Chapter 37: Fixing Things

Seamus turned fourteen on May 8. Like every year before then, Kelly and I wondered whether he would live long enough to see another birthday. The eternal question was which one of us would kill him first. On the other hand, he could consistently manage to take my mind off the ongoing crisis in the Matucket Police Department.

Over dinner that night he asked, “Dad, a mistress is a girlfriend, right?”

I looked across the table at Kelly and she looked as confused as I did. I turned my head towards our son and replied, “Not precisely, but close enough. It’s more like a second, secret girlfriend. Why?”

“I think I need a mistress.”

“Excuse me?” I said, astonished.

“I think that’s what I need, a second girlfriend.”

“You need another girlfriend?” We had met a pretty brunette after school holding his hand, but we doubted he had gotten anywhere past the hand-holding stage. Now he was looking for another?

I looked over at Kelly who was just shaking her head. “He’s the reincarnation of your brother,” she muttered. To Seamus, she said, “And that’s not a good thing!”

“Where did you come up with this brainstorm?” I asked.

“Seamus, this is dumb, even for you!” added Riley.

“I found on the web a formula for figuring out the perfect age of a mistress,” he said.

“You found a formula? Why don’t you tell your mother? You know, the professor of mathematics?”

He looked at his mother and said, “The guy takes his age and divides it by two, and then adds seven. I just turned fourteen, so if I divide by two, I get seven, and then add seven I get back to fourteen. Cool, huh!”

“Uh, huh,” she said drily. She gave me a look that meant,’ Do something!’

Before I could bury him in the back yard he asked, “How old are you, Dad?”

“Don’t go there.”

Riley answered, “He’s forty-three.” I gave her a dirty look.

He went there. “So, if we divide by two ... uh, twenty-one-and-a-half ... add seven, your perfect mistress is twenty-eight!” he said with a smile.

I looked at Kelly. “Seems reasonable to me.”

“Remember what you said about not going there!”

I snorted a laugh. Riley then said, “So if I subtract seven and then double the number, I could be a mistress for somebody who’s ... twenty.” She looked at her mother and asked, “So I can start hanging around over at Matucket State?”

That generated another dry look. Kelly looked at me and said, “Right after I meet a seventy-year-old guy.”

“Looking for that early inheritance, babe?” I rolled my eyes and then looked at Seamus. “Don’t get your hopes up, smart guy. The other part about mistresses is they cost a lot of money. A lot! More than you’ll ever make dumping garbage working for your Uncle Dave at the mill. You’ll need the kind of money that will make the chief of police interested, understand. Maybe you need to work on your girlfriends one at a time, like the rest of us.”

Seamus grinned at that. “I’ll think about it, Dad.”

“You do that.” A mistress at fourteen? Good Lord! I just knew I was going to hear about this from Kelly after the kids went to bed.

Over the next few weeks, we started to see some changes in the MPD. For one thing, it got smaller. We lost two patrol officers and a detective, and Ramirez decided that if she couldn’t become a captain she wasn’t going to stick around. She took her marbles and went home. I hadn’t been impressed in any case. I got together with my two captains, Holden and Warren, and with Sergeant Crenshaw, and promoted Sergeant Celia Cogburn in Patrol to Lieutenant and put her in charge of Services. Celia was African-American, so a black female looked just wonderful in the media, but to be fair, everybody said she was highly qualified. I had to pay a lot of attention to that crap now. The job really called for a captain, but we just didn’t have a lieutenant to promote. In the long run, though, I still wasn’t sure we needed both a captain and a lieutenant in Services. I thought a single white shirt and a few decent sergeants would do the job okay. Mindy Hollis was working out great and was worth a sergeant or two all on her own!

