Citing a need to further evaluate its legality under state civil-service laws, Little Rock has delayed a vote on proposed guidelines that would give Little Rock Police Chief Kenton Buckner major influence on promotions for the department's top brass and place less emphasis on input from a third-party panel.
The policy, which would change the process through which a captain is promoted to assistant chief, had been set for a vote by the city's Civil Service Commission at a public hearing this morning. It has been tabled until Buckner, city attorneys and human resources officials can meet next month to discuss revisions, according to Human Resources Employment Manager Kathleen Walker.
It was unclear when that meeting might occur, as well as when a modified policy might be presented to the Civil Service Commission. The policy was drafted at Buckner's request.
Walker said the biggest change from the current policy to the proposed policy -- the chief's influence -- will likely be revised.
Under the drafted guidelines, 50 points of a candidate's 100-point evaluation would be based on a structured interview with the chief. A structured interview includes questions on a candidate's law enforcement experience, judgment, interpersonal skills and stress-coping ability. It may also include hypothetical questions known as situational judgment tests.
That interview, as well as the separate 50-point review of a candidate's professional history, involves panels under the current policy. To ensure objectivity, panelists are from outside Arkansas and "reasonable efforts" are made to ensure race and gender diversity of the group, the policy states. Panelists rank assistant chief or higher. The chief selects a new assistant chief from the three highest-scoring candidates.
Walker said that panels will probably be written back into the structured interview under the proposed policy. The chief would still be involved, but further specifics -- such as how points would be divided between the chief and the panel -- haven't been determined.
"We're still going to have it, but we're looking at a rater panel versus the chief," Walker said. "At this point, we don't know anything else. We haven't come up with the language of what changes we're going to make."
The Little Rock Police Department has three assistant chiefs: Wayne Bewley of the Field Services Bureau, Hayward Finks of the Investigative and Support Bureau and Eric Higgins of the Executive Bureau. Each has been with the department more than 25 years and has no current plans to leave, according to police spokesman Lt. Sidney Allen.
Because of that, Walker said there isn't a "big rush" to revise the policy.
"We like to take our time and make sure we get everything right," she said.
Walker said the policy is being reviewed to ensure it complies with a 1987 Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that allows oral examinations in the promotion process for firefighters and police officers, provided that they're "fair," "impartial" and "free of favoritism, politics or other impropriety."
The court issued the opinion in the case of Bennett v. Blytheville Civil Service Commission, in which former Blytheville Fire Department Lt. Tommy Bennett appealed a circuit court's decision to uphold the promotion of Lt. Jerry Summers to captain. Summers was promoted after scoring less than one cumulative point higher than Bennett on tests in the promotion process.
"The oral exam and departmental evaluation must be conducted so that some reasonable means for judicial review is possible to insure that the examiners have not been guided entirely by their own subjective discretion: That would require at a minimum some prior conceptions of the qualifications for the position being filled, the ideal responses to the questions posed, and some memorandum of the results besides scores," the ruling states.
Justice Darrell Hickman concurred with the court's opinion but lamented that the law didn't outline criteria to assess a promotion candidate's intangible qualities.
"Leadership and character are hard qualities to determine purely through testing. I doubt if they can be. A person making the best grade may be totally unable to act out the duties of a senior officer," he wrote.
Two Little Rock police employees -- Capt. Alice Fulk and Capt. Patrice Smith -- sued the department and the city last year after being denied promotions to assistant chief under circumstances similar to the Bennett case.
Fulk, a sworn officer since 1992, had the second-highest score of applicants for the position, but former chief Stuart Thomas chose the top scorer, Bewley, and third-highest scorer, Finks, to become assistant chiefs.
Fulk alleged there was a "glass ceiling" at the Police Department.
Smith, in addition to her own lawsuit, filed a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission stating that she was denied the promotion because of her race and sex. She is black. The proposed guidelines have no language on gender or racial diversity in the promotion process.
Little Rock City Manager Bruce Moore said in a Board of Directors meeting Nov. 25 that he supports involvement by police and fire chiefs in the promotion process. He was speaking to Ward 1 City Director Erma Hendrix, who told Moore that she had read about the Police Department's proposed policy in the Democrat-Gazette earlier that day.
"I have always thought that the chief ought to have -- whether it's the fire chief or the police chief -- some additional ability to pick his or her team. There's no vacancies in that area, but Chief Buckner agrees and [former] Chief Thomas agreed that a chief should have input," he said.
When Hendrix asked Moore if city directors could also have input, Moore said, "Sure."
Hendrix said Wednesday that she hadn't yet read the proposed policy in full. She declined to comment further until she had.
Buckner has not answered questions on why he's seeking more involvement in the process of choosing an assistant chief. He has also declined to discuss possible changes to the guidelines.
"We are in the process [of] rewriting the language," he said two weeks ago in a statement to the Democrat-Gazette. "We will be more than happy to discuss at the proper time. At this time, nothing has been finalized."
When asked Wednesday whether Buckner would answer those questions, Allen, the department spokesman, said that the chief was unavailable to comment.
"He's unavailable today, but I think he's answered those questions. Albeit generic, but he's answered them," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Aziza Musa of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Metro on 12/11/2014