Allegations that a Plainsboro police officer was questioned about his sexual preference during his appeal of a sergeant’s exam and, in a separate incident, that a performance improvement plan put into place to improve another officer’s performance violates the state quota law have been made against the police department in an anonymous letter sent to newspapers this month.##M:[more]##Both officers are active in the police union, which is currently involved in contract negotiations with the township.
According to the letter, Plainsboro PBA 319 President Nick Procaccini was questioned during one of the depositions during his appeal of a sergeants exam by the township labor attorney over whether he was gay and if he dated men. The letter states that Procaccini filed a complaint with the township administrator, who brought in an independent investigator. “They advised Nick that the questions asked of him were not intended to harass him,” the letter states. The letter also states that an investigation by the township was completed, but that “there was no indication from the town that they had a problem with the fact that Nick was asked if he dated men.”
Procaccini confirmed some of the allegations made in the letter, but said the attorney from the Ruderman and Glickman firm in Springfield, Union County, who questioned him with regard to his deposition, never specifically asked him if he was gay. “They did ask me if I dated men, they wanted to know the names of women I had relationships with, for how long, and if I was afraid of commitment to women — hardly the questions I expected to be asked for appealing a sergeant’s exam,” he said.
Procaccini says he took the test in 2004 and had appealed the result because he thought he should have finished higher up. Procaccini said he couldn’t comment about whether or not there was an investigation done by the township or what the result of that investigation was.
In response to the allegations involving Procaccini, Police Chief Elizabeth Bondurant declined to comment, saying it was a personnel matter.
The second incident involves a performance improvement plan put into place regarding Officer Richard Colucci. According to a copy of a memo sent from Sergeant Troy Bell to the township, which was sent with the letter and dated November 1, 2007, “a plan was put into place to increase Ptl. Colucci’s monthly selective enforcements and motor vehicle stops. He will attempt to perform daily selective enforcements and make motor vehicle stops if his work load permits. He will target 8-10 operations per month for the remainder of 2007.”
Further, the memo states, “the employee was informed that failure to improve any noted performance deficiencies will be reflected in the next performance evaluation and may subject him to future disciplinary action.”
The anonymous letter alleges the plan violates the state quota law, which states that state, county, and municipal police departments “shall not establish any policy, either formal or informal, requiring or suggesting that any law enforcement officer meet a quota for arrests or citations.” The law also states that “the department or force shall not use the number of arrests or citations issued by a law enforcement officer as the sole or primary criterion for promotion, demotion, dismissal, or the earning of any benefit provided by the department or force.”
Procaccini confirmed this allegation as well, saying, “the quota law is to prevent officers from having to make a stop, which is a search and seizure issue. Whether you issue the ticket or not is one issue, but to stop somebody because you have to is no different than issuing a ticket because you have to.”
Colucci, who is the state PBA delegate for the Plainsboro PBA 319, echoes the sentiment. He says his motor vehicle enforcement has been “like a rock” in his 20-plus years with the department, and that he has never deviated from his performance.
Back in the 1990s, Colucci says, police officials starting threatening disciplinary action unless officers began issuing more tickets. Members of the Plainsboro PBA and other PBAs from around the state drafted the quota bill, got support from state politicians, and helped the law get passed, he says. “You cannot reward a police officer and you cannot punish a police officer for doing too much or not enough as far as issuing traffic summonses,” Colucci says.
He also says that police officials purposefully omitted the word “summons” on his performance improvement plan for this reason. “Their contention is there’s a difference between stopping a car and writing a ticket, and I’ve been trying to explain to them, and I’m sure they understand it, that there is no difference,” he said. “That stop is a seizure of that car, and everyone in it.”
And, he says, by doing this, police officials are hoping that more stops lead to more tickets. “Once you go down that road, the police officer is going to be forced to throw discretion to the wind for the sake of personal preservation,” Colucci said. “With that kind of threat, nobody’s going to want to lose their job.”
“By threatening me with disciplinary action if I don’t pick it up, it is subjecting some motorist to a car stop that they may not otherwise have to be subjected to,” he added.
Colucci says that since receiving the plan, he has not since heard whether it has been remedied. None of his supervisors would tell him how many tickets he needed to write to satisfy the plan, he said. Colucci says an unfair labor practice complaint filed by the PBA on the matter will head to the state board of mediation for a hearing in October.
Bondurant says that the department did not violate the law at all. “I don’t want to debate the merits of personnel matters that involve specific officers, but I will state that we did not violate the quota law, and that if you read the quota law, traffic enforcement is a basic function of a police officer’s job,” she said. “We, at no time, told officers to write specific numbers of tickets.”
Further, she explained that selective enforcement means “going to particular locations at particular times to focus on specific violations.” For example, selective enforcement would be sending officers to areas of town where residents have complained about problems of a high number of accidents. Selective enforcement also includes campaigns like “Click-It or Ticket” and the drunk driving campaigns for which the department receives grants, she says.
“The direction is to interact with the motoring public, not write a specific number of tickets,” Bondurant says.
