Out Of All Patience

I read the various news and commentary about the regular police force; five full-time officers and a chief strong, and a couple of other city employees resigning in a body from their jobs in Kenly, North Carolina, in protest over the hostile work atmosphere generated through a new city manager hire. Details on this are all obscure about the personalities and specific incidences of workplace hostility involved. One can sort of fill in the empty spaces, just applying what can be deduced from the personal details and past employment record of the city manager involved, and suppositions regarding the civic employees who have resigned. That and reading the comments appended to the news stories about this interesting happening from those who seem to be familiar. All the parties involved seem to be tight-lipped about what set the whole thing off. The town council was supposed to have held a closed-door meeting on Friday to resolve the situation, but there has not been anything new in the news media that I can find.

I did not grow up in a small town like Kenly, but in a suburb on the distant outskirts of Los Angeles, a suburb so remote from the urban core when I grew up there, that it might just as well have been a small town. There was only one high school – a largish one, as semi-urban/suburban consolidated high schools go – but otherwise a semi-isolated, tight, and cohesive community, a community only cracked, dispersed and amalgamated to the larger urban core when the 210 Highway went through, making the place an easy commute to the larger city. I have since made a study of small towns, doing books about them, visiting such towns regularly, participating in regular celebrations (mostly book-oriented), absorbing local history, gaining a sense of places where everyone knows each other, or is related, even at one or two removes. Look – these places are tightly-woven with personal and familial ties. Screw around with them at your peril, as all those folk tales about the country folk and the city slicker will attest.

Even late-comers to the place must make an effort to blend in, create their own positive connections, take a key part in binding the community together, and not make themselves obnoxious. What happened in Kenly, inspiring the full-time police officers and chief, and two other city employees to tender resignations is … most unusual. The new city manager does seem to have been the one chiefly responsible for inspiring the resignations. Frankly, it takes a true gift for offense to inspire such hostility within a bare month. From the little that has made it into the various news reports, she was let go from her previous civic employment, sued for the unfairness of it all, which was denied, and then spent two years as the self-described CEO of her boutique consulting firm, which I suspect is resume-speak for being unemployed; a woman of color, you see. From the previous job descriptions and college degrees, one might suspect a committed diversity social justice warrior.

I should emphasize that I don’t know this for sure, but the speed with which she alienated city employees gives one the sense that she was, and not tactful or diplomatic about it. Kenly is roughly two-thirds white, Asian, Native American, mixed race or Latino, the remaining one third black, as of the 2000 Census, although that may be subject to change in the last twenty years. So – at a blue-sky guess here, a professional city-administering bureaucrat of color, swanned into a small town, tried to throw the racial card down … and long-term employees and citizens looked at her, and what she demanded of them, and decided that the only way to win was not to play.
Honestly, I’d guess that at this point, employees of various cities, corporations and colleges who are not of the favored ethnic or sexual demographic are looking at the racial game as played by the DEI/BLM/Whiteness-is-a-Crime-Against-Humanity-Eleventy!! as a game they don’t want to play. Just look at the declining recruitment and retention figures for the military. Not everyone annoyed by the diversity woke can afford to quit so publicly. Likely that more of the dissenters are quietly resigning, retiring or updating their resumes.
Comment as you wish. Especially if you have first-hand or second-hand insight into the Kenly situation.

34 thoughts on “Out Of All Patience”

  1. For whatever it may or may not be worth, I went 10-42 for the last time in 2008, ending a 28 year career with my department [14 years ago]. In that 14 year period, my old department became extremely politically correct and Leftist. They also accumulated a large and ever growing non-uniformed administrative class of staff weenies with no line experience. From contacts I have still [mostly people I trained when they were rookies and they are approaching retirement themselves], the reactions to new PC atrocities kind of go like this.

    If the people are past probationary status, and have a few years in, if they are P.O.ed enough they will look for another department as the career shift will not affect them that much. If the people are P.O.ed enough and already at retirement age, they will pull the pin. If they are close to retirement age, they will try to stay out of the way of whatever new madness has come down and maybe rearrange their retirement plans so they can pull the pin earlier if things get unbearable, and they are likely to leave earlier than they had originally planned.

    The poor sods who have more than a few years in and yet are not near enough to consider retirement grit their teeth and try to hold on. I have one friend who has been hanging on for at least 10 years and is within two for retirement and trying to make it.

    The other effect is that the word gets out, and the numbers and quality of new applicants for the Academy go down. Both tend to create pressures to graduate officers who normally would not make it. Which makes the job worse and to create opportunities for the staff weenies to crack down more and make things worse. Which lowers the reputation of the department more. I’ll just say that I am glad I retired when I did.

    I don’t know the staff demographics in Kenly, but this kind of mass walk off probably means a) whatever was the trigger was not only outrageous but involved insults by said city manager that were intolerable; probably involving their professionalism or honor. And b) that those who left knew that based on the city manager’s protected class status that she was absolutely immune from consequences. So they left.

