Quoted Text

Police indictments a waste of time, money

    As a member of the Schenectady community, I would like to express how appalled and embarrassed I am about the indictments passed down to three Schenectady city police officers [Sept. 5 Gazette].
    It bothers me to know that these three officers are being prosecuted for doing their job and it scares me that the officers are being charged with a crime — not completing paperwork! It appears to me, and I am only an outsider who reads the paper, that the administration in the Schenectady Police Department and the Schenectady district attorney’s office jumped the gun on this incident and brought a trivial case to the state attorney general’s office. Then, instead of the attorney general’s office stopping the insanity and admitting that this should have been handled internally, they went and indicted these decorated officers for a crime!
    Now, as a community member in Schenectady and a New York state resident, I want to know how you are going to explain all of the wasted money you spent on such a ridiculous case, especially when Gov. Paterson is being forced to put the state on a hiring freeze and cut our state budget! This is just absurd.
    ELIZABETH PROVOST
    Schenectady

Quoted Text

Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
What did cops do to be indicted?
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    I was off work for a few days when the great announcement was made that three Schenectady cops had been indicted for failing to fill out a form, and it was probably just as well, since my reaction would only have been, Huh?
    Failing to fill out a form? Plus, in the case of one of the officers, failing to have his patrol car’s video camera turned on. You mean those lapses are crimes for which the cops could theoretically go to jail?
    Naturally I wondered if more was going on. I wondered if maybe the cops really did beat up the guy who made the original accusation against them and if the evidence just wasn’t solid enough to justify an indictment for that so the grand jury went with the next best thing, sort of like charging Al Capone with tax evasion when you can’t get him on bootlegging.
    But I don’t know, because grand jury proceedings are secret.
    The form that they failed to fi ll out was a “use-of-force” form, which implies that they did indeed muscle the guy they arrested, Donald Randolph, on a charge of drunk driving last December, as Randolph claimed.
    Even though he suffered no injuries to speak of — merely a bruise on the cheek — some kind of evidence, probably a video from one of the police cars at the scene, was sufficient to outrage Schenectady Mayor Brian Stratton and to convince the state attorney general’s office to take the case to a grand jury.
    Now we’re left with very little. The drunk driving charge was dropped for lack of evidence. The five cops involved in this incident have been sitting home at full pay since it happened, and all we have to show for the expense is criminal charges for not following proper procedures.
    I still want to know: Was the camera in one patrol car turned off so the cops could rough the guy up out of sight? Did they indeed beat him up without causing any noticeable injuries?
    I’m still waiting.

Quoted Text

Man in critical condition after Schenectady shooting

By PAUL NELSON
Last updated: 11:30 p.m., Saturday, September 13, 2008

SCHENECTADY A man was critically injured in a shooting Saturday in the city's Hamilton Hill neighborhood, police said.
     
Police were summoned to a home in the 800 block of Lincoln Avenue around 9:22 p.m. after someone reported hearing shots in the vicinity. At the residence, they found an unresponsive male victim bleeding on the sidewalk, according to city police spokesman Lt. Brian Kilcullen.

He did not know how many times the man was shot, or the nature of his wounds. The victim was taken by ambulance to Albany Medical Center Hospital, Kilcullen said.

Police had no suspects late Saturday.

