A new evaluation process for Plainsboro police officers that came under fire last February is scheduled to be implemented next month.
Plainsboro Police Chief Richard Furda confirmed the new evaluation process, which he said is aimed at ensuring officers are up to par with performing all of the functions included in their job descriptions, will be implemented in January.
The evaluation process was previously criticized in an anonymous letter to the News in February, which alleged that the new process was on the verge of becoming a policy that forces officers to make a certain number of traffic stops and issue a certain number of tickets.
Since then, Furda said he has worked with the PBA on the draft and “we’ve finally come up with a proposal that works for everybody,” he said.
As he explained it when it was first proposed, Furda said the new evaluation process was created to find an updated way to conduct personnel evaluations. The former process was long and cumbersome and to do an evaluation for one police officer usually took a supervisor two to three days to complete.
Furda also explained, at the time, that the new system looks at the same statistics which have always been tracked, just in a different way. Furda also said that the new system was simply being created to give officers a benchmark in seeing where most of their colleagues are measuring up. As he explained it in an E-mail to his employees then, instead of comparing all the members against each other, despite job function, the department would now be comparing members against each other in the same job function.