    If she is immune [especially being new and with her history], then she will remain and it will be an interesting exercise in recruiting replacement cops. I have not been watching the job market in North Carolina, but I suspect that those who quit will not have difficulty in getting new jobs. If she is not immune and goes elsewhere, they have a chance to rebuild the department.

    Given current politics, I suspect that good cops will have no problem getting new jobs in non-Democrat polities.

    YMMV

    Subotai Bahadur

  2. Why does a town of 1500 need a city manager for?
    Lots of nonsense happens in small town government, you may not get the real ambitious psychos you get at higher levels, but there’s still some nutters there, regardless of party.
    Ideally the locals can come together and straighten things out. So many small town residents have just given up.

  3. “Why does a town of 1500 need a city manager for?”
    A city that size, and that’s a technical legal distinction, with a good city manager has street without pot holes, trash picked up as necessary and low taxes compared to a city of that size that tries to be governed by 4-8 amateurs that may have a couple of hours a week to devote to all the paper work and staying ahead of all the many regulatory requirements from on high, not to mention various personal axes to grind. Do you have any idea just what is involved in running the water, sewer etc. for 1,500 people?

  4. Brian asks a question the residents of that town should be considering, why do they need a City Manager? Bloated government is never the solution. I watched video of this City Manager walking into a City Council meeting after the resignations, the seated Council members barely acknowledged her arrival, some did not at all notice her presence.
    It seems to me, they have an excess of administration.

  5. Brian,
    Being from small town myself I can answer that question.
    The mayor, council etc are part time positions and generally not professional managers. Somebody has to handle the budgets, personnel, planning, regulatory compliance, grant hunting, etc etc. The city manager is hired to do those things and answers to the mayor and council. But since the elected aren’t professionals they can be easily buffaloed into following the manager’s recommendations.

  6. Thirty percent is way past the tipping point. I’m surprised Kenly haven’t been in the news before this.

  7. “Why does a town of 1500 need a city manager for?”

    Excellent question. Usually, the correct answer is “an elected mayor” not “imported (and highly questionable) “credentialed expertise” from far outside.” Especially now, as “experts” at nearly every level have been proven to be quite fallible.

    The focus, for the moment, may be on the cops, but what else is happening in Kenly? Beyond the LEOs leaving en masse – a very significant event in itself – “a couple of other city employees” have departed, but what are businesses and homeowners doing? Any business retrenchment happening, expansion plans being scrapped, homes going on the market in numbers higher than normal?

    Adam Smith is credited with saying “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” which may be true, but just as true is that there is a whole lot less room for any ruin in a small town.

    I suspect that the more serious questions being raised across Kenly’s back fences and in grocery and hardware store aisles go far beyond not just the Imported Talent in Question but also to the city governance who selected her.

  8. I live in a town a bit over 10k in population. There have been pushes for a city manager a few times in the past decade or so from a previous mayor and candidates. Nothing has been done, because the town runs on inertia. Department heads do more or less what they should, and the mayor and city council are not exactly the most dynamic or ambitious people in town.
    If the department heads can’t run their departments, they should be fired. If the mayor can’t keep the basics on track, they should be booted from office. A city manager seems superfluous, and a way to avoid the root of the problem, if things really aren’t being run properly. (This particular person does sound like a grifter, from what I can tell.)
    And the fact is that 1500 people is a tiny, tiny community. Heck, I even question why they need six full time police, to be honest…

  9. Kenly is on I-95 and in two counties – it is a high-crime corridor full of vibrant diversity.

  10. Six full time police? Long time ago, someone explained to me that it took about 7 full time people just to keep a person behind a desk ready to answer the phone 24/7. Simply the consequence of 8-hour days, weekends, vacations, training, sick time.

    My local small town does not have six full time police. It relies on mutual aid from the County Sheriff’s department and the State Police — and on a low level of crime.

  11. Although the departure of the entire police team may serve as a wakeup call for the citizens of Kenly, the most likely short-term outcome is that the police department will now be filled with cronies of the city manager. Followed by the uneven application of the law that goes with rule by the democrat apparatchiks.

  12. I had experience with a larger suburban city about 20 years ago. To make a long story short, we organized a reform group and got several reform candidates elected. After election the reform candidates made new friends and proved to be no improvement. The city was about 100,000 and in California, both negative factors.

  13. How to (awkward phrasing, I know) not require a city manager and still get things done?

    Don’t put all the eggs in one basket. Why should the mayor or city manager have to control the police, the fire department, the water, the sewer, parks, roads, and streetlights?

    The mayor, etc, takes care of the cops and the jail (government monopoly of power). Everything else becomes a service district with it’s own elected board and taxing power.