Quoted Text

SCHENECTADY
Many crimes don’t end in arrest
Councilman addresses issue
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    Robbers, muggers, even rapists escape the law with alarming frequency in Schenectady. It’s another story for murderers — police almost always catch them.
    For almost every non-fatal crime, Schenectady’s arrest rate has fallen far below the national standard, with the vast majority of the city’s most serious crimes going unsolved over the past three years.
    The arrest rate is so low that Schenectady City Councilman Gary McCarthy said the Police Department should be completely reorganized to put more police on the street.
    “This is an embarrassment,” Mc-Carthy, the Public Safety Committee chairman, said after the city released the 2005-07 arrest rates in response to a Freedom of Information request from The Sunday Gazette.
    He said most of the arrest rates will leave residents feeling shaken and unsafe — particularly the rate for arresting burglars.
    “If 95 percent of the burglaries go unsolved, how do you create value in the community? You should be able to feel safe and secure in your home,” McCarthy said.
    According to the city’s records, police also solve only a fraction of the city’s nonviolent break-ins and gunpoint robberies, posting results that are less than half the national arrest rate.
    But the national rates aren’t great either, with more than threequarters of most crimes going unsolved.
    For example, in statistics adjusted by the Department of Justice to be proportionate to Schenectady’s population, the average city solved only 13 percent of its burglaries in 2006. Schenectady police made an arrest in 7 percent of its burglaries that year.
    Schenectady historically does well in solving murders, making arrests in nearly every killing. The city usually posts an annual rate of 100 percent for murders while the national adjusted rate hovers around 60 percent.
    The city’s arrest rate for arsons usually matches the national rate, at about 18 percent.
    But Schenectady is far below average in arrest rates for every other serious crime.
LAGGING BEHIND
    Only about 20 percent of the city’s rapes get solved each year, based on Schenectady police data from 2005 through 2007. Nationally, police make an arrest in nearly 40 percent of all reported rapes.
    The police also make arrests in about 35 percent of Schenectady’s aggravated assaults — serious beatings and attacks with weapons — while the national rate is about 55 percent.
    McCarthy said months ago that the arrest rates will be a central part of his campaign to change the police department’s priorities in the 2009 budget. The council will begin work on the budget in less than three weeks.
    But Commissioner of Public Safety Wayne Bennett said it’s not fair to compare Schenectady to a per capita arrest rate garnered from every police department in the country. It would be fairer, he said, to compare Schenectady to cities with the same number of police, a similarly-sized police budget and a community made up of a similar number of poor and affluent residents.
    “Using the national average, strictly based on no other information than population, is not a reliable means of comparison,” he said.
    But Schenectady does not fare much better when compared to Troy, which faces similar economic woes, has roughly the same percentage of its population living below the poverty level and posted the same median income in the 1999 census report. It is also the same size as Schenectady but has about 14,000 fewer residents. It has a police force of 118 officers while Schenectady has 165 officers.
COMPARED TO TROY
    Troy also did not meet the national arrest rate average in all crime categories, but it did far better than Schenectady. Last year, Troy solved nearly half its rapes and arsons while Schenectady made arrests in 20 percent of the rapes and 7 percent of the arsons. Troy also solved two-thirds of its aggravated assaults — compared to 37 percent in Schenectady — and posted a solve rate for auto thefts that was twice as good as Schenectady’s.
    In robberies and burglaries, Troy also posted a better rate. Only in larcenies — stealing from a person — did Troy’s arrest rate of 9 percent fall short of Schenectady’s rate, which was 11 percent.
    Bennett also argued that a true review of the statistics would include analyzing every incident and eliminating those for which there were no “solvability factors” — evidence, witnesses and other factors.
    “You can’t look at the percentage and say, based on the numbers, performance is good or bad. You need to get into the cases,” he said. “With rape, if she doesn’t know her attacker, if there is no DNA evidence able to be collected, and there’s no witnesses — what do you have?”
    But he acknowledged that such factors can’t explain why Schenectady’s arrest rate is so much worse than the national rate for cities of Schenectady’s size.
    “In relation to cities of similar size, I think the issues are the same,” he said.
    McCarthy also believes there’s no mitigating factors to explain the discrepancy between Schenectady’s arrest rate and the national rate.
COPS ON THE STREET
    But he’s confident that the gap can be bridged if the Schenectady City Council will support his effort to change the department’s 2009 budget. He declined to offer details before the public meetings on the budget but said he will present a plan that would put far more offi - cers on patrol.
    “I believe our fundamental thing is to put more cops on the street, so when people call, the resources are there,” he said.
    He argued that he can improve the arrest rate with better funding.
    “You put your resources on something, you’re going to solve the problem,” he said.
    Bennett agreed that he could improve the arrest rate — but only if he’s given more officers. Crimespecific task forces could have an impact on burglaries and other serious crimes, Bennett said.
    “I would say Gary [McCarthy] has a point there. Let’s say we have a burglary task force, we send guys out in plain clothes in certain zones and we look for burglaries. Would that improve solvability rates? I would certainly hope so,” he said.
    But sometimes money just isn’t enough. In 2007, with a state grant, a specialized task force and a detective all dedicated to cracking down on motor vehicle theft, the police only managed to make arrests in seven cases. And despite their efforts, more cars were stolen than in either of the previous two years.
    But in 2005, without a grant or a task force, police made arrests in 86 percent of the car thefts, solving all but five of the 36 thefts. The national rate that year was 12 percent.
    In 2006, Schenectady’s rate for solving car thefts fell to 52 percent. In 2007, the rate was 11.5 percent — mirroring the national rate.
    “We don’t know what happened in 2005,” police spokesman Brian Kilcullen said. “Unfortunately, we can’t attribute that to a grant.”
    Even if task forces could be counted on to dramatically increase the city’s arrest rate, the department doesn’t have the staffing to run such a program. There are only enough officers to fill a task force on days when every officer shows up for work — with no one calling in sick, using a comp day or taking vacation, Bennett said.
    “We don’t even remotely approach the staffing to do that on a regular basis,” he said. “There are issues with the wording in the [labor] contract that impede the ability of this department to operate. When you can take comp time with 24-hour notice, there’s absolutely no way to factor in the needs of the department.”
    McCarthy is taking a more pragmatic approach. City leaders have been negotiating the comp time issue with the police union for more than a year, to no avail.
    “But we can control the budget,” McCarthy said.
DETAILED STUDY
    McCarthy’s Public Safety Committee has spent more than 10 months reviewing police statistics, and McCarthy has repeatedly said that the council should use its spending authority to redirect funds in ways that would improve the police department. He has focused on police response times, particularly the fact that it takes city police an average of 45 minutes to respond to calls about non-violent crimes.
    Fix the response rate, McCarthy said, and the arrest rate will skyrocket.
    “If a neighbor calls and says she sees a man creeping through backyards, if you send a cop there real quick you’re probably going to catch a burglar, or deter one from happening. You send an offi cer 20 minutes, two hours later — nothing,” McCarthy said. “We’ve got to have a greater presence on the street.”
    Until the response time is improved, he said, police performance simply encourages criminals to commit more crimes.
    “They know about the response rate,” he said.
    Bennett said a faster response probably won’t lead to a higher arrest rate.
    “A lot of these cases are not reported until a significant delay. People don’t report crimes in a timely fashion in many cases,” he said. “We had a bicycle robbery the other day. The kid didn’t have a phone. Now he’s got to find a phone. It takes 5 to 10 minutes. That significantly diminishes the solvability rate.”
    But Bennett said he would enjoy the “luxury” of having additional officers for special task forces. He said he’d welcome more officers — unless they are simply reassigned from other areas.
    “He has not shared his thoughts with me, but I’m worried we’ll have less detectives,” Bennett said of Mc-Carthy’s plans. “If you rob Peter to pay Paul, something’s going to suffer. The detectives are part of the solve rate too, you know.”
    Instead, Bennett said, police should triage cases, closing every case that seems unlikely to be solved.
    “I really think we have to be realistic and tell people, ‘There are no solvability factors in this case,’ ” Bennett said. “We could spend less time on these cases.”

