MIN CHC 1989-04-04 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

directly to the mayor and give everything. . .really, control to the mayor , then the Police Department becomes the same. . . becomes a political instrument if a mayor chooses it to be that way . I think that ' s one of the reasons that the commission was inserted in there, to try to distance itself from pure politics . At least to provide some distance from that. DUNCAN: But then. . . the commission itself; is not a policy-making body, then the only thing it may have is the politics . BETHEA: Yeah, but what I think the.. . . the answer perhaps is that the commission should be a policy-making or a, as Mr . Ibarra suggested, in the broad sense maybe not to get involved with the day-to-day operations of the depart- ment for which they ' re not. . .neither trained youknownor capable. And at the same time, and this is just a personal opinion, I think you want it to be as far removed from politics as possible and obviously not being at someone ' s disposal with their investigative power and their manpower for political purposes . CUSHNIE: I might point out, it ' s been interesting because over the course of the last few weeks , we ' ve have had quite a few new chiefs of departments speak to us . They all have their own new interpretation and I 'm sure Chief Vierra is aware of the fact that our past mayor , Mayor Carpenter , took over the day-to-day operations of the Police Department while we still had a chief of police in place. And he did it under this administrative supervision clause. Now if that ' s not direct "intervention or interference, " I don' t know what is . VIERRA: Then. . . I 'm in a very ambiguous situation. Like you said, the Charter isn' t clear , as I would inter- pret Section 7-2 . 7 , the mayor might interpret it differently as was obvious. with Mayor Carpenter . And like you said, the commission was set up specifically to separate the department from other departments in terms of political. . .pure political contact. Yet, I 'm still respon- sible to go to the mayor for my budget, my paychecks , my own personal actions , my commissions , and so you ' re part of the team but yet you' re not part of the team. You ' re in a tenuous situation. And. . . BETHEA: But. . . that ' s a practice (inaudible) . Does the mayor influence his promotions? VIERRA: He could and I have known it to happen. In Honolulu right now, the. . . the. . . there are two types of 209