    Will that solve all the problems? No, but it limits them. An incompetent administration in the water department will not result in pothole problems, and the correction in the next election won’t affect the plans for a new park. Incidentally, professional politicians (and their sycophants, like polysci professors) hate the idea because it limits their power. “You’re raising a stink over the $300k remodel of the 3 year old admin building? You’re local fire station is redundant, and will be abandoned next month.”

    I lived in an unincorporated area between two municipalities which used “Special Service Districts” for most government functions, unlike the two municipalities. Had the same or better service at 20% lower tax rates. Their were constant calls for changing the state law which created them from politicians outside of the area. The residents loved them.

  14. “Everything else becomes a service district with it’s own elected board and taxing power. ”
    How about to avoid a lot of elections where about six people vote. How about to keep the water district, the road district and the sewer district from getting in a fight every time one of them needs to dig a hole. How about a sewer district that commits to a 3 Billion treatment plant when nobody’s paying attention.

    If it works for you, lucky you. one smallish city council and one mayor are a lot easier tho watch than a dozen districts with their own tax rate. Council-manager governments have worked well for a long time in a lot of places. They can blow up for a lot of reasons too, usually having to do with somebody’s ambition for higher office.

  15. In my large metro area the county govt and biggest-city govt overlap and compete. This is not by design. This de-facto power-sharing arrangement works pretty well as neither govt gets too far out of line, but there are constant calls from interested parties and naïve good-govt types to merge the govts. So far all attempts to do so have failed, so perhaps the voters aren’t totally asleep.

  16. Agree with SB that what triggered the mass walk-out was probably something outrageous and likely insulting on the part of the new city manager. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot with the people you are supposed to work with, professionally. I’d guess the police and clerks who walked off together had all known each other very well, and worked together for some time. Also what Elrod said – that the city residents and council members are likely having some serious discussions over back fences about a hire who turned out to be disastrous. Someone didn’t do their due diligence – either that, or they fell for a good sob story.

  17. I bet there’s some much longer history here. Perhaps the mayor is a tyrant who everyone hates, or there is some sort of egregious conflict between two different town factions. Some new city employee doesn’t make this many people quit in a month and a half if things are otherwise ok, no matter how awful she is.

  18. One fellow who was a major in the miami police a reputation for being a martinet (when deployed to iraq, not a single one of his men were hurt) he returned ended up a city manager in a small burg but ran afowl of the mayor who had a skydragon fixation

  19. }}} John Henry
    July 26, 2022 at 8:46 am
    Please delete that last comment and ban the commenter

    Sgt. Mom
    July 26, 2022 at 8:49 am
    Done.

    Might want to identify the name of the commenter in future cases, so it’s clear AFTER the delete that it wasn’t, as in this case, Elrod. :-P

  20. The comment was unacceptable, and the name given was a creatively misspelled obscenity, and one which I will know again, if it doesn’t go straight to the spam file. And I also have doubts about Newt Gingrich, but he’s kept it civil, so I’ll let it pass.

  21. As Gavin points out — unless you want truly part-time police, six is about the minimum to have one person answering the phone, and one in the field, and covering 3 shifts a day. You probably need one or two more just to handle the weekend coverage (you can get by with a bit over one to handle the 48 weekend hours, if you rotate the shifts and move the extra player around during the day, not an easy job changing shifts regularly. So make it 2-3, and make them part-time… Maybe retired city cops who only want to have some cash flow to add to their pensions by working 16-24h a week. You could even argue for 4 part-timers, because… vacations. Who fills in then? That’s 10 people right there, and that only gives you one person driving around 24/7/365.

  22. }}} The comment was unacceptable, and the name given was a creatively misspelled obscenity, and one which I will know again, if it doesn’t go straight to the spam file. And I also have doubts about Newt Gingrich, but he’s kept it civil, so I’ll let it pass.

    Oh, i figured it was rightful in every way. Just saying it was ambiguous until your “done” applied. ;-)

  23. “As Gavin points out — unless you want truly part-time police…That’s 10 people right there, and that only gives you one person driving around 24/7/365.”
    Yes, and as he also says:
    “My local small town does not have six full time police. It relies on mutual aid from the County Sheriff’s department and the State Police — and on a low level of crime”
    The fact is one of the advantages and attractions of living in a community of 1500 people is you don’t need the government to do as much stuff, including having police constantly patrolling the streets.

  24. “Agree with SB that what triggered the mass walk-out was probably something outrageous and likely insulting on the part of the new city manager. Talk about getting off on the wrong foot with the people you are supposed to work with, professionally. I’d guess the police and clerks who walked off together had all known each other very well, and worked together for some time.”

