Timoney sees a blow to strategy

A labor examiner ruled that police must stop using civilian experts to do crime-mapping.

A state hearing examiner has dealt what Philadelphia Police Commissioner John F. Timoney described yesterday as a potential blow to the heart of his crime-fighting strategy - the computerized mapping of crime.

The examiner for the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board ordered the Police Department to stop using computer specialists trained at the University of Pennsylvania to develop the sophisticated maps that increasingly guide police deployment and tactics.

Examiner Donald A. Wallace, ruling on a complaint from the Fraternal Order of Police, said department brass had improperly taken work from unionized officers by hiring the nonunion civilians. He said that under the city's contract with the FOP, mapping was the province of sworn officers.

``Given the same training and equipment,'' Wallace wrote, police officers ``would be able to produce the same work.''

The March 19 ruling, a copy of which was obtained yesterday, will not take effect until the city has exhausted its appeals - usually a yearlong process.

``I'm really upset,'' Timoney said in an interview. ``This flies in the face of everything we're trying to do here with regard to reform. It seems like every time we try to make a step in this direction, we're blocked off.''

FOP officials countered that they had no objection to improving the force. But they said the department acted unilaterally in establishing the mapping unit, ignoring the requirement for collective bargaining.

``The kids are doing our work,'' said union lawyer Thomas W. Jennings, referring to the civilian mapping experts. ``They stole our work. The work belongs to us.''

The mapping team was set up in late 1997, under Timoney's predecessor, Richard Neal. Its three members, who are paid about $35,000 a year, all hold master's degrees from Penn and report to Deputy Commissioner Charles Brennan, who established the unit.

Timoney took command of the department last year after a career as a top police commander in New York, where computerized mapping was credited with helping bring about a steep drop in crime. He immediately gave the Philadelphia mapping unit a high profile.

The maps it produces - which show how rapes, robberies and other crimes are distributed by location and time of day - are the centerpiece of the department's weekly ``Compstat'' meetings, at which commanders are grilled about crime trends on their turf.

Recently, the mappers have worked with the police ballistics and homicide units to develop leads in slayings to which there were no known witnesses. One such map traced the path of a handgun used in two shootings and a murder in different locations over two days.

The hearing examiner found that the mapping unit had usurped work previously done by a graphic arts unit established in the 1980s and staffed by police officers. Wallace acknowledged that the civilian unit has operated on a more sophisticated plane, developing custom software.

But he said that some of its functions duplicate work done by the graphic arts unit and that, under state labor law, meant the civilians could not do any further mapping for the department.

Wallace ordered Timoney to ``reinstate that work to the bargaining unit.'' The ruling can be appealed to the labor board and then the courts.

Timoney contends that the computerized maps are far more complex than what his aides described as simple push-pin maps produced by the graphics arts unit.

The police commissioner said it was ludicrous to compare ``officers assigned to graphic arts who do mapping with crayons'' with ``these kids who have master's degrees.''

Though Timoney and the FOP have generally been on good terms, the union has disputed several of his key moves.

In addition to challenging the mapping unit, the FOP on Feb. 5 filed a grievance against a test program intended to relieve detectives of paperwork so they would have more time to investigate crimes.

In the pilot program in South Philadelphia, uniformed officers prepare paperwork on all suspects they arrest. Elsewhere in the city, that task, which typically takes about an hour, is done by detectives.

The FOP contends that the change makes uniformed patrol officers do detectives' work at 10 percent less pay than detectives get. The grievance, filed in February and still pending, seeks a pay increase for the patrol officers during the time they handle the paperwork.

Timoney said the grievance was ``disgraceful, absolute garbage.''

``Our detectives should be out investigating, spending most of their time out there in the street, working with informants, cracking cases, not sitting around there typing a case,'' he said.

FOP president Richard B. Costello said he and Timoney discussed freeing detectives from paperwork a couple of months ago. But he said he thought the change would involve having individual officers fill out arrest forms. Instead, he said, a new unit of patrol officers was created to handle that work.

``There would have been an advantage to having the guy who made the collar do the paperwork. They seemed to like the idea of processing their own pinches. It dignified the rank of patrol officer a little,'' Costello said.

``But they didn't dignify the rank of patrol officer at all. They just reduced the pay level of those doing the follow-up paperwork.''

In another dispute with the department, the FOP recently won a ruling from a labor board hearing examiner regarding the department's Field Associates Program, an anticorruption effort.

The program, begun in the '80s and revived in 1995 after a corruption scandal in the 39th District in North Philadelphia, recruits cadets while they are in the Police Academy - and unknown to most veterans on the force - to inform on corrupt police.

The labor board ruled that the department must give the union ``any and all information'' about the program. The union said it was entitled to the information so it could determine whether its members were doing detective work, so they could be compensated appropriately. The department is reviewing the ruling.

The ruling, dated Monday, does not say whether the information to be provided includes the names of the ``field associates,'' which are kept confidential. Costello said it was his position that it should.

He said he needed to know the associates' identities in order to determine whether they were performing detective functions and were thus entitled to higher pay.