Union representative defends Brownsville Borough Police
I read with interest an article dated June 2, 2013, in the Herald-Standard regarding the FBI and the Brownsville Borough police. I’m the secretary-treasurer for Teamsters Local 491, which represents the full-time police officers of Brownsville Borough.
There is a lot more to this story than was laid out in the article. I am writing to give you a somewhat different perspective than the misleading commentary received from Borough Councilman John Hosler.
Contrary to what Councilman Hosler would have the public believe, the police officers of the borough do a tremendous job under very difficult circumstances. The borough is facing an unprecedented influx of drugs and drug-related crime. The police department, like other departments in the borough, is forced to constantly do more and more with less. Despite the limitations on funding, the borough’s police department has recorded a dramatic increase in the number of arrests for drug-related offenses in the past several years.
In 2006 the department brought a total of eight criminal charges for drug-related activity. In 2007 there was one charge for drug-related activity during the entire year. By 2011 the number of charges for drug-related crimes rose to 48. In 2012 that number almost doubled to 93 charges. So far in 2013 the Department has brought a total of 42 criminal charges of drug-related activity. In addition the total number of crimes being charged by the department has risen from 130 in 2006 to 224 in 2012.
These numbers bear out the stepped-up law enforcement efforts of the borough police in the past four years. What has not gone up is the number of complaints filed with the Department of Officer Misconduct. In the last three-and-one-half years there have been a total of seven complaints filed with the department regarding officer conduct.
In one instance, the officer was reprimanded as a result of the investigation for not bringing the individual up on criminal charges. In other words, the officer should have charged the individual with a crime but failed to do so.
Each of the other complaints was investigated and ultimately cleared. There has not been one instance of a valid complaint of officer mistreatment toward anyone.
The two claims mentioned in our article (Albert DeSalvo and Angela Perkins) involve individuals who have never brought any type of formal complaint against the officer involved. Mr. DeSalvo went to the trouble some time ago to request a copy of the borough’s code of conduct, which includes the complaint procedure to bring a complaint against an officer, but to date he has never filed any claim with the department.
Ms. Perkins addressed borough council at a meeting in April about the situation involving her son, but neither she nor her son ever took the step of bringing a complaint against the officer that she says mistreated her son. Despite the fact that these individuals were made aware of the complaint procedure, they have never submitted any claim to the department. Instead, the matter was raised at a council meeting and in a newspaper article instead of following the established procedure to investigate such a claim.
The focus of the article was on the fact that the FBI has confirmed that it received a request to investigate the police department. However, contrary to the claim of Councilman Hosler, there have not been 30-plus complaints filed with the borough in the past two months. That is simply false — as of the date the article appeared there were a total of seven complaints since the beginning of 2010, and every one of those complaints had already been cleared.
It is interesting that Councilman Hosler also took the opportunity to inform you that pornographic material was found on a municipal computer, although he somehow failed to point out that the computer wasn’t the computer utilized by the police department. It is a computer in another part of the borough building that was available to almost anyone in borough government.
Mr. Hosler obviously hoped that people would associate the computer with the complaints against the police even though there is no apparent connection whatsoever.
Local 491 fully support’s the idea of an investigation into these allegations. The fact is that the department, its police officers and the law-abiding citizens of the borough will benefit from a thorough investigation into these questionable claims. When claims of police misconduct are raised or repeated by a member of the borough council, those claims can (even when they are completely false) affect the ability of the police to do their job.
There is a segment of our community that is unfortunately deeply involved in criminal drug activity, and that segment of our community stands to gain if the police officers are harassed and intimidated into backing down from their efforts to fight that criminal activity.
Sgt. John Brant is responsible for more that one-half of the drug-related arrests in 2012. Sgt. Brant is the handler for the K-9 police dog that has greatly enhanced the department’s ability to locate illegal drugs.
It should be no surprise then that Sgt. Brant would be made a focus of these complaints. Local 491 is convinced that an outside investigation is now necessary in view of the negative publicity brought on by Councilman Hosler. Local 491 is confident that a fair, unbiased investigation will reveal that the complaints reported to the newspaper are meritless. Then it will be appropriate to investigate the source of those meritless complaints.
Vito Dragone, Jr. is the secretary-treasurer for Chauffeurs, Teamsters & Helpers Local Union No. 491.