Quoted Text

SCHENECTADY
Drug charge against Kaczmarek upheld
BY STEVEN COOK Gazette Reporter

    Telephone conversations can be enough to uphold a conspiracy indictment against Lisa Kaczmarek, a judge has ruled.
    The attorney for the woman had asked Schenectady County Court Judge Karen Drago to dismiss the conspiracy charge against her, arguing that a telephone call was not enough to result in an indictment.
    In a ruling out last week, Drago sided with the state Attorney General’s Office, which is prosecuting the case.
    “Evaluating the content and context of the conversations in this case demonstrates that sufficient evidence of an overt act was presented,” Drago wrote.
    The ruling means the indictment stands and the case remains on course for a possible trial.
    Kaczmarek, wife of former Schenectady police chief Greg Kaczmarek, was charged along with 23 others in May, accused of taking part in a drug organization headed by Kerry Kirkem and Oscar Mora.
    Hers is one of the final cases to remain open. Her son, Miles Smith, took a deal last week, admitting to a drug sale charge in exchange for a three-year prison sentence.
    The Attorney General’s offi ce opposed the motion to dismiss, arguing that Lisa Kaczmarek knew full well that Kirkem was a large-scale narcotics distributor, using him as her source for cocaine she later sold.

Quoted Text

Statistics confirm worst fears about Sch’dy PD

    That Sunday Gazette story about the Schenectady Police Department’s dismal crime-solving record probably didn’t shock too many city residents — or even casual observers of the region. Sadly, the statistics, which show that the department is well behind the national averages in solving most serious crimes, confirm years of anecdotal evidence that have pointed to a poorly run department.
    For 2005-2007, murder was pretty much the only serious crime the department was any good at solving. (Fortunately, there aren’t very many of them in the Electric City.) But when it came to rape, the solve rate ranged from a dismal 35 percent in 2005 to an even more dismal rate of 15 percent in 2006. Arrests for arson were even less impressive — ranging from 7 percent last year to 21 percent in ’06. Schenectady cops did slightly better with aggravated assaults, making an arrest in roughly one of every three over the past three years. But when it came to theft crimes — burglary and larceny — forget about it: Their batting average was consistently in the single digits!
    As the Gazette story pointed out, not only were the department’s arrest rates substantially lower, in most cases, than the national averages, they were lower than those in the city of Troy, which is smaller in population than Schenectady but similar in many other respects (physical size, median income, poverty rates, etc.) And Troy’s police department is roughly one-third the size of Schenectady’s.
    The response from Wayne Bennett, the city’s Public Safety Commissioner, was hardly reassuring: excuses, equivocations and fingerpointing. Gary McCarthy, head of the city council’s Public Safety Committee, at least expressed a little of the outrage taxpayers must be feeling, and promised to push for a departmental reorganization in this year’s budget proposal.
    Resource limitations, which translate into size restrictions, may have something to do with the department’s problems. Contractual loopholes that let the rank and file call too many shots on staffing and work rules, also don’t help. But at some point, Bennett, the city council and Mayor Brian Stratton have to stop making excuses for this department and figure out some ways to improve its performance. The failures have gone on far too long.

