They called it “Code 31.”
Thirty years ago, a scandal over a list of
town officials and prominent Republicans who police were told not to ticket led
to the indictment of the town’s then-supervisor, the ouster of its police chief
and the dissolution of the town police department.
It also resulted in
the creation of the Police Commission, which was abolished Wednesday by the Town
Board.
Now, village officials and members of the former commission say
they don’t want the commission to go. It was formed to bring professionalism to
the force, to keep politics out of policing and to restore public trust, they
said.
“What happened 30 years ago could happen 10 years into the future,
too,” said longtime Police Commission member James Spellman, who had been on the
Police Commission since those early days. “The guarantee was for the village
that the commission would oversee the department.”
Village Mayor Don
Ryan said he has asked a lawyer to look over documents dating back to those days
to determine if what the Town Board did was legal. At the time the commission
was created, the village also allowed the town to take over its own police
department.
“Under our law, it states it will be run by a police
commission,” Ryan said, referring to the police department. The village had a
representative on the Police Commission.
But Town Supervisor Patrick
Tyksinski said the scandals of the past are over and that he needs closer
control over the department as he begins the process of finding the right person
to replace retiring Police Chief Raymond Philo. Tyksinski also must negotiate a
new contract with the police officers’ union.
“I live in the village of
New Hartford,” he said. “The town and the village have historically worked very
closely.”
And, he added, what’s past is past.
“Times have changed,
and those types of incidents that happened then cannot and will not happen now,”
he said.
Code 31
It was a scandal that became
known as “Code 31,” tainting the town police department’s reputation and
ultimately leading it to be dissolved.
The chain of events in the late
1970s led to the indictment of then-Town Supervisor George Zegibe and the ouster
of Police Chief George Bowman. Events revealed that police officers had been
told to avoid filing charges against a list of 31 town officials and prominent
Republicans.
The first signs of the scandal came one weekend in November
1978 when 10 of the town’s 12 police officers resigned at once.
In
Observer-Dispatch articles from that time, Zegibe said they had left because of
a “personality problem.”
One of those officers, present-day Kirkland
Police Chief Daniel English, however, recently said that wasn’t
true.
“That was when the Code 31 list originally surfaced and was put
into practice,” he said. “We basically said, ‘We don’t like what we are seeing
and we don’t want to be a party to it.’”
That information did not appear
in news coverage at the time. Within days if the resignations, however,
then-Police Chief Bernard Wood abruptly retired and a new chief, Douglas Bowman,
was appointed.
Soon after that, six of the officers were reappointed,
including English, who says now he hoped things had changed.
He said the
problems continued, and a few months later, an Oneida County District Attorney’s
Office investigation into the list became public.
Another officer, James
Staggs, had filed a complaint after Zegibe allegedly tried to prevent him from
testifying at a hearing on a speeding ticket for Ronald Massaro, who did
accounting work for the town.
Zegibe denied the charge.
Ticket-fixing scandal
Zegibe and then-Police
Commissioner S. Ross Sloan told investigators that the list of names had been
posted in a building used by the town Republican and Democratic committees for
meetings, and had been accidentally distributed by an officer.
“We caught
it in time, and it was never implemented,” Sloan told the O-D at the time. “It
was only out for one day and there wasn’t anything to it.”
English,
however, said that didn’t sound right to him.
“All I can say is that it
was in the clipboards in some of the patrol cars,” he recalled. “It was well
known to a lot of people.”
By May 1, 1979, his father and fellow officer
James English, and another officer, Leroy William Conkling, had been fired.
Zegibe said at the time that they had been trying to “undermine” Bowman,
but English said they simply had been trying to cooperate with the
investigation.
When the grand jury returned, it indicted Zegibe over the
Massaro affair and recommended changes to the police department to make it more
professional. Zegibe’s indictment was subsequently tossed.
Another part
of the grand jury report was sealed by then-County Judge John Walsh, but two
years later, in June of 1981, it was unsealed on appeal.
It recommended
that Bowman be fired, saying he had ordered police officers not to charge
certain people even if they deemed crimes had been committed.
The aftermath
By October 1981, Bowman was gone
and the town was planning to purchase police services from the village. And the
next month, Democrat Gordon Newell became New Hartford’s first-ever Democratic
town supervisor when he defeated Zegibe at the polls.
The problems came
at a bad time for the town, however, Spellman said.
“That was the time
Sangertown and all the businesses were developing,” he said.
Newell knew
the town needed a strong police force to cope with the changing landscape,
Spellman said.
In the old town department, officers were not required to
go to academy, civil service laws were not followed and officers drove their own
vehicles while on duty. They put a magnetic decal on their cars so they could be
recognized as officers while on the clock, Spellman said.
The village
police, by contrast, did attend academy, had police vehicles and the department
was widely regarded as more professional than the town’s Spellman and former
Town Board member David Valentine said.
“The village was leery of the
town, the town was leery that the village would want to control the department,”
Valentine said. “The purpose of the Police Commission was to bring
professionalism and bring them in line with civil service.”
Reasons to abolish
This year, Tyksinski led the
push to abolish the commission after Town Attorney Herbert Cully found a state
law that said town police commissions legally had complete control over Police
Departments.
Tyksinski has said he wants to implement changes to the
department to reduce costs as he works to right the town’s troubled finances.
“I think sometimes when you can deal directly with a department it’s
better,” he said. “You can sit down and talk things out and whatever
disagreements you have can be worked out better face to face.”
Ed Wiatr,
a co-founder of local watchdog group Concerned Citizens for Honest and Open
Government, said he believes the Police Commission had become its own old-boys’
club.
“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he said.
But Spellman said the commission had never used the power it had under
the state law, and had always allowed the town to approve or deny its
recommendations.
Also, he said, the commission fielded all complaints
against the police and the commission members were not paid, he said.
About 50 percent of towns in the state have police commissions, John
Grebert, executive director of the state Association of Police Chiefs said.
Told of Tyksinksi’s actions, he said it sounded like the supervisor
wanted more control over the police department.
That’s a local choice, he
said.
“It’s whatever works best for the community,” he said.
NEW HARTFORD —
