Tupper police accused of sleeping on the job
The Adirondack Daily Enterprise is reporting that Tupper Lake’s chief of police used a GPS tracking unit to find out what his late-shift police officers were doing at night.
One village police officer has been sleeping on the job, and others have been hanging out at home while on the taxpayers’ dime.
Village police Chief Tom Fee told the village board at a special meeting Jan. 4 that he caught one of his officers sleeping on the clock in a police vehicle, both on his own property and on the side of the road.
He also discovered that two other officers went home while on duty for several hours, leaving police vehicles running in their driveways the whole time.
It’s still unclear what disciplinary action will follow. But Fee told told the Enterprise that he isn’t “going to destroy somebody over” the case.
But this means a third of Tupper’s rank-and-file police force is accused of behaving negligently (I’m using a layman’s term, not a legal term) on the job.
Tags: adirondacks
Big deal, I hope that the department can handle this issue. If it really requires board participation they certainly have a top down approach in TL.
This must be one of those no news days.
Tommy better remember that a lot of people have been watching him for a couple decades.
Stuff like this happens. But a bigger issue may be if you have time to regularly sleep on the job and go home and hang out, and no one knows that you are doing it unless they track you; does the village need the third shift at all? Put a couple of guys on call at night and let the professionals handle the big calls.
idiots————deduct amt of time they goffing off and sleeping from pay check. im sure their families and kids happy to see them home on duty. they feel safe-great role models.
Well it may not be national news but it does seem like people should do the job they’re being paid for while on the clock, or am I missing something?
Maybe in a sleepy little town like Tupper lake, in the middle of winter, in the middle of the night, there really isn’t much to do. Maybe the small towns have too many policemen on the payroll.
Last fall, I spent a weekend in Montreal…We were all over the city, in and out of shops, restaurants, neighborhoods, and parks…in that whole two day stretch, I saw exactly two policemen! Two! In a city of 11 million. By contrast, when I go to work in the village of Potsdam, it’s not uncommon to see from three to six patrol cars, in a six block trip across town. We have village cops, county sherriff’s patrols, border agents, state highway patrol cars, and campus cops…all creepin’ around town, carrying weapons, and eyeing the locals. The saddest part, aside from paying all these people, is that I felt safer in Montreal.
It’s the same here in Lewis County, Mike. Police officers of various stripes everywhere. And it all has to be payed for.
A bit off topic, but this “security complex” actually drove a very popular and lucrative music festival out of the county as they demanded over six figures from the promoter and owner of the facility where it’s held for security services last May. Despite the fact that the promoter and owner hired their own security personnel year after year and never requested the huge police presence the county tried repeatedly to insist on providing. Now the Town of Mohawk and the County of Herkimer are reaping the benefits of this very popular festival.