Quoted Text

SCHENECTADY
Chaires to be named police chief
First black leader to head department
BY STEVEN COOK AND KATHLEEN MOORE
Gazette Reporters

    A 20-year veteran of the Schenectady Police Department whose landmark career has followed his father’s groundbreaking service on the force will be named police chief today, sources told The Daily Gazette.
    Mark R. Chaires, one of three assistant chiefs in the city Police Department, is to become the 18th police chief.
    He will also become the fi rst black man to head a 160-member force that has made a concerted effort to recruit minorities.
    Chaires followed his father, Arthur Chaires, into the force. Arthur Chaires became the city’s first black police officer in 1952, serving 27 years with the department.
    The announcement is to come this morning at a ceremony in City Hall. The event is to be attended by Mayor Brian U. Stratton and Public Safety Commissioner Wayne Bennett. Stratton did not return a call for comment Wednesday evening. Bennett declined to comment through a spokesman.
    Also contacted Wednesday evening and declining comment was Chaires himself.
    Chaires, 52, topped four other candidates in a search that lasted nearly a year and stirred debate over whether the department needed homegrown leadership or an outsider.
    The debate had been fueled by a department that has been troubled for much of this decade. One investigation by the FBI sent four officers to prison for drug-relatd offenses. Drug evidence has been stolen, resulting in prison time for another officer.
    Just two weeks ago, three offi cers were indicted on misdemeanor counts of official misconduct for allegedly failing to follow procedures in a controversial arrest last December. A grand jury declined to indict on more serious allegations.
    News of Chaires’ impending appointment was greeted Wednesday night with applause from ACORN, a local neighborhood group that had promoted Chaires as its choice for the post.
    Chris Dixon, group organizer, said members were thrilled to hear Chaires was picked.
    “That’s good!” Dixon said, then quickly added, “We feel he’s capable, but he’s also going to have to be accountable. So we think it’s good, but we’ll see.”
    Bennett had said he’s never seen a neighborhood group lobby for a particular chief promotion before and said it would have absolutely no effect on his recommendation.
    “This is not a popularity poll,” he said last month. “Opinion really doesn’t have a place in the process.”
    ACORN, which stands for the Association of Communities Organizing for Reform Now, represents several neighborhoods in the city but primarily focuses on Hamilton Hill. Some of Chaires’ relatives are members of ACORN, but Dixon said that wasn’t why they supported him. They wanted a chief who had worked his way up through the Schenectady ranks and was familiar with the city and its troubles, he said.
    He also said ACORN was impressed with Chaires’ education. “There was no one better,” he said.
    But a career-long member of the department is what the city doesn’t need, another community activist said Wednesday night.
    Fred Clark, of the local NAACP, said he would have criticized any internal choice.
    “I would be very disappointed if any of the assistant chiefs got the job,” Clark said, “mainly because of the fact that all of them were present and on the force when all that corruption went down.”
    Chaires became one of the fi nalists when he scored a 70 on the police chief’s exam, receiving extra four points for a 74 as an internal candidate.
    He was joined on the finalist list by fellow Assistant Chief Michael Seber and three outside candidates, retired Albany police commander Steven Stella, Troy Assistant Chief John Tedesco and Poughkeepsie police Capt. Steven Minard.
    The chief position is advertised at a salary of $115,000, an increase from the $109,000 that former chief Michael N. Geraci Sr. was to make this year.
    Chaires was a finalist for the chief’s job in 2002. That year, he lost out to Geraci. Tedesco was also a finalist in 2002.

Quoted Text

SCHENECTADY
City police to get raises
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    After nearly three years of talking, the Schenectady police are getting a raise — and they didn’t have to give up any of their contractual benefits to get it.
    Arbitrator Jeff Selchick ruled Tuesday that the police should get 4 percent raises, retroactive to 2006 and 2007.
    New recruits who were hired at a salary of $29,717 will see a $2,425 increase, while investigators will see a $4,401 raise on their base pay of $53,939.
    Selchick signed off on the twoyear deal when the police union and the city could not come to an agreement on their own.
    There are no changes in the contract other than the raises. All of the issues that city officials proposed, from a health insurance contribution from officers to a 12-hour work day and the elimination of compensatory time off, were rejected.
    Police Benevolent Association President Bob Hamilton said the deal gave him everything he wanted.
    “All we want is a cost-of-living raise,” he said.
    That’s just about what he got. The consumer price index rose 4.1 percent last year and 3 percent in 2006, according to the Department of Labor Statistics.
While the city didn’t get any of the things Mayor Brian U. Stratton wanted, he saw a silver lining in the decision.
“They essentially have a twoyear deal that is already 10 months expired,” Stratton said.
The city had set aside money to pay for retroactive raises, so the decision won’t hurt the $14.7 million police budget, he added.
Now both sides are heading back to negotiations. Both said they want to come to an agreement without arbitrators this time.
But Hamilton said Stratton must be willing to buy his concessions. “You can’t offer us a cost-of-living raise and ask for 10 things,” he said. Stratton said the city will argue for reforms, but may not have any money to sweeten the deal.
“Financially, we’re not going to be able to talk about 4 percent raises,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be talking about zeroes. That’s the economic reality.”
    Last year, the police almost got a deal in which they would get 4 percent raises every year through 2010. Hamilton started negotiations by saying the 165-member force would be willing to pay 5 percent of their health insurance premiums in exchange for 4 percent raises each year — the same deal given to the city firefighters.
    “I offered the health givebacks. They said no,” Hamilton said Thursday, adding that he wasn’t going to bring a different proposal back to his members.
    “I can’t bring back a deal that is far worse than the firemen,” he said.
    Stratton acknowledged that he thought seriously about accepting Hamilton’s offer. But he ultimately decided other reforms to the contract were more important than health insurance contributions.
    “We want health insurance [givebacks] but comp time and union leave are more problematic and quite frankly more costly too,” he said.
    Stratton said he’s glad he didn’t take the health insurance deal.
    “We’d be in a very tight jam if we’d locked into a 4 percent raise for a five-year deal,” Stratton said.
    Hamilton is already prepared to argue that the city won’t save any money by eliminating comp time, which city officials have blamed for everything from escalating overtime costs to slow response times and poor arrest rates. The city wants to pay officers overtime instead of letting them earn days off when they work beyond their scheduled shifts.
    Hamilton said he commissioned a multiyear study of the situation to prove that the department rarely calls in extra officers on overtime to fill in when someone takes a day off with comp time.
    “A large percentage of the time, when someone takes a day off, it doesn’t create overtime. The city is saving money rather than paying overtime,” Hamilton said.
    The city also has a study, which was done in-house, that shows the opposite. A Sunday Gazette review of comp time found that it led to substantially reduced staffing on weekends, but that review did not look at how many officers were brought in on overtime to fill in the gaps.

