WESTFIELD – The city’s police commission has authorized the first steps in the arduous process required to withdraw the police department from participation in the Civil Service system.
The conversation was sparked when Chief John Camerota reported that a decision relative to an appeal made to the Civil Service Commission by a terminated officer was not expected until 2014.
Camerota said that the delay is “totally unacceptable” and said he told the commission representative that “I would be moving with the city aggressively to get (the department) out of Civil Service” and asked for the support of the commissioners.
Commission chairman Karl Hupfer immediately supported the chief saying “two years, roughly, holding up an appointment to the department is totally unacceptable and it’s an embarrassment to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Civil service should be gone!”
Hupfer explained that due to the officer’s appeal the department has been unable to fill his position. In addition, the officer’s salary has been held in escrow because, if the department should lose the appeal, “we’d owe him back pay” Hupfer said.
In a subsequent interview, Camerota said that the current issue is only the most recent example of the civil service procedures that take so long they hamper the effectiveness of the department.
He said that all the processes take too long, starting with the civil service appointment and promotion exams.
He said that when applicants take a State Police promotion exam they hand their completed test to a proctor who scans the answers and “they walk out the door with their grades”, a sharp contrast to the Civil Service procedures which can take five or six months to report results of an exam.
He said that the Civil Service system was valuable in the past but may have outlived its usefulness.
“It did away with (hiring) family and friends and people who are owed favors,” Camerota said but those protections are no longer as necessary as they once were due to safeguards built into union contracts with the department. “The union safeguards are the same” as those provided by the Civil Service system, Camerota said.
He said that before the department may withdraw from the Civil Service system, the unions, the mayor and the city council must agree and those decisions will then have to be endorsed by the legislature.
The chief told the commission “The (patrol officers) union has agreed, at the last negotiations, to support the city in getting out of Civil Service and I think it’s time to move in that direction.”
The commissioners also agreed, unanimously, to support efforts to withdraw from the system.
Camerota said that the superior officers represented by the International Brotherhood of Police Officers will be asked to buy in to the plan and, if they agree, it will be up to the mayor to ask the city council to seek authorization from the legislature.
Camerota said that, like all of the other Civil Service processes, withdrawal from the system will not be quick.
“It could be a two-year process”, Camerota said, “or it could be longer.”
