Commentary

Working For the Man

They fire good officers. They hire - and promote - bad ones. One former officer tells about life inside DPS.

By Amber Plaunty and David Baufman

During the research process for this issue, the Oregon Commentator interviewed Kim Maynard, a former employee of the Department of Public Safety.

An experienced safety officer - he once ran a security organization employing more than 150 people - Maynard aired numerous complaints and made serious allegations concerning the conduct of the DPS and its working environment. A DPS officer for more than five years, Maynard resigned just this Sepetember. Maynard contends that he was among the victims of an intentional, ongoing effort to weed out older employees as well as those that do not fit the narrow profile that he claims supervisors at DPS look for.

"Basically, they made working conditions so bad that I felt compelled to resign." Maynard said. Among the management officers whom Maynard said contributed to the hostile environment was Lt. Marte Martinez.

Hired as a patrol officer, Martinez advanced to sergeant after a mere four months; six months later, she was promoted to lieutenant. This move was out of the ordinary, Maynard felt; it seemed to him and others that as senior officers, they were unfaily excluded from the hiring process. "There were a couple of us who were going to apply for a lieutenant position... [Former officer] Terry Gaeta and myself felt that the direction of the place was going downhill, and that it had been poorly managed for a long time," Maynard explained. "They needed some good management in there." Gaeta could not be reached for comment by the time of publication.

The DPS administration divided a single lieutenant position into two, creating an Administrative and Operations Lieutenant. Maynard and Gaeta applied for the positions, but were discouraged by Director Tom Fitzpatrick. "The application process was basically him telling us how horrible we were and what problems we were causing." While it made sense that the original lieutenant - Joan Saylor - should retain one of thepositions, contract policy maintains that every eligible officer has a chance to apply. According to Maynard, Fitzpatrick said he wouldnÕt even consider his or Gaeta's application for Administrative Lieutenant. "They just gave the department a memo," Maynard says. "'The new lieutenants are Martinez and Saylor.' "

Due to legal issues, the Commentator was unable to confirm the current status of Lieutenant Martinez; DPS maintains that she is on "personal leave," but confidential sources say she will not be returning to the department. As to why Martinez is on leave, Maynard did not believe it was a voluntary decision on her part. "I'm 99.9 percent sure it was harassment," Maynard said, "because harassment is what she does best."

According to Maynard, Martinez played favorites, allowing Sgt. Sean Strahon "to go to his girlfriend's track meet on duty without a radio and get paid for it," while she sometimes called officers out to locations beyond their patrolling jurisdiction. "I was on the radio once when Lt. Martinez was out at Autzen Stadium and called to have one of us come out to check on some woman on Centennial [Boulevard] who was laying on the sidewalk. Centennial is not Autzen; it's not on campus." Incidents like these, coupled with her rapid advancement, contributed to resentment of Martinez within the department.

Martinez's harassment was not limited to fellow employees, either. Maynard claims Martinez told officers that it was okay to use force to obtain entry to students' rooms, even after the student has denied them entrance. "That's breaking and entering... it's like your home... they can't come in unless they have a search warrant and [DPS] can't get search warrants," Maynard said.

A few months after Maynard and Gaeta were denied consideration for lieutenant, a steadily mounting series of incidents led Maynard to consider resigning his position.

After Maynard took four days sick leave due to a virus, Fitzpatrick told him that he would need a doctor's release to return to work. Maynard pointed out that his contract stated he only needed a note from a doctor after seven days' absence. According to Maynard, Fitzpatrick said, "Well, we'll deal with this some other way." At the end of the following week, Maynard came in to the office where he heard Parking and Transportation Manager Rand Stamm "talking to the secretary saying, 'I don't know what's going to happen, but it should be interesting.'"

What followed was: Maynard was ordered to report to the Watch Commander's office and was put on administrative leave until he could provide a doctor's statement approving him for returning to work. This notice came after Maynard had already worked a full week following his four days sick leave.

Another incident that added to his frustration happened when Fitzpatrick brought in a trainer to set up four eight-hour training sessions, to familiarize officers with certain defensive tactics. Because of Maynard's physical limitations as a disabled war veteran, his not being able to complete the second defensive tactics course - in which officers rode bicycles up and down the steps at Autzen Stadium - disqualified him from participating in the bike patrol, which he was assigned to at the time.

"This was another thing to try to get rid of us older officers," Maynard says. "I have all the same paperwork that everyone else has, but they took away my pepper spray and [baton]," sending Maynard out to patrol the campus without adequate means to defend himself.

