rules while others are not - a clear indication of favoritism.
After all, now captain Terri Hook knew about the rape allegations for three years before she ever told the sheriff - even though she knew the superior she did report it to had not informed the sheriff or conducted an investigation.
That was a violation of the spirit of the rules, if not the letter of them.
Had the rules been followed and the sheriff informed by somebody who knew, this case would not have festered along for as long as it did, and it probably would not have exploded in the sheriff's department's face, as it ultimately did.
That no one told him is not the sheriff's fault, of course. What is his fault is allowing such a culture of favoritism to persist, and even to encourage it. After all, Hartman didn't take Hook or anybody else to task for not telling him; in fact, he promoted Hook.
Then, too, had we not prevailed in that records case we might never have known about the overall lack of oversight of sheriff's department officers when they are attending out-of-town training.
That's where the alleged assault took place, and, whether it happened or it didn't, there's no question that partying and drinking and even going to strip clubs late into the night on the taxpayers' dime did happen, and happened on most out of town training trips, as Lech himself acknowledged.
When he was placed on administrative leave, Lech told a co-worker that "if this was about me going to training and getting drunk, everybody does that."
In 2012, the department soft-pedaled another incident with Lech, in which he was accused of providing alcohol to a minor at an out-of-town training exercise for members of the Marathon/Oneida County Sheriff's Department Bomb Squad.
Lech denied knowingly doing so when chief deputy Dan Hess interviewed him and that was that. The sheriff's department took Lech's word for it - without interviewing the minor or the complainant or other potential witnesses about the allegation.
It's hasn't just been problems with Lech, either.
As this newspaper reported in 2017, at a Wisconsin Professional Police Association convention, two of Oneida County's finest were busted for kissing in the bathroom at the bar, at a convention attended by their spouses, no less.
More than that, one of the involved officer's wife locked him out of their hotel room; and that officer admitted he sometimes did not know how he ended up back in his room in the mornings, because he was too intoxicated on the nights before.
What's more, the same two officers went to another out-of-town event, this time in Green Bay, and shared a hotel room, though only one of them was authorized to attend. The officer not authorized to go hopped a ride in the squad to get there.
It's obvious, when this much bad behavior is happening and has happened, that the department does not and has not had enough oversight of these training sessions. It is indicative of a culture of misbehavior within the department.
Leaders are elected to change such a culture, not encourage and sustain it. We haven't seen change.
Indeed, as we reported last year, the department doled out disciplinary action against its officers and staff at least 17 times between the middle of 2012 and the end of 2016 - a period of just over four-and-a-half years - in what continued to be a long-standing pattern of misconduct inside the sheriff's department.
And those disciplinary actions did not even include the allegations of rape against Lech.
The incidents ranged from relatively minor infractions such as sleeping on the job and insubordination to significantly more serious and potentially dangerous acts, including habitual failure to properly escort inmates; failure to conduct the proper number of inmate walkthroughs and ordering other officers not to follow the policy; failure to properly search inmates; unauthorized use of county computers; and neglecting E911 telecommunicator duties.
Other major disciplinary actions came for improper denial of records considered releasable to the public; failure to properly enter warrants into the Law Enforcement Records Management System; running an unauthorized and improper check of a person through a law enforcement data base for personal reasons; and failure to report important information to the sheriff, the latter a case involving an affair between two officers.
To be fair, not all of these incidents took place under Hartman's watch. The Welcenbach accusation stems from 2011, before Hartman became sheriff in early 2013, and the disciplinary records begin about six months before his tenure.
But the vast majority of the incidents do occur under his watch - as does about four years of records and the handling of the Welcenbach matter and looking the other way on enabling underage drinking.
The patterns of dysfunction that were percolating in the department since the late sheriff Tim Miller's retirement have continued under Hartman, and in fact we believe they have grown exponentially worse.
To wit, in another peek into the department's inner workings, the grievance committee hearing in which Sara Welcenbach was fired for mishandling drug unit monies showed widespread sloppiness when it came to bookkeeping within the department, and it showed outright encouragement of "borrowing" money from drug unit money boxes, except when it came to Welcenbach, when it was called stealing.
Indeed, as testimony confirmed, the department allowed monies to go missing without punishment so long as the person responsible for the money replaced it at audit time, though that was ultimately not the case with Welcenbach.
In his testimony, for instance, chief deputy Dan Hess said that was accepted practice and it was also usual practice for people in the NORDEG drug unit, if they had a money box and ledger, that if they were short they were responsible to put their own money in.
Not all of this is completely the sheriff's fault.
This newspaper has repeatedly called for the county's public safety committee, the sheriff's department committee of jurisdiction, to exercise more oversight and to hold the department accountable.
As even some of its members have admitted, often times committee members have found out about major issues by reading about them in the newspaper. We have called for reform to require accountability and reporting, but so far the county has taken no concrete action. It's been all talk.
The truth is, as county board members stick around and become enmeshed in the county's bureaucracy, the public safety committee has become part and parcel of the good-old boys Brotherhood of Justice. It's really cozy in the committee room when law enforcement and the committee members gather around, everybody scratching everybody's back.
And when you talk about dysfunction, don't leave out the corporation counsel, Brian Desmond, who cost the taxpayers that $50,000 in the lawsuit, and committee chairman Mike Timmons, whose knowledge of open records is grounded in the laws of physics.
That is to say, it's a black hole.
So it's not all Hartman's fault. That said, in 2016, when increased oversight was being discussed, Hartman told the county's law enforcement committee he didn't really want them meddling in internal department affairs: Just trust us and let us do our jobs, and everything will be fine, he basically told the committee.
Well, everything is not fine, and the latest headlines coming out of Madison show that unequivocally to be the case.
In that 2016 meeting with the public-safety committee, Hartman had these words for the committee and we will let those be the last words: "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," he said.
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