I probably should not have been surprised that Officer Adam Treanor staged a mid-sized tantrum yesterday because, sources and my own common sense say, this has been an off-year.
I had telephoned Officer Adam yesterday to discuss the Police Union’s latest no-confidence-in-the-chief vote, although I subsequently was told the boys took a vote to determine whether to hold a second no-confidence vote. Just follow the bouncing ball.
Making it plain that he does not toss baloney all the time, Officer Adam asserted himself at the outset. He let the dense thinker on the other end know he should not light a stogie and scootch to the rear of his chair because, ahem, this wouldn’t take long.
In a rather stentorian tone, Officer Adam attempted to wise me up.
Said I, in part: “Can you tell me about the election results?”
Said he, in part: “Hey, I think it has been explained to you: Nobody on the board is going to be talking to you anymore. Okay? We don’t believe you have any objectivity. And there’s no reason to talk. So we are not going to comment. You don’t need to bother calling. Okay? Like I said, because of things that have been discussed with you in the past, you don’t need to be contacting anybody on the board anymore. Okay.”
Dazzled by the dialogue, my wife suggested that I incorporate it, whole, into the screenplay I have been writing since 1991. Okay.
For just a moment after my You Should Be on Our Side conversation with Officer Adam, he reminded me of ill-tempered losing football coaches I used to cover. They also had trouble defining “objectivity.”
In Officer Adam’s dotage when he shuffles to a table to assemble a bulging scrapbook of favorite memories, these 12 dreary months of ’10 will even rate behind A Belated Tribute to Favorite Ex-Wives, Raises I Deserved, Promotions Any Fairminded Bloke Could See I Had Earned and Smart, Handsome Journalists I Sure Wish I Had Befriended.
Twenty-ten opened with all the pregnant promise of your first couple of weddings. Freshly elected President of the Police Officers Assn., and surrounded by (mostly) like-thinking chaps, this would be a year, Officer Adam surmised, to gain recognition on the cover of the Culver City Police Dept. History Book, under the headline:
“We Dumped the Chief, By Golly.”
Wrongo.
It is Dec. 16, and the boys of the POA still are trying to push what was supposed to be a pebble up the hill.
By now, fifth-year Chief Don Pedersen was supposed to have been shlepping a lunch bucket up and down busy boulevards, desperately, perspiringly pursuing menial jobs.
Trouble was, the boys quickly found out they lacked grounds to bring against the Chief. More like stale coffee grounds.
Last I looked, Culver City yawned at what seems to be a fairly exhaustive campaign to oust Mr. Pedersen.
They have tried to translate petty private complaints into a bill of sale against the Chief, and I haven’t yet come across anyone who is buying bogus bargains today.
The POA’s charges could not be categorized as swift: Accusing the Chief of wearing his watch on the wrong wrist, of tying his shoes too loosely, of jaywalking at midnight on the main street of a ghost town at midnight.
As a result, their campaign to can the classy Mr. Pedersen has backfired, which may explains their greasy, messy faces.
By all signs, Mr. Pedersen is even more firmly ensconced in the Chief’s second-floor office than he was last January when the leadership of the POA furtively and busily was diagramming his professional demise in Culver City.
It is a detail that he is in office because the boys of the POA mapped woeful strategy. Mr. Pedersen is there mainly because he exudes class, he is honest, because he is an effective face of the Department, and he has the faith and confidence of City Hall.
The leadership of the POA has been commonly characterized as four petulant, disgruntled chaps who have been trying — hamhandedly— to convert their intensely personal beefs with Mr. Pedersen into a falling axe.
I sympathize with their disappointments. But your personal setback does not translate into lowering a 2-by-4 atop your boss’s think tank.
The lesson for the boys at the top of the POA for their spectacularly failed mission — so far —is that you shouldn’t do overkill.
Don’t wipe your nose with the carpet.
Don’t shoot a sparrow with two Civil War cannons from opposite directions.
No matter how hot your temper is, no matter how tempting tantrums are, and my ears still ring a little, somebody needs to dream up charges at least vaguely darning and fact-tinged if not face-based. Okay?
