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Hiring policy raises standards for Evansville police

EVANSVILLE — Officer Patrick Reese recalled being kind of surprised by the hiring process when he started at the Evansville Police Department in 2005.

"I just remember when I got hired, I think a few phone calls were made, nothing too exciting was done," he said.

But when former Sgt. William Fitters, who was responsible for background checks in the hiring process, quit before he was charged with two counts of liquor sales without a license, Reese said he and Investigator Mike Laufenberg saw an opportunity.

"I thought even though we're still small-town Evansville, we have to get out of the mentality that, ‘Since we're smaller, maybe we can get away with doing less,'" Reese said. "We're the same police that Madison are, we're the same police the State Patrol are, we're the same police as anybody else in the state of Wisconsin."

Reese and Laufenberg spent months researching how other departments hire officers, attending workshops and talking with experts as they developed a new hiring process.

The standards they wrote have been in place about 12 years, and two full-time officers—Cristian Bennett and Matthew Nankee—and two part-time officers have been hired since. Using the standards in those hiring rounds has weeded out potentially "bad apples" that otherwise could have been hired, Reese said.

"We can train people, that's not the issue," he said. "But we can't train people to be good, ethical, moral people."

Those officers went through a lot more hurdles and verification, and their hiring hopefully is helping to restore trust in the department, Reese said.

"We recognize we've had problem children," Reese said, referring to Fitters and former Officer Jason Grooms, who quit in December 2007 after being cited for disorderly conduct in a Milton bar fight.

Fitters quit in spring 2007 after state agents caught him selling bottles of his homemade "Apple Pie Everclear" to a local bar without a license. Fitters also had served a 60-day suspension in 2006 for unbecoming conduct after an Evansville woman accused him of misconduct, including pressuring her to have sex.

"We really don't want that to happen again," Reese said. "It's an embarrassment to us, it's an embarrassment to our community, and it's hard to recover after something like that and build up peoples' trust."

He's hearing less jokes about "the olden days" now and hopes the public recognizes the problems hopefully have been corrected.

Police Chief Scott McElroy reviews every step of the process and makes the hiring recommendations to the police commission, which makes the final decision.

Police Commission President Scott Brummond said the more exhaustive level of checking makes sure the candidates are qualified, but also a good fit for the department.

"I think the result—time will tell—is certainly the effort that goes into screening the officer candidates is much more intensive than it used to be, and I think we'll see the benefits in the long run," he said.