PHILADELPHIA MONITOR BRINGS FIRE ON POLICE

PHILADELPHIA, April 3 — Ellen Ceisler dutifully heads into work each
morning as something of a civilian pariah, the lone court-appointed auditor
of the Philadelphia Police Department's chronically scandalous attempts at
self-discipline. She seems no match for the larger- than-life statue she
passes — that of the late mayor and police commissioner Frank L. Rizzo,
whose iron-fisted defense of the police knew no bounds.

"Some people joke that Rizzo ought to be holding civilian complaint forms
in his hand," notes Ms. Ceisler, director of the Police Integrity and
Accountability Office. But she is hardly laughing as she monitors a 20-year
record of hundreds of internal police cases that have led her to conclude
in a new study that the department's discipline of its officers has ranged
from "inscrutable" to "dysfunctional," with wayward officers often
unpunished in the face of union prerogatives and a questionable arbitration
system.

"Some of these officers, because of their known propensity towards
violence, instability, anger or histories of drug and alcohol abuse, pose a
danger not only to citizens who live and work in this city, and the people
who pass through it, but also to the other officers with whom they work,"
Ms. Ceisler warned in her report.

The report concluded that the department was making attempts at progress
but needed a far greater effort against entrenched abuses. Ms. Ceisler
criticized the arbitration process for reinstating officers despite
evidence of misconduct including drug use, theft, and physical abuse and
sexual harassment of civilians. In one case, she cited the failure to
discipline an officer despite "overwhelming evidence" that he had left a
shooting victim to die in the street.

Ms. Ceisler, a former investigative journalist, admits that she expected
her study to draw little attention in a city so inured to its traditions.
Her oversight job was created after a notorious bout of corruption in the
1990's, which can seem like ancient history in this hard-driving place of
cyclical police scandal. At that time, the city had to scrap hundreds of
criminal prosecutions and pay tens of millions of dollars in damages when a
ring of officers in the 39th district were found rigging allegations and
evidence against innocent blacks.

As Ms. Ceisler's study was issued last month, the administration of Mayor
John F. Street was coincidentally embarrassed by headlines about a
three-year-old incident of police misconduct. Department investigators
found that officers had staged a midnight traffic accident to prevent the
potential firing of a homicide commander who had crashed his unmarked car
while drunk, then lied along with others in a cover-up.

"I believe in redemption," Police Commissioner John F. Timoney said as the
story broke in The Inquirer and he had to defend his decision to mete out
only a mild suspension to the commander. "Take your medicine like a good
soldier," Commissioner Timoney said, contending that the police union would
have reversed any stronger punishment in an arbitration appeal.

But, in the glare of headlines, Mayor Street found the medicine shockingly
innocuous. "There shouldn't be a double standard," he said last week as he
appointed a task force to study discipline problems and bolster public
confidence in the police.

At his side, a chastened Commissioner Timoney transferred the accused
commander, Capt. James J. Brady, from homicide to the night squad that
officers commonly refer to as Siberia. Of the earlier punishment,
Commissioner Timoney said, "Upon reflection, I believe that was not a good
decision."

Commissioner Timoney was recruited from the New York City Police Department
three years ago to run the often unruly department of 7,000 officers here.
In her report, Ms. Ceisler praised him as a leader of the drive for
stronger discipline. But she also concluded that the city must do a far
better job of investigating complaints, of facing up to the union and of
pressing cases through the maze of hearing and arbitration procedures that,
she warned, is itself a big part of the disciplinary problem.

"The arbitrators have become super-commissioners, in effect," Ms. Ceisler
said in an interview. "The department needs to figure out what its values
and standards are and stick by them."

The police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, was defended by its
president, Richard Costello, who described Ms. Ceisler's report as
"woefully inadequate and incomplete." Mr. Costello said a "lynch mob
mentality" was at work, with officers' civil rights at stake in the growing
criticism of the arbitration process. The union represents almost the
entire department in this pro-union city and has succeeded in reversing
about 90 percent of the misconduct findings routinely appealed to the
private arbitrators, chosen jointly under the contract between the union
and the city.

Mr. Costello denies complaints that the union can afford high-paid defense
lawyers to best the department's overworked disciplinary staff.

"They're losing cases because they continue to make the same mistakes over
and over again," he said, alleging department "arrogance" and attempts at
"punishment by headline."

But critics of the union stress that the commissioner has authority to
appoint only a very few of his top aides, and say he is no match for the
union in the power politics of this city.

"It's a horror show here," said Dr. James J. Fyfe, a former New York City
police officer who is a specialist in police misbehavior as a professor at
Temple University. "A film noir."

Dr. Fyfe has been studying the Police Department here for 20 years as an
academic and Justice Department consultant, and has concluded that it is
one of the worst in the nation for lax discipline, excessive union power
and an arbitration process that favors the police and cuts off most city
appeals to the courts.

Critics of the department praise Commissioner Timoney's efforts to fight
the Fraternal Order of Police, or F.O.P., by appointing a more aggressive
inquiry prosecutor and by requiring fuller disclosure of disciplinary
findings. He has also been seeking state legislation to gain a stronger
hand to fire the sort of abusive officers who Ms. Ceisler concluded are too
often reinstated by arbitrators.

"In past contract negotiations, when the city wouldn't pay its police what
they deserved, in return the control of the adjudicatory processes was
turned over to the F.O.P.," said Stefan Presser, legislative director of
the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. "Now it's time for the
city to bite the bullet," he said, and be more aggressive in negotiating to
reclaim control.