My antenna went up when I read that Durham City Attorney Henry Blinder advised the City Council that personnel-privacy issues will be a problem for the “independent” committee looking into how the Durham Police Department handled the Duke lacrosse case:
City Attorney Henry Blinder also advised the council Monday that the committee, which is supposed to meet in public, has to be careful not to violate the state’s personnel-privacy laws.
The committee should focus on “broader operational and criminal-procedure issues,” not on “individual employee performance or [recommending] any disciplinary actions against individual employees,” Blinder said.
Blinder says “individual employee performance” should not be a focus of the committee’s investigation. I ask then: What the deuce should be their focus?
This entire case is about poor performance by tax-paid employees. Already it is obvious that either Police Chief Steve Chalmers or Investigator Benjamin Himan was less than candid about when the police knew of the rape accuser’s contradictory versions of events, i.e., long before indictments came down. I call that a relevant “individual employee performance” issue right there.
We also know that Deputy Chief Ron Hodge had his hands all over this case, which, in the view of many, should immediately disqualify him as a candidate to replace Chalmers. Fortunately, at least some Council members seem sensitive to that:
“I am confident the manager is going to take into consideration all the factors related to the cases that Deputy Chief Hodge has worked on,” Woodard said. “He was in the chain of command and there were periods during this investigation when we know that Chief Chalmers was handling family matters.”
Councilman Thomas Stith echoed the point. “This was certainly a significant occurrence in Deputy Chief Hodge’s record of service, so I would want the manager to weigh this along with the information he’s weighing on the other candidates,” he said.
It looks like Blinder is trying to emasculate the committee before it even has its first meeting. Let’s hope Willis Whichard doesn’t buy that limited view of the commission’s charge.