    Thinking about it, this may be “culture conflict.” From what I’ve been able to gather the new city manager’s previous employment experience has not been, shall we say, “all sunshine, bunnies and butterflies” and bringing an urban leftist attitude (I’m assuming a lot, there) into what may be a somewhat bucolic and closely knit small Southern community is bound to ruffle feathers. Businesses used to be keen on not “parachuting in” business foreigners who were Not Of The Culture, often because many businesses performed some degree of incest and because they also recognized the potential for philosophy and performance conflict. These days, I gather they’ll take anyone who is willing to show up somewhat reliably. Public governance, especially tightly knit governance common in small communities, is no different.

    I’ll stick by my previous back fence comment and put another vote to Sgt Mom’s assessment of Due Diligence Faliure.

    Which raises questions about what was, and is, going on Behind The Proverbial Scenes in Kenly. Methinks there’s deliberate friction being created by someone who’s out to settle a score of some kind; anything else speaks to sufficiently severe tone deafness as to justify exclusion from a public management position (which, come to think of it, equally applies to manipulative score settlers).

    And, thanks to ObloodyHell for pursuing corrective clarification. And, Mr. Henry – may I suggest that specificity is a worthwhile trait to develop, as in “that comment from commenter “X” (“X” signifying an initial, not the entire name) posted at 09:45AM is offensive and requires blog management attention.” To paraphrase the Reacher character of Lee Child’s novels (and now, on subscription TV) “details matter.”

    And, while I’m here, RE: the number of officers required for adequate coverage. I used to be with an SO that had slightly over 1700 sworn, about 2/3 of whom were “Road Dogs” – patrol deputies – and ~1200 non-sworn support employees, in a county with the SO and 12 (later, 13) smaller agencies belonging to small incorporated areas of varying size. When I left (almost 2 decades ago) we were handling about 1.1 million annual requests for service through 911 and non-emergency phone lines in a county with 1.8 million residents and workaday visitors, among which were service requests for the 6 small agencies we provided 911 services for because they were too small to have their own (one town, of about 1,000 homes, the cheapest of which was just over 500K, had 2 full-time and 3 part-time officers, and after hours calls from residents were often made to the chief’s home phone). Several towns voted themselves Special Taxing Districts to raise funds to “contract” with the SO for specific deputy coverage nights and weekends; several eventually stopped sending dollars to us and used them to hire more officers, even part-time ones, which made sense: they had more control over, and got better patrol coverage, plus a sworn officer’s request for assistance, especially of an urgent nature, would prompt a much speedier response than a citizen’s. Given that those agencies operated tight against our patrol zones, and we did overlap into their territories, a call for help was not quite what “Hey, Rube” produces at a circus but close. We regarded them as “first due,” especially for the trivial stuff, and ourselves as close support that also had more resources available. Our smarter deputies maintained frequent and detailed contact.

    I don’t know what the area surrounding Kenly looks like, or which other, and I assume, probably larger, agency may have responsibility for that turf, but I’d assume there is some degree of assistance available. Even Mayberry could call on the staties for assistance, but there is a certain reluctance to “go outside” for help.

  25. Eldest son is a field training officer in a local town, as in he rides around with rookies to see if they know what they’re about. Tells me a couple of the “rookies” he’s been with were a husband and wife that had 15 years with a dept in a major western city (not west coast), and half a dozen from west coast cities. So far they’ve been competent, capable, and willing to start over in an area where even the local civil rights groups understand that you have to have police.
    His comment to me was that so far they seem to above average types, and the implication of the declining average in their old towns doesn’t sound good.

  26. Wait a minute, don’t forgot that I said a few days ago “I bet there’s some much longer history here. Perhaps the mayor is a tyrant who everyone hates, or there is some sort of egregious conflict between two different town factions. Some new city employee doesn’t make this many people quit in a month and a half if things are otherwise ok, no matter how awful she is.”
    lol

  27. We may be jumping to a wrong conclusion by automatically assuming the new manager is the problem. I have heard of several cases over the years where a new manager was the cause of uncovering various cans of worms, not infrequently involving the police department. Everything from questionable practices to blatant corruption. I know nothing more than what’s out there and haven’t been paying very much attention, my point mainly being that there just isn’t much information. For the prevalent scenario, there seem to be oddly few aggrieved parties venting their spleen in the media. The reticence of those that so publicly resigned seems odd.

  28. MCS:
    As to the reticence you mention, especially in the government and law enforcement field you do not want to cause political waves. Let us say that those who resigned have either found other jobs or are working to find other jobs in the field. New employers, or prospective new employers, will not want to find themselves embroiled in whatever happened in Kenly. So those who left probably are keeping their heads down and just trying to move on. Not everyone views HR problems as an opportunity for both publicity and lawsuits.

    At least as a possibility.

    Subotai Bahadur

  29. That could be it too, or others without number. Considering the number of people on all sides, it seems remarkable that I couldn’t find anything beyond the initial statement announcing the resignations after all this time. The CIA could wish to be so tight lipped.

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