It’s not as if I’m about to walk out the door.” Ramsey says that he is not upset or angry with Patterson, and that he plans to “work harder with the council.” He also says that the benefits-package brouhaha isn’t the end of the road for him at the department: “I’m not ready to retire. “I don’t see anything in motion to improve the quality of basic police work,” Patterson says. And the councilmember will even hazard a prediction on how the evaluation will turn out. She says she won’t let it out until she evaluates Ramsey’s performance over the coming year. Through a quirk in the council’s legislative protocol, she has managed to bottle up an enhanced benefits package for Ramsey in the Judiciary Committee. Yet Patterson still has a card to play against Ramsey. Despite her clout on the council, only five of her colleagues agreed with her, and the raise passed on a 7-6 vote. In a surprisingly heated battle that played out over several weeks, Patterson argued that the raise, which was to bump the chief’s pay to $175,000 per year, would constitute a reward for poor performance. The diss, in other words, helps explain Patterson’s determination this summer to deny Ramsey a $25,000 pay raise. Still, it carries far greater resonance: The feud over Kuhn and Barrett helped to turn Patterson inexorably against Ramsey and his stewardship of the D.C. We were within our rights to hire these people.”Ī personnel spat waged with memos certainly doesn’t rank among the sexier clashes in council annalssuch as the time the late Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas slugged a staffer at a holiday party, or the time newly elected At-Large Councilmember David Catania shouted down veteran colleague Harold Brazil on the dais. Ramsey counters, “I just flat-out disagree with her. You didn’t answer me because you know your people broke the law. This past March, Patterson effectively closed the file with a letter that she summarizes as follows: “‘OK, I’m not going to write you anymore about this. Over the next two years, Patterson pursued the matter with both Williams and Kellems.ĭespite her repeated entreaties, Patterson has not yet received a response from the administrationan omission that Kellems confirms. In one letter, Patterson detailed several violations of the D.C. Williams and his deputy for law enforcement, Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, Patterson’s queries fell into a bureaucratic black hole. After an initial exchange of letters with Mayor Anthony A. “The chief bounced it upstairs ,” she says. So Patterson wrote Ramsey to ask if he’d complied with the code. He had also failed to post the positions and open them to competition. By the look of things, Ramsey had violated hiring rules by filling senior positions from outside the department. So she went to one of her greatest allies in municipal oversight: personnel regulations. Patterson knew that simply whining about alleged cronyism would get her nowhere. She had hammered the chief over shoddy homicide investigations in recent months and had called for a council hearing after Ramsey’s orchestrated street-sweep of anti-globalization demonstrators in April 2000the so-called Ramsey plan. Patterson was tracking both of the problem areas Ramsey had targeted. When she heard about the decision to hire Kuhn and Barrett, her oversight reflex kicked in. In her two-and-a-half years heading Judiciary, Patterson has forged friendships with various officers, who often call or stop by her office to raise concerns about happenings on the force. The grumbling about these two hires would likely have faded quickly.īut as Ramsey has learned, rumors of mismanagement don’t fade away if they reach the desk of Ward 3 Councilmember Kathy Patterson, who chairs the D.C. The chief wouldn’t address the rumors regarding either of the hires.īut charges of cronyism at the department are nothing new, and even critics of Chief Ramsey admit that he may have been merely trying to hire seasoned cops, ones he could trust. This rumor was likely true in Kuhn’s case, because his time serving as a cop in Chicago had overlapped with Ramsey’s for about 15 years. Word within the department was that the pending hires, Steven Kuhn and Jack Barrett, were old friends of Ramsey’s. When it came time to fill the positions, Ramsey prepared to pass up homegrown talent in favor of outsiders. Ramsey was under fire, so he decided to create two new positions to help fix the mess: a superintendent of detectives to boost the force’s investigative capacity and an inspector to work with the feds on the excessive-force probe. police department for its use of excessive force. Department of Justice was investigating the D.C. It was early 2001, a time when more than half of the District’s murder cases were going unsolved, and the U.S.
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