In a column published a year ago, The PBA Magazine shined a much-needed spotlight on the Department’s so-called Performance Monitoring Program (PMP), “a sinister and dishonest shadow system of discipline that can cost a police officer career advances and desirable duty assignments and put a career on hold for seven years.” At that writing, the PBA legal team had filed a complaint with the city Office of Collective Bargaining, seeking to rescind the program and have it declared a mandatory subject of collective bargaining.

Of course, at the OCB — an agency that has been referred to as the city’s lapdog — the cards are usually stacked against us and our complaint was denied. But we’re not letting that stop us. We are continuing to strike back in the wars against the insidious and illegal PMP.

Besides appealing in State Supreme Court to have the OCB’s denial of our complaint reversed, the PBA has also filed a class action suit in that court on behalf of 14 of our members seeking to have the PMP declared unlawful, to reverse its harmful effects against these officers and more than 300 other affected cops, and to recover $125,000 or more in damages. Named as defendants in the suit are The City of New York, the NYPD, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, First Deputy Commissioner George Grasso, Chief of Personnel Rafael Pineiro, Chief of Internal Affairs Charles Campisi, and Arnold Wechsler, Director of the Employee Management Division.

The suit charges some or all of these defendants with 14 counts, including violations of the city administrative code, the city charter and the state constitution, as well as fraud, breach of contract, being vague and arbitrary, and being arbitrary and capricious. The PBA has demanded a jury trial.

The suit contends that the program is unlawful in that it:

• was unlawfully promulgated and maintained;

• disciplines cops beyond the commissioner’s authority;

• disciplines them without notice of — much less, written — charges;

• denies them the opportunity to testify on their own behalf and cross-examine and confront witnesses, and denies them legal counsel and union representation;

• imposes, without a hearing, penalties not covered by law — including denial of overtime and premium-pay opportunities;

• imposes multiple penalties for one infraction;

• places officers on probation for periods illegally exceeding one year; and

• disciplines them without conviction and/or on the basis of mere or unproven allegations.

All that certainly covers a multitude of sins. But beyond the legal ramifications, there’s a personal side to the story, told best by one of the plaintiffs in the class-action suit — a PBA Transit delegate who has been exiled to the program, most probably simply in retaliation for his effective representation of PBA members and advocacy of the union’s principles and policies and for filing an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint against the department.

The officer was summoned for a PMP meeting last July 23 with Deputy Inspector Donna Jones of the Employee Management Division, where he learned that he had been placed in the program without notice 15 days earlier. The officer had the presence of mind to conceal a tape recorder on his person for that meeting. Excerpts from the tape reveal the total disdain for the officer in the street and callous disregard for objectivity, due process and individual rights that characterize the mentality of the program and its management perpetrators.

D.I. Jones: What I need to tell you is how this monitoring program is going to work. That’s what I need to tell you, and you need to listen. You know why? Because we’re taking a hard look at police officers who are poor performers. We are looking to bring them up on charges. We are looking to get rid of non-performers. The Police Department should not be saddled with people who cannot meet the expectations.

Remember, by the department’s own admission, the PMP is a program for discipline. Officers receive no notice of their placement, are kept in the dark about when their terms will end, and are given no way to challenge their inclusion. The more than 1,000 pages of procedures provided to every officer contain not a single mention of the program. Criteria for inclusion are improper, subjective and vague. For example, they tell you that you can be placed in the program for “negative behavior” without providing objective criteria to define that term. In fact, CCRB complaints that have been resolved in the officer’s favor have been used as pretexts for inclusion.

D.I. Jones: The biggest thing I take most offense to is you police officers who don’t have the gumption to study... You could have been a captain. They gave enough exams for you to have taken the test to become a captain. You know what I mean?

No, what does this mean? If you want to devote your career to being a police officer, you’re prime performance monitoring material?

D.I. Jones: I think your whole perspective is somehow skewed. So you need to change it. Because you’re in this monitoring program, you’re going to be evaluated quarterly. You need to — you know what his (the captain’s) expectations are not. You know it’s not two arrests per quarter [meaning, it’s more than two? — Editors’ question]. So, if I was you, I would figure it out, what it needs to be. So the next (unintelligible), come in here positive. Because if you get two (evaluations) below standards, we are going to the third step and we are going to ask that you be moved out of Transit.

That sounds suspiciously like the threat of a punitive transfer for not meeting an arrest quota, doesn’t it? Does it make policy sense to impose arrest quotas and have our police officers make arrests to avoid discipline?

D.I. Jones: As a matter of fact, I think you need to be moved out of Transit anyway — you and your bad back (derisively).

The officer has medically certified back problems.

D.I. Jones: You know why? — because I think Transit is a whole different mind-set. If you come out of Transit and we send you to a patrol precinct, where you are assigned jobs, you don’t have to wait on the platform for them to come and say, “Hey look, look at me, I’m swiping this MetroCard for people.” You don’t gotta wait for that. They will assign jobs to you.

Notice the total lack of respect for the difficult and dangerous job Transit officers perform. Has this supervisor ever stood on a subway platform all alone at 2 a.m. on a cold and wintry and crime-ridden night? We doubt it.

D.I. Jones: We will schedule you for the next performance enhancement class. And you will be expected to come. But I am telling you, two of those and we are going to look to put you in a patrol precinct. After that we are going to look to get rid of you. We will look to bring you up on charges for...um...I’m trying to think what they are calling it. Malfeasance. We’ll fire you. It’s not malfeasance — I forget the name. But we are going to look to bring you up, and it’s going to be funny.

That’s just a taste of what a cop has to endure after being singled out in this witch-hunt known as the Performance Monitoring program. Notice how vague and subjective D.I. Jones’s terminology and standards were. We don’t think it’s “going to be funny” at all — in fact, we’re dead serious in our opposition to this illegal and unjust program.