Other incidents were more bizarre: Maynard was written up for "bringing in large meals" and sharing them with students. He claimed that the meals were never disruptive to the work atmosphere, and that he liked cooking for the hungry and cash-poor student workers. "I love to cook, so I used to bring in food and tell the students, 'Hey, if you're hungry, come back here.' I didn't cook it there; I cooked it at home and brought it in."

Maynard claims that Terry Gaeta was mistreated in a similar manner, which he believes led to her resignation. "She was a bike patrol officer... and then all of a sudden they hire a new person, assign him as bike patrol officer." Gaeta was reduced to driving around campus in "one of the beat-up pizza vans," as Maynard called the DPS vans. Maynard also recalled an instance in which Stamm ordered an officer to ticket Gaeta's truck, even though it was legally parked and sported the necessary parking permit. "[Stamm] just didn't like the fact that it was a long truck [in a compact parking space], but the fact was that she wasn't even driving that truck that day," Maynard explained. Upon hearing of Stamm's action, Gaeta

"walked out the door and said, 'I can't even go back in that office.'"

Maynard says she then went to Oregon Hall and turned in her keys without cleaning out her locker.

Director Tom Fitzpatrick had little to say about Maynard's accusations. "We had some folks that were unhappy working here - they chose to leave," he told the Commentator.

However, not all former officers left willingly, Maynard says.

One officer was released after his six-month probation period, even though, according to Maynard, "he made more money for the department on parking than any other parking officer ever." Maynard explains his view of the officer's discharge: "He talked back to Joan Saylor the first week because when he got hired he had a beard. They interviewed him with a beard, they re-interviewed him with a beard... never said a word about it and his first day on the job... they said 'Oh, you can't have a beard.'" Maynard recounts the officer's reply: "'What? I went through this whole process, several interviews, face-to-face and you never said a word about having a beard and now you hire me and I've got to shave it off?'" The officer did shave his beard, indicating to Maynard that the beard itself was not the real cause for termination; rather, the comment to Saylor afterwards. Maynard believes that is the true reason why they let him go. "Because he talked back."

Another dispatcher worked as a reserve police officer and took time off for his reserve duties. Saylor, believing he was using sick leave for the reserve duty, "called up his commander at the reserves and demanded to have copy of his work records," recalls Maynard. "When the dispatcher found out about it, he confronted Joan, he said 'That's my private thing, it doesn't interfere with my job here.' So she fired him."

Tom Fitzpatrick, however, did not believe that Maynard could possess any credible information about the department's personnel issues. "There are very few people who truly have access [to personnel information] because the personnel information in this department is confidential." He similarly brushed off Maynard's allegations, saying "Kim Maynard had very little access to what goes on in this department." However, Fitzpatrick said that he and Maynard got along well, and was disappointed that Maynard had never come to him personally to discuss his reasons for leaving the department.

Aside from Maynard's allegations of harassment by management, there are other issues relating to the hiring of the department's personnel.

A former officer, Genaro Siliga Acuna, was fired in December of 1999 and arrested by the Eugene Police Department on four counts of Theft in the First Degree, four counts of Official Misconduct in the First Degree and Burglary in the Second Degree. In all, the State of Oregon estimated that Acuna stole $4,750, including a G3 Macintosh laptop, a Dell computer, and more than a thousand dollars worth of Fred Meyer gift certificates.

"I don't think Joan [Saylor] did a very good background check on the guy," Maynard said. "He came from San Diego and had worked on a sort of Coast Guard group. I remember a story, him saying that when they had drug busts on these ships, the Narcs would come and take the dope and arrest the people. He said he and his crew would just go [aboard] and take everything that they wanted."

More recently, the Commentator discovered that an officer currently employed at the department has a restraining order against him from 1996, before he was hired by DPS. Fitzpatrick was still in California at the time of the hire, and when asked by the Commentator, he had no knowledge of the restraining order. "I wasn't aware of that," he said. Associate Director Tom Hicks, however, was part of the DPS administration at the time, and when he was later asked about the restraining order, he too admitted to the oversight.

Fitzpatrick defended the officer, however, saying, "he's shown a strong work ethic since he's been here. He is a hard worker. I believe he's honest."

Despite the allegations against the department and despite the tumultuous personnel situation, Fitzpatrick believes the department is a good place to work, though there is room for improvement. "There are a number of people that were here when I got here that are still here, and who appear to be somewhat happy working here," he said. "I hope the working environment will get better... and more people will come and stay here and work hard and we'll have a better environment."

Amber Plaunty, a sophomore majoring in Journalism, is a staff writer for the Oregon Commentator
David Baufman is David Baufman.