Just ... Talk

In Southampton Village’s $32.5 million budget for 2021-22, more than a third of the spending, a total of $11.5 million, goes to fund the Village Police Department. It’s an expensive part of village government, and thus is ripe for close examination year to year, and a deeper dive from time to time to see if there are inefficiencies.

So Mayor Jesse Warren’s recent decision to ask the Village Board to hire a consultant to do an “operational assessment” and offer advice is hardly an extreme position, even in the midst of a continuing standoff between the mayor and police department that began nearly the day Mr. Warren was sworn in.

The firm, Edmund Hartnett Risk Management, delivered a sensible report on May 7 — and the entire enterprise went off the rails almost immediately.

First, the mayor opted to filter the 118-page report through a task force he appointed, rather than simply having the consultant give the report to the Village Board itself. The task force added its own interpretations of the consultant’s findings, mostly amplifying the criticism, with the task force’s chair, Craig J. Goldberg, hastily issuing a press release describing “mismanagement and waste in many aspects of the SVPD’s activities.”

It’s important to note: That was the task force talking, not the consultants. Search what is now known as the Hartnett Report — it’s on the village’s website in its entirety — and the word “mismanagement” never appears, not once. (“Waste” is in there twice, but it doesn’t carry quite the weight it does in the task force’s statement.)

Mr. Hartnett himself, on Tuesday, stressed that point, noting that mentions of the police chief’s contract, suggestions about contracting out public safety dispatch duties, eliminating the detective division, vehicle expenses, and talk of the chief’s security work on the side “came from them, not from us,” meaning the task force. Charges of nepotism, he noted, were found to be unsubstantiated — but were still launched by the task force.

“We think we provided the tools to fix the house, not the tools to tear it down,” Mr. Hartnett said, eloquently. What was presented, however, was a demolition plan.

Every Southampton Village resident should read the Hartnett Report, or at least its executive summary, which sums up what the consultants found, and what they suggest. There are reasonable points about scheduling, overtime, sick leave and other personnel issues, which would seem to benefit from tightening up. The consultants make recommendations regarding the village’s participation in the East End Drug Task Force that deserve more discussion — some elements of policing simply don’t reflect their true value in the bottom line — and in general completed the task placed before them, without much drama.

But there are problems. First, there is some question about just how involved Police Chief Thomas Cummings — the target of the entire enterprise, the mayor has pretty much made clear — was in the process. He called the report “full of conjecture and assumptions that are incorrect, as well as being replete with spurious and untrue accusations.” Which raises the question: Did he voice those concerns before the report was written? Did he have the opportunity? And just how useful is a report that doesn’t run its conclusions, and the facts that led to them, past the chief before it’s issued?

There’s also a nagging problem that overtime was a big part of the conversation, with both the department and the village’s dispatchers — but while the consultants used pre-COVID numbers in studying the patrol officers’ time sheets, there seemed to be no acknowledgment of the very public dispute over the size of the dispatching corps last year, and the village’s reluctance to fill posts.

Finally, there’s the overall process, which seemed designed to start at the endpoint, and to recast what should be a helpful consultant’s report into a sledgehammer. The Hartnett Report lays the foundation for a productive conversation about the Southampton Village Police Department and ways to improve it. Instead, it’s being converted to gasoline and thrown on an already raging fire.

Even the consultants themselves note that “one of the most significant recommendations” is improved oversight of the department by the village. Instead of one trustee serving as a liaison, with no real authority, the Hartnett Report suggests the creation of a police board — though it essentially would be the Village Board, with the mayor as chair. The key: monthly discussions involving the chief and the elected officials on a variety of matters.

It’s not a surprising recommendation: The village, at this moment in time, is paralyzed by the general inability to have a civil conversation. It seems clear that the mayor, frustrated by an inability to talk meaningfully with his own police chief and the union representing its officers, resorted to a report, and a self-appointed task force, to bludgeon them into submission.

Ironic, then, that Edmund Hartnett Risk Management found what so many observers can see clearly: Most of this can be resolved by reasonable adults sitting down together and having respectful conversations. That insight cost the village $40,000 — and there just doesn’t seem to be much hope that it will be money well spent.