Mindy figured out writing an RFP for the engineering on a new storage annex, but we didn’t put it out for bid. Instead, we invited the county council to have their next meeting in the main conference room. The conference table was still in the room, though it was now off to one side. All the chairs that had been around the table were now gone. They had been taken out when the conference room was converted to ‘temporary’ storage and were now all over the station, replacing chairs in worse condition. As the council entered the conference room, I handed them a folding chair and welcomed them. It got their attention. I had already led them through the building on a short inspection tour, so they could see the peeling paint and torn flooring. Then Mindy and I hit them with the RFP and an emergency budget request that would cover some of the shortfall we would have until the next budget cycle kicked in. There was a fair bit of grumbling at that, so I thanked Mindy and sent her home. Then I reminded the council of the budget numbers I had told them about back when I was being hired.

“I think it is much too soon to begin considering a budget increase, Mister Reaper. The budget you submitted was simply a proposal and will need to be reviewed by the public and scaled back appropriately,” said Harlan Alderdyce.

“This is wasted money! We need to shut down the entire department and call in the Department of Justice immediately!” added Theo Pendergast.

I kept my mouth shut and looked at Sue Thadwicket and Jim Talbot instead. Sue sighed and said, “We are not calling Washington to handle our problems. We knew about this when we decided to fix the department. Nothing has changed since then.” She looked at me. “How much, Doctor Reaper?”

“Five million.”

That led to a predictable uproar. Five million dollars now, plus an increase in the upcoming budget of another five million, was going to be a considerable shock to the good citizens of Matucket. A big part of my future job would involve attending public budget meetings. Eventually I settled on $3.75 million for the rest of the fiscal year. That would at least allow me to start paying overtime, increase training, and start recruiting. From there I was able to bring up the RFP for the new storage annex. Technically the Request For Proposal was only a request for the funding for an engineering study and design for the annex. Then, after the design was created, a second RFP would be required to pay for the construction for the annex. Of course, the engineering firm that did the design would have an in on the bid for the construction. Maybe we could get a better price on the design that way.

I did a few more ride-alongs to get the feel for the shifts and the current situation. I also sat down with the Personnel clerk to review current training status in the department. The status was unnerving. Put simply, for the last several years training was almost nonexistent. We already knew that one of the previous chiefs had specialized in pencil-whipping reports, signing off on training that had never actually taken place. Another cute scam was to have officers do online training instead of being sent to the academy in Forsyth to take the classes; online training often consisted of screens that could be rapidly clicked through without a need to learn from them. Likewise, we found an awful lot of waivers being granted to allow officers to skip training. For the last year or so, for instance, nobody had been required to requalify at the range in West Springs; waivers had been granted stating that they had demonstrated proficiency, no details provided.

We generated a memo and had it posted and given to all officers, and then Crenshaw read it at the next morning roll call. There was some good-natured grumbling but not as much as some might expect. Online courses were generally considered almost useless. In addition, the prospect of being paid to get out of town for a few days to go to Forsyth was treated by some as an escape from home life. At the end of class, they would head out for dinner and hit the bars, maybe chase some strange tail away from home. The only groans came when it was announced that monthly requalification at the range would begin the second Saturday of every month, beginning June 10. Marksmanship is a perishable skill, even for a natural shot like me, and maintaining proficiency required an officer to spend time at the range and pay for his own cartridges.

I waited until Crenshaw finished reviewing the requirements before coming into the squad room. He promptly called everybody to attention as I walked to the podium. Discipline had improved markedly since my first roll call, when the response was surly and antagonistic. At this roll call the officers had neat haircuts, tidy uniforms (aside from the occasional doughnut crumb), and close shaves. “At ease. Please be seated.” I waited until everybody was seated again before speaking. ‘Thank you. I just wanted to comment on Sergeant Crenshaw’s announcement. As many of you are aware, in the last few years training and continuing education have taken a hit. You should also be aware that we have managed to get the county council to commit several million dollars towards officer training, recruitment, and overtime. You might have heard about the overtime already, but it’s official.”