Quoted Text

Editorial: Good choice for symbolic appointment
Friday, September 19, 2008

With the creation last year of a public safety commissioner’s job and hiring of Wayne Bennett to run the Schenectady Police Department, this page felt little need — especially in view of the city’s financial condition — to replace Police Chief Michael Geraci when he departed last fall. That was deemed impractical for technical and administrative reasons, and so the department has a new “chief” — a lifelong city resident who rose through the ranks, most recently serving as an assistant chief — who will nonetheless serve as second-in-command.

Mark Chaires was probably the obvious choice, not only because of his background, experience and record, but also because of the color of his skin: He is the first African-American to serve in this capacity, and even if he will only be the department’s No. 2 man, his promotion is a significant step for a city, and a department, that has had relatively few minority employees and almost no minority managers.

Schenectady does have a plenty of minority residents, of course, including many African-Americans who have felt — with occasional justification — that they don’t get proper attention or respect from the city, especially the police department. Chaires’ promotion, even if mostly symbolic, should help dispel that notion and ease some of the tension that has built over the years between the department and the city’s blacks and other minorities.

Chaires, though obviously an insider, was sounding the right notes at his swearing-in ceremony, acknowledging the department’s problems, including its reputation, and pledging to work hard to fix them. We wish him well in what may be a gargantuan task.

We also hope that the Bennett and Mayor Brian Stratton use the opportunity provided by Chaires’ promotion to do a little restructuring within the department’s bureaucracy. With response times to calls averaging 45 minutes, and solve rates for most serious crimes well below the national average (see last Sunday’s Gazette), some kind of shake-up seems overdue.

Quoted Text

SCHENECTADY
Police chief’s roots run deep
Chaires part of a family legacy
BY STEVEN COOK Gazette Reporter

