Here is a link to the complete report
thanks Bill
Posts Tagged Chicago Office of the Inspector General
The Chicago Tribune has a follow-up article relating to yesterday’s order to rehire four CFD firefighters that were fired.
Chicago’s internal watchdog on Monday defended his recommendation to fire dozens of firefighters who padded mileage reports and called an arbitrator’s ruling to soften penalties in the case “patent nonsense.”
Last year, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson recommended firing 54 firefighters in the Fire Prevention Bureau that his office determined had falsified their mileage reimbursements to the tune of $100,000 in 2009. Then-fire Commissioner Robert Hoff decided instead to issue lengthy unpaid suspensions to most firefighters but fired four of them.
The arbitrator, Edwin Benn, reversed the firings last week, ruling that the four instead should be suspended without pay for 40 days. He also ruled that most of the other firefighters have their 30- to 60-day suspensions reduced to 20 to 40 days.
Benn found that while firefighters and supervisors violated city rules, they engaged in conduct that had been “almost a work rule,” condoned within the department for decades.
“The idea that stealing, fraudulent falsification of official records — and lying — is acceptable because everyone else is doing it is patent nonsense. Any child knows better,” Ferguson wrote in response. “These firefighters did not engage in conduct that unknowingly brought them in technical violation of some obscure and misunderstood city rule. Rather, they admitted to routinely and systematically lying in order to steal money from the city — and, ultimately, from Chicago taxpayers.”
The complete article is HERE.
Statter911.com has an article about the City of Chicago Inspector General (IG) trying to dictate disciplinary measures within the Chicago Fire Department … again. At issue this time is a CFD battalion chief (BC) that allowed his adult son to ride-along and bunk-in. The IG wanted a 20-day suspension for the BC, while Commissioner Hoff dispensed a verbal reprimand.
The article quotes CFD Spokesman Larry Langford and a column on Huff Post Chicago by Alden Loury the publisher of The Chicago Reporter.
Introduced by the IG is an opinion that the commissioner’s stance has to do with his childhood. (from Huff Post Chicago):
In the opening scenes of the 1991 Ron Howard filmBackdraft, two young brothers are horsing around in the Chicago firehouse where their father works when an emergency call comes in. As firefighters ready their engine to answer the call, the younger brother beams when his dad asks if he wants to ride along.
The movie is loosely based on the lives of Chicago Fire Commissioner Robert Hoff and his older brother Raymond Hoff, third-generation Chicago firefighters whose father was killed fighting a fire in a South Side apartment building in 1962, according to media reports.
The film came to mind recently because Commissioner Hoff — presumably depicted as the younger brother in Backdraft who rode along with his firefighter-father — is now at the center of a controversy involving fire department “ride alongs.”
The Statter911 article can be found HERE, and the Huff Post Chicago article can be found HERE.
