DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier said union members who called a “no confidence vote” on her were just mad because she made them work over the weekend.
Recently, Lanier launched an “All Hands On Deck” initiative to try and quell some of the violence that has plagued the city this summer.
At the same time, members of the D.C. Police Union called for a “vote of no confidence” on her, claiming she wasn’t keeping the city safe.
“I find the timing of this vote interesting, as this is the first AHOD weekend this year,” Lanier said in an email. “I realize that officers don’t like their schedules disrupted and I try to minimize it, but when we have violent crime we have to make the sacrifices that we all swore we would make when we took this job.”
The vote concluded Sunday night with more than 1,000 police officers voting “no confidence” in Chief Lanier’s ability to manage the police force.
Gregg Pemberton, a spokesman for the union, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the “no confidence” vote had nothing to do with the weekend work, though, and, in fact “only a handful of officers have Saturday and Sunday off.”
Pemberton said officers have been fed up with the leadership at the department for years and listed off a laundry list of complaints the union has with the chief:
Failure to negotiate contracts in good faith, no cost of living increases, unreasonable scheduling disruptions, cancelled and banned vacation time, bad faith bargaining, heavy handed and capricious discipline, disingenuous reporting of statistics and data, impotent and ineffective policing strategies, disbanding of the most effective units, gimmicky deployment, toxic management, a skyrocketing attrition rate, and an inability to fundamentally keep our neighborhoods, our citizens and our officers safe have all contributed to the fact that our members have lost confidence in the leadership of the Chief, not just having to work on a Saturday.
In a statement released by the union’s executive committee on their website, the union says it has become “increasingly frustrated” with what it calls “gimmicky tactics” implemented by Lanier and says all the ideas put forth by the union have been shot down in favor of political correctness.
“Because of the disappointment of our members and of the community, combined with the dismissive response from the leadership, we decided to quantify our frustrations through research,” the statement reads.
The union conducted two polls, one an internal referendum of the police force about their confidence in leadership, and the other a poll of D.C. citizens about their feelings on the current state of public safety in the city.
According to the union polls, which were conducted by independent agencies, more than 97 percent of the police officers who responded had “no confidence” in Lanier’s leadership.
D.C. residents, however, had a mostly positive view of Lanier’s leadership. Around 60 percent of those polled said they had a generally positive view of Lanier.
Residents are still very concerned about crime in the city, though, with 49 percent of people saying, on a scale from 1-10, their concern about crime rated a 10.
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