Gregg Jarvies, Spring Lake’s interim police chief, has prescribed bitter medicine for the town’s demoralized police department: Everybody gets fired, and the department gets rebuilt from the ground up.
“It’s a kick in the gut,” said Jarvies, lamenting the injury to “decent individuals and good police officers” who would suffer for the misdeeds of others.
The plan is, as Nellie McCoy of the Board of Aldermen said, “very cold.”
All true. But it does have its redeeming features.
First, it would work. Rather than painstakingly untangle the Gordian knot that the scandal-wracked department has become, Jarvies’ plan would slice right through it. There would be no one left in the department whose competence or integrity was suspect, because there’d be no department.
Second, it makes good fiscal sense. With the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office already running things and town officers barred from investigating both misdemeanor and felony cases, it would be hard to justify keeping those officers on the payroll while they were variously vetted, investigated, vindicated and sacked.
According to the most optimistic timetable, the department will not recover its power to handle misdemeanors before 2011, and there is no timetable for restoring the power to investigate felonies. Even if everything breaks exactly right, that’s too long to keep a police force that is little more than a paperweight on the public payroll.
Third, by contracting its police work out to the Sheriff’s Office, the town would stifle the brewing debate over who should pay the county’s expenses for its intensive efforts in Spring Lake.
Fourth, some provision has been made for honest officers who become innocent casualties of the clean sweep — and we don’t mean only the two weeks’ notice and the month’s severance pay. If the plan is adopted, they won’t be barred from reapplying once hiring resumes. And both new hires and returnees will be working for a bigger, more professional department that properly compensates its officers.
This plainly isn’t going to happen right away. In fact, District Attorney Ed Grannis has said that the process of restoring police powers can’t even begin until Jarvies’ contract is extended or a permanent chief is installed.
The larger, obvious point is that it can’t begin at all unless the town board commits itself to a plan and to providing the wherewithal to move it forward. It doesn’t necessarily have to be this plan. But if the aldermen vote this one down without putting up a better one, that will be another leadership default and another undeserved blow to the public’s trust.
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