    Mark R. Chaires was introduced as the city’s new police chief last week, his father’s legacy not far behind.
    A 20-year-veteran, Mark Chaires follows Arthur Chaires’ 27 years on the force. Arthur Chaires was the department’s fi rst black officer and his son is the fi rst black chief, all in a department that has struggled to recruit minorities.
    But his family’s involvement in law enforcement goes beyond that. One of Mark Chaires’ daughters is now a probation officer. A brother also wore a city police badge. He, however, was forced out of the department two decades ago with that badge tarnished.
    Mark Chaires himself never envisioned growing up to be a police officer. At one point, he even wanted to be a journalist.
    Now Chaires, 52, must now lead the department after 20 years on the job himself, the last seven as assistant chief.
    “I have to live for my life and that’s all I can do,” Chaires said. “I can’t be concerned with ‘my father did this so I have to do this, my brother did this, my mother did this.’ Just do the job. The job’s hard enough as it is.”
    And it will be a hard job. Mayor Brian U. Stratton, who made the appointment, noted that Chaires’ honeymoon will be short.
TOUGH WORK AHEAD
    He will have the task of leading a department whose public perception has taken multiple hits in recent years.
    Scandals have resulted in criminal charges against a number of officers. An FBI probe in the early part of this decade sent four to prison. Most recently, three were indicted just this month on misdemeanor charges related to department policies.
    Response times and customer service issues have also lagged.
    Chaires has vowed swifter punishments for officers deserving of them. He also promises better relations with the public and attempts to get more people involved in watching out for their own neighborhoods.
    Police department critics had suggested that Stratton and Public Safety Commissioner Wayne Bennett look outside the department for a new chief. Three outsiders were considered in the process.
    Among the reasons Bennett and Stratton chose Chaires, they said, was his knowledge of the department and its problematic past. They also cited his roots — his father’s role and his own youth growing up in the Hamilton Hill neighborhood, a neighborhood that has declined since then.
FAMILY PRIDE
    The new chief’s mother, Dorothy Chaires, beamed Thursday as she pinned her son’s chief’s badge on his chest. She said later that she was worried she’d stick him.
    She said she never thought Mark would be a police officer, let alone chief, until he entered the Air Force. He spent eight years in the service, until 1986.
    She said she knows her son will do well.
    “He’s going to be an honest person,” she said. “He’ll be determined to try to right everything that he can, and he’ll stick with it.”
    Chaires’ father, Arthur Chaires, passed away in 2003. He served 27 years in the department and was known for walking his beat and never having to draw his gun.
    In a 2001 interview, months after his son was appointed assistant chief, Arthur Chaires lit up when talking about his son.
    “I think he’d be so happy,” Dorothy Chaires said last week of Arthur, “he might explode. He’d be very proud.”
    Mark Chaires now lives in Scotia with his wife, Theresa. He has five daughters, all of them strong women, the chief said. Daughter Yolanda has been a probation officer with Schenectady County for about five years.
INDIRECT PATH
    By both the mother and son’s accounts, Arthur Chaires never targeted Mark for police work. The father was good at giving advice but not nitpicking.
    Even into his 20s, Chaires didn’t think of himself in law enforcement.
    As a teen in the early 1970s, Chaires got involved in a program at Union College called Upward Bound. The program was for both good students and those academically challenged. “Unfortunately, I was in column B,” Chaires said, placing himself among the less academic.
    It was in the Upward Bound program where Chaires got interested in journalism. But he still wasn’t focused. He turned to the discipline of the Air Force for that.
    He landed in military policing, handling military working dogs and supervising dog teams and Security Police Emergency Services teams.
    Bennett pointed out Chaires’ military history as being “critically important.”
    Chaires’ counselor in the Union College program was Joseph Bowman; the two have stayed in touch over the years. Bowman, who is now a regent with the state, said he’s proud of what Chaires has accomplished. The two have since worked together at the Hamilton Hill Arts Center, where Bowman is involved.
    He recalled Chaires often attending center events, talking with the children.
    “He would talk with the kids, communicate with them and set them on the right path,” Bowman said. “He wasn’t necessarily there as law enforcement; he was there to be a friend to the kids.
    “I think he’ll be excellent for the position,” Bowman said. “He cares about the community. He’ll take a stand and do what’s right for the community.”
    After leaving the Air Force, Chaires signed on with the Schenectady County Jail, serving as a corrections officer there for a year.
    It was around that time that his brother, A. David Chaires Jr., then a city police officer, ran into trouble. In 1987, David Chaires was accused of selling cocaine to an undercover state police officer at Yates Village. A jury convicted him of possession. There were also issues with his sick time, and he was fired. Mark Chaires noted that his brother has long since turned his life around.
RAPID RISE
    Mark Chaires entered the police academy in December 1988, the month after his brother was sentenced to prison.
    “To say that I came in here and that was never on my mind, I certainly can’t say that,” Chaires said.
    Chaires ascended rapidly, making sergeant in 1993 and lieutenant in 1998. He was appointed assistant chief in 2001, three years later taking over the department’s Administrative Services Bureau, which includes officer discipline.
    For much of the past decade, the department has seen periodic arrests of officers. An FBI investigation sent four officers to prison on drug-related offenses in the early part of the decade. Another detective went to prison after admitting to taking drug evidence for personal use, acts that went undetected until the drugs were needed at a trial.
    Among the mistakes of the past, Chaires said, was not devoting enough resources to internal affairs. Hiring practices were also lax, allowing in people who never should have been hired.
    Those practices have since been tightened up.
    “At the end of the day, people are victims of their own bad judgment,” Chaires said. “But the organization takes a hit, too, because we could have intervened a lot quicker.”
CRACKING DOWN
    Chaires said he intends to quicken internal discipline investigations. A perception among some is that the investigations last too long, creating a gulf between the incident and the punishment.
    Some accused officers have even complained, Chaires said.
    “It has to have a deterrent effect,” he said. “It has to be swift. It has got to be fair, but it has to happen quickly.”
    The facts should be able to be determined and a punishment settled upon within weeks, he said, not months. He said he would never “hide behind the contract.”
    The big discipline case of the past year has been over allegations by Donald Randolph. Randolph was arrested Dec. 7, 2007, accused of drunken driving. He accused officers of excessive force.
    Internal affairs investigated and found merit to the claims. Within three weeks, the officers were taken off of the road and the case was handed over to prosecutors.
    “Based on the evidence we know, we were convinced that something inappropriate had happened,” Chaires said. “Nothing is going to change our opinion of what we initially thought,” he added.
    Then there’s relations with the union. Past chiefs have been criticized, accused of being too close to the union, becoming unable to discipline officers effectively.
    Chaires said he sees parts of the contract that no longer make sense, like compensatory time, a practice that gives officers time off in exchange for overtime work. It’s a benefit, he said, that doesn’t work today.
    “Now, it’s a different time; we really need all hands on deck,” he said.
    An arbitrator last week gave out raises, but crucial issues of release time, seniority, health insurance remain unresolved.
    “You have to come in and say, what do we want and what is it going to cost us?” he said.
COMMUNITY ROOTS
    Chaires’ management style has been called reserved and light on humor. Chaires described himself as shy, maybe even to a fault, the opposite of his outgoing father, though he also admitted to having more of a temper than his father.
    His time in front of the City Council has rarely been given to humor, councilman Mark Blanchfield said.
    “He is, above all, honest, and he can be sometimes brutally honest,” Blanchfield said. “I think those are wonderful qualities in a chief, maybe not so much a politician.”
    Chaires grew up on Hamilton Hill, spending his childhood playing on Lincoln Avenue. His father patrolled the neighborhood, the same one the son would later patrol as an offi cer.
    But the Hamilton Hill of his childhood was a different neighborhood than the one today. He recalled coming home from school one day and taking a flower from a house on Craig Street. By 5 p.m. that day, his parents knew and he was in deep trouble.
    Chaires cited that as an example of a sense of community. He said he wants to help residents take stock in their neighborhoods.
    When he was a community policing lieutenant, he said he held membership drives to get people involved in the Neighborhood Watch.
    “It really is a very important tool,” he said, “and it helps.”
    Even just watching for crime is important, he said. He wants to urge residents to be extra vigilant in the community and let police know of problems.
    “The one thing is, don’t give up,” he said, “don’t give up on your neighborhoods.”

