PARIS, Maine — A former local police officer wrote a letter to the town, calling Chief David Verrier “nothing more than a bully,” and criticizing his running of the Police Department.
The letter, written by William Cook, was addressed to Town Manager Phil Tarr in March, about a month before Cook took a job with the Mexico Police Department.
Cook recently sent the 12-page letter to selectmen, and at Monday’s meeting, Paris resident Janet Jamison asked selectmen if the board had read it. Chairman Sam Elliot said he was familiar with the letter in question, but said it would be inappropriate to discuss employee matters.
“Things like that are personnel matters, and we’re really not going to discuss those in public,” Elliot said. “This is really not the place to discuss some of that.”
Jamison also asked about old police department computers that had been sold. “That’s part of the letter,” Verrier said at Monday’s meeting. “That’s a personnel issue.”
Verrier later said the old computers had been purchased with grants and were traded in toward the cost of new department computers.
Cook worked as a reserve officer for the Paris Police Department briefly in 2007, then from June 2009 through March 2012. In the letter, Cook accuses Verrier of retaliating against him for going to Town Manager Phil Tarr about issues with his schedule.
Cook wrote that Verrier launched an internal affairs investigation against Cook and cut his hours. “Chief Verrier utilizes his rights over scheduling to instill fear into those who work for him,” Cook wrote.
On Wednesday, Verrier said that legally, he couldn’t discuss Cook’s letter, or whether there was an internal affairs investigation as it was a personnel issue. “I really can’t say anything.”
When I work for an employer they demand all sorts of access to personal information, which in aggregate make up my “personnel” file. Yet here we have employee’s, they work for a town and it’s tax payers, which are shielded because their files involve “personnel” issues. Again, these people work for the town. Shouldn’t those ‘personnel” files be open to the people who have hired them? I know, someones going to say that legally this is the law. I’d like to know when it became law and why?
Being a bully seems to be contagious these days.
Sam Elliot has taken a brake from his hollywood career to serve as a chairman in paris maine! awesome!
Ram tuff
A bully ? BAD ole puddy tat…
Disposing of ‘old police computer’s’ is not a personnel issue and Eliot knows it. That equipment is Town Property and as such is a public finance issue. That the computer’s also had police information on it also makes this a public safety and privacy issue, more so with any domestic or abuse complaint information on them. That polecat on the road may smell lke Chanel but the longer and closer you get the real smell comes out. And that this is being handled under the excuse of a ‘personnel issue’ is nothing more than someone that’s wrong now having their dirty laundry aired out. And that’s what transparency in Government is suppossed to do. If the NY Attorney General can get his ‘short’s aired out and survive then it’s survivable, as any public official should know……….
Must be slow news day