Arbitrator says Arlington PD not holding supervisors accountable; group calls for investigation
An officer’s association called for an investigation into the Arlington Police Department’s internal affairs division at a city council meeting this week.
Chris CeBallos, Arlington Municipal Patrolman’s Association president, said the police department disciplines officers and supervisors unequally. During the city council meeting Tuesday, he asked Mayor Jeff Williams and the council to approve an independent investigation into the internal affairs division.
CeBallos cited a Dec. 9 arbitration ruling in which a former judge overruled the department’s suspension of an officer and lambasted the department’s internal affairs process.
“The ruling is blasting the way the investigation was handled and blasting the way that supervisors were overlooked that made obvious policy violations,” CeBallos said in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
In response to CeBallos’ complaint, Arlington’s city attorney said the city is considering appealing the arbitration award.
“It is unfortunate that some individuals within and outside of the Arlington Police Department organization have prematurely attempted to use this award as a basis for their effort to paint members of APD staff in a negative light and to demand certain actions based on an award that is clearly flawed,” attorney Teris Solis said.
Officer’s suspension
In 2017, an officer was suspended and charged with dereliction of duty, insubordination and violating body camera policy. Several of his supervisors, including Assistant Chief Kevin Kolbye, argued the officer completed a “defective” police report.
The report in question was made in January 2017 at a disturbance call. The officer’s supervisors accused him of not including critical information in his report and one of them, Sgt. Eric Belisle, filed an internal affairs complaint against him.
After an internal affairs investigation, the officer was suspended for 80 hours.
However, an arbitration hearing found the officer’s supervisor never gave him the information he was accused of omitting from the report.
Judge Anne Ashby ruled the suspension was unfair, and demanded the police department pay the officer for those 80 hours.
However, the city said in a statement that legal staff regularly reviews arbitration decisions to ensure the arbitrator did not exceed his or her scope of authority. The police department has concerns that Ashby did just that, saying she included subjective statements in her ruling that were not related to the officer’s discipline.
Randall Moore, the officer’s attorney, said the judge’s ruling was “a complete devastation of the department’s leadership and internal affairs process.” He said the city’s statement on the ruling “evidences their failure to accept responsibility and consequences for the system they put in place.”
“Arlington picks the arbitrators, they make the rules, you have the arbitration on their premises, they have everything in their favor,” Moore said. “And then they lose, and they want to take their toys and go home.”
Moore said the harshness of Ashby’s ruling was due to the “bogus” nature of the case against the officer.
“Basically, the internal affairs investigation was a sham,” Moore said. “They should have just said, ‘Fix your report,’ but they didn’t like this guy.”
The arbitration ruling
Ashby said the officer’s discipline was based on false information, and his “deficiencies were no more than that of his supervising sergeant, who was not charged with dereliction of duty.”
In his arbitration brief, Moore wrote the officer did not understand why he was asked to accept responsibility for the entire breakdown of the department’s system even though he was the lowest ranking officer at the scene.
As a result of the suspension, the officer was placed at the front desk for nearly a year and had part-time and overtime privileges revoked, according to the brief.
“Most of the time, the city will at least have some merit so that you don’t get this kind of backlash, but this case lacked merit. It just reeked of targeting,” Moore said.
In the ruling, Ashby said Belisle and Detective Julia Vecchioni intentionally gave false information to the internal affairs office about the officer.
Kolbye also gave wrong information to the department which “was used by internal affairs to try and tarnish an officer’s career,” according to the ruling.
“None of these officers have been held accountable for their actions and all remain in their choice positions without repercussions,” the ruling said.
Kolbye, Belisle and Vecchioni were not disciplined. Ashby said this “shows disparate treatment and obvious formal privilege that rank has at the Arlington Police Department.”
Ashby also cited the suspension of one of the officer’s supervisors as evidence of this disparate treatment. Sgt. Jason McRay had previously received 30 hours of suspension for shooting 10 rounds at a suspect’s vehicle, the last shot being fired when the car was about 120 feet away.
“At (that) point, the suspect and vehicle posed no threat to you or the woman that you believed had been car-jacked,” the ruling says. “Sergeant McRay received a three-day suspension for unlawfully discharging his firearm in the line of duty, which could have killed the suspect and/or an innocent and uninvolved party.
“Conversely, Sergeant McRay recommended Appellant be suspended for eighty (80) hours as disciplinary action resulting from a far less egregious incident.”
CeBallos said he wants an investigation to ensure internal affairs is conducting “fair and unbiased investigations” and treating supervisors and officers the same.
JP Mason, President of the Arlington Police Association, said the group has not received any complaints about the issues mentioned in the arbitration ruling. He said the city allows policy and procedures to be discussed at a Meet and Confer panel, but the AMPA decided to leave the panel.
“I also find it concerning that AMPA chooses to make public an Arbitrators ruling that mentions alleged misconduct of their own members,” Mason said in a statement.
Previous complaints
The ruling is not the first time Arlington police have disciplined officers differently than supervisors, CeBallos said.
CeBallos pointed to a November incident in which Chief Will Johnson was accused of using a racial slur during a meeting. Johnson reportedly said the n-word as he recounted details of a hate-crime investigation after a black woman had the slur written on her car. City Manager Trey Yelverton concluded Johnson did not violate policy.
In June, an officer was disciplined for violating the same policy. CeBallos said the context of the situations was similar, but Johnson did not face repercussions because of his status as the chief.
In an arbitration ruling in September 2017, a judge ruled command staff chastised a 24-year veteran officer on “trivial matters.”
The officer had talked with Kolbye about the department’s sick leave sell-back program, which Kolbye said the officer did not meet the criteria for. Kolbye told Assistant Chief Jaime Ayala that the officer had been “rude and disrespectful” during the meeting, according to the ruling.
The officer recorded his meetings with Kolbye, and contended he told Kolbye he was doing so when Kolbye asked. However, Kolbye told internal affairs that the officer lied when asked if he was recording the meeting.
The audio recording of the meeting showed that Kolbye did not ask whether the officer was recording, meaning the complaint was based on false allegations from Kolbye, the ruling said.
The judge also ruled that police department was using “vague personnel provisions” to discipline the officer over “matters that had nothing to do with his actual performance of protecting and serving the public.”
This story was originally published December 20, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