Chaires


MARK ROBARGE/GAZETTE ONLINE EDITOR Schenectady Mayor Brian U. Stratton introduces new police chief Mark Chaires at a news conference on Thursday.

Quoted Text

Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Sch’dy cops have no need to negotiate
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    You can see what the city of Schenectady is up against when it tries to wring concessions from its police union. There is just no wringing. State labor law sets up such a system of contract resolution that there is no incentive for the police union to concede anything.
    The cops want raises, and they get those raises without having to give up a thing with regard to their prerogatives in taking time off, showing up for work, bagging job assignments on the basis of seniority or anything else. That’s how the system works.
    The city and the union, the PBA haven’t had a new contract since the old one came to the end of its term on Dec. 31, 1999, but it hardly matters, since public employee contracts remain in effect in perpetuity, regardless of any nominal expiration date.
    What the two sides do is negotiate an extension through a “memorandum of agreement,” usually giving raises without making any fundamental changes in working conditions, or they go to arbitration under the supervision of a state-sponsored arbitrator, who most often imposes raises without making any other changes.
    In the latest go-around, the city and the union negotiated to a standstill over a new contract and finally went to arbitration after the union officially declared “impasse.”
    Arbitration is a process closed to the public involving three hearing officers, one for the city, one for the union (who of course cancel each other out), and one who is supposedly neutral, working under the auspices of the state Public Employment Relations Board. In this case, that would be Jeffrey M. Selchick, an Albany-based lawyer who makes a full-time practice of such arbitration in the wonderful world of New York.
    After four trial-like hearing sessions in April of this year, Mr. Selchick finally decreed that Schenectady cops should get 4 percent raises for each year, 2006 and 2007, retroactively, noting that the city was in relatively good financial condition and could afford it, and he rejected all demands by the city for changes in working conditions that would allow for improved management, stating, “This approach is consistent with the practice of collective bargaining,” as it surely is.
    The unions get their raises, and the city gets nothing — no changes in the amount of time off allowed, no changes in health insurance, no changes in the rights of seniority, nothing.
    So obviously negotiations are a farce. All the union has to do is sit tight and wait for arbitration, which it does.
    Now we are nearing the end of 2008, and negotiations must begin all over again for this year and whatever future years can be agreed to, and I cannot discern any reason why the outcome should be different. City officials can say all they want that they are going to demand this and they’re going to demand that, but it means nothing. Under the state’s Taylor Law, there is no way to achieve any such demands.
    I do note an interesting wrinkle in the formal decision of the arbitrator. It was consented to by the city’s lawyer, John Van Norden, who was the city’s representative on the three-member panel, but with curious reservations. He wrote that he agreed with the 4 percent raises, which he said were fair given the splendid job done by most of the city’s police officers, but he also said more could have been achieved by way of restoring good management to the police department if the city’s own team had been “more organized in its approach to the negotiations.”
    Those negotiations were “fruitless,” he said, “as a consequence of the posture of both parties.”
    And he concluded, “In agreeing to this result I charge both par- ties to modify their course,” etc., which to me is striking. He’s the city’s lawyer, he’s the city’s man on the arbitration panel, and he’s telling his own employer, or his own employer’s negotiating team, to shape up.
    What’s that all about?
    “The opinion speaks for itself,” was all he would say to me, though I can’t say it speaks nearly enough for my purposes. With negotiations conducted behind closed doors, I have no way to know how city negotiators might have been at fault for not winning concessions.
    So here we have yet another argument for making labor negotiations public, which, however, I expect will happen about the same time hell freezes over, if not later.
    Van Norden also said, “At this point the relationship that exists between the PBA and the City is not conducive to either party achieving its goals,” which I can’t say I agree with, since it seems to me highly conducive to the PBA achieving its goals.