There was a very positive response to the information about overtime. Patrolmen, Senior Patrolmen, and Sergeants were all paid by the hour, so overtime was something highly desirable. In a no-overtime environment officers who had to work past the end of shift would either not be paid for their time or be allowed to take time off at the end of their next shift. Neither was desirable. White shirts, the lieutenants and captains and the chief, got what was called comp time, compensatory time, the equivalent of extra vacation time. We almost never took enough vacation time to use it up.

I smiled and nodded. “Yes, feel free to pass it along. It’s official. The rules are simple, though. Only your shift commander or above can authorize OT, but it’s allowed again. Just keep in mind, there’s a downside. We are going to tighten up training. No more waivers. No more online training unless it’s a course authorized by Forsyth. And, especially, no more whitewashing or gundecking of requirements. That includes your weapon requalification. You’ve got three weeks or so before some of you will need to be at the range, so you might want to get some practice time in on your next day off. From here on in we are all going to be current and qualified, in everything.”

Somebody in the back asked, “What about you, Chief? You going to requalify, too?” There was some laughter at that.

I smiled back. “Oh, my prideful friend, I plan to be there to watch the requalification. The only time I’ve shot less than perfect in a qualification test was when one of my shots went through a bullet hole I had already shot. Feeling lucky? Pistol or rifle, just bring your money. I take cash, check, and all major credit cards.” There was some more hooting and laughter at that and I turned it back over to Crenshaw to close out.

In the meantime, I began to see what we could do to increase recruitment. Currently we weren’t recruiting at all. As part of the cost cutting effort, we had simply been hiring Intermediate level officers on the open market. In the system I had become a cop under, we had mostly recruited academy graduates, some of whom the department had sent to the academy in the first place. It took longer but you could train them to meet your requirements. Hiring on the open market meant you might get what other departments had rejected. I had Mindy post ads for new recruits in all the local papers as well as on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Additionally, we put hiring ads on the various computer bulletin boards at all the police academies. I even called each academy division commander and told them what I was up to and that we were hiring and looking for some immediate recruits. Another thing I did was place ads for administrative assistants. We had often sent admins, like I had been, off to the academy.

By my calculations, if we were at our full 196 complement and had a standard twenty-year career, we needed to replace five percent of our strength every year. Five percent of 196 worked out to about ten recruits a year. Figure one a month. We were understrength by almost forty officers and detectives. If we could hire two a month and keep them, we could be almost up to strength in three years. I had promised major improvements in three years, the time my contract was up. I needed to hire a couple of dozen officers a year for the next few years to keep up with retirements and transfers out.

My first operational change was in Investigations. One of my predecessors was a bean counter who had shut down all the various detective detachments. The Gang Task Force and the Drug Task Force had just been the first. Instead, a half dozen detectives had been fired and half the rest were dumped into a Major Crime Squad. The remainders were all lumped together as generic detectives. There was supposed to be a new computer program that would have all the information on every case, so any detective would have all the information at his or her fingertips. Detectives would be considered interchangeable parts. The software never worked, but the disastrous reorganization lasted.

The reason that detectives are put into different task forces and divisions isn’t because some are better than others. It’s because it allows them to specialize. The Gang Task Force isn’t composed of gang-busting supercops but setting up a group of detectives who specialize allows them to know all the members in the gangs. They can learn all the key players, the interactions between the gangs, their suppliers and customers, and develop face-to-face relationships.

I sat down with Captain Holden and Lieutenant Dupree of Investigations and decided we needed to reverse the trend. I left it up to them to work out the details, but the first thing we created was a new Auto Theft detail. Several high-end cars had recently been stolen in East Matucket, including a brand-new Beemer and a classic Mercedes that belonged to a major contributor to various county councilmen. He complained to the Council, the Council complained to the County Executive, the Exec complained to the Chief of Police. Shit flows downhill. We announced the creation of an Auto Theft Division, and three detectives were assigned to it. They would investigate all stolen cars, begin tracking down ‘chop shops’ where stolen cars were stripped down for parts, and try to trace any patterns they discovered. I also told Holden and Dupree to start planning other special details and task forces. We might as well start fixing things.