Quoted Text

Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
Chief Chaires aims to serve customers

    I have never had the warmest relations with the Schenectady Police Department, and I make no bones about my generally wary attitude toward the policeman’s trade Nevertheless it is my pleasure to welcome Mark Chaires to the position of Schenectady police chief and congratulate him on his recent appointment. I hope this does not damage his standing in the department.
    I hope it doesn’t damage my own standing either — I don’t want anyone thinking I have become a toady My reputation as a basher of cops is as necessary to my professional calling as Chaires’ reputation for probity is to his.
    As far as mine goes, I believe it’s intact.
    Eight years ago, on a slow day, I wrote a column proposing on the basis of my personal experience that cops and criminals are basically of a kind, at least as far as a propensity to lie, cheat and bully goes, and when I sat down with Chief Chaires for an interview yesterday, in his new office, it was the first thing he recalled from my varied output over the years.
    He cited it as just one instance of my going “over the line,” another being my commentary on the funeral of a cop who was killed in a car crash a few years ago while speeding to a call.
    In that second case it wasn’t so much what I had said — I remember writing that one with extreme care — as what he had read into it, which is something that often happens. He had sniffed out my attitude, which was less than the fully reverential one that cops require on such solemn occasions.
    I don’t hold any of this against Chief Chaires, by the way. He is a cop, and I make allowances, but I mention it to show that we each have our view of the world, mine being maybe unduly bleak.
    What I wanted to know was how he proposes to improve the occasionally dismal performance of the Schenectady police, particularly their pokey response to calls for help and their low rate of solving crimes other than murders.
    He labels all of this customer service, after the manner of private business, and one thing he is doing, and the Police Department is doing, is a survey of random “customers.” The department actually has a SUNY student on its staff, in charge of drafting and mailing out these surveys to find out if people are satisfied or not with the services they have received, which I think is not a bad idea, for starters.
    Another thing is more training in communication, meaning talking to people. The department has offered its officers a course in “verbal judo,” giving talk a martial-arts flavor, I guess to boost its popularity.
    Yet another is systematic evaluation of officers by way of four-page written reports from their supervisors, which actually began under the previous chief, Mike Geraci, of whom I was no great admirer.
    He called the rate of solving crimes “unacceptable” and said part of the problem is that the department’s detectives have too many cases to handle, which he proposes to ameliorate by getting more cops into direct anti-crime work. “If you’re not responding to calls or investigating cases, you might get reassigned,” he said, though he declined to say how many such officers there might be.
    As for his relations with the local police union, the PBA, which has long been sort of a co-administrator of the department and of which he was for many years a member, he assured me he was no patsy. “I’ve never been shy about arguing for the rights of management,” he said. “I’m no good-time Charlie. When I have to fight tenaciously against them, I do that.” And he stressed that “a well-run department is in everybody’s best interest.”
    He took responsibility for the long backlog of unresolved civilian complaints against police offi cers and promised to have it cleared by the end of the year.
    As for the case of the five cops who have been on administrative leave, sitting home and collecting full pay all year, accused of beating a drunk-driving suspect, Chaires defended his handling of the case as the head of administrative services, even though three of the five were recently indicted only for paperwork lapses, not for any violence, and the other two were cleared.
    “It was not over-reaction,” he said. “There was something inappropriate in the way they did their job,” and he confirmed what I had earlier been told, that “there is some video evidence” of what happened, even though obviously it wasn’t enough for a grand jury to indict for assault.
    He said the Police Department is just beginning its own investigation to determine if punishment of the officers is called for and will not be bound by the findings of the grand jury.
    He supports the assertion of disciplinary authority by Public Safety Commissioner Wayne Bennett, avoiding outside arbitrators, saying that having internal disciplinary matters resolved by someone “two or three levels removed is not a good way to manage.”
    Besides his 20 years as a cop, Chaires has nurtured something of an academic career at SUNY Albany in the field of criminal justice. He earned a master’s degree in 1995, and since then has gotten extension after extension while working toward or intending to work toward a doctorate. He told me he recently defended his prospectus for a thesis, the subject of which he declined to specify, and if all goes well he will earn his Ph.D. next year, which will certainly be a first for the Schenectady Police Department. Then we’ll have to decide whether to call him chief or doctor.
    All of this is a little odd considering that early on he wanted to be not a cop but a journalist, despite the example set by his father before him, the highly regarded and well liked Arthur Chaires, also a Schenectady cop.
    I think he made a wise choice. Journalism is a lowly trade that carries with it no authority to knock people over the head or put them in handcuffs, and I can’t imagine it ever being as satisfying as police work, not to mention the question of benefits.
    In any event, Mark Chaires is now chief of Schenectady police, and we’ll see if he has more success than previous chiefs and commissioners. I for one hope he does.

Quoted Text

He told me he recently defended his prospectus for a thesis, the subject of which he declined to specify, and if all goes well he will earn his Ph.D. next year, which will certainly be a first for the Schenectady Police Department. Then we’ll have to decide whether to call him chief or doctor.

Quoted Text

Eight years ago, on a slow day, I wrote a column proposing on the basis of my personal experience that cops and criminals are basically of a kind, at least as far as a propensity to lie, cheat and bully goes, and when I sat down with Chief Chaires for an interview yesterday, in his new office, it was the first thing he recalled from my varied output over the years.