Ross commissioner acknowledges rift in police department, says effort underway to address problems

A Ross commissioner is calling for the township’s rank-and-file police officers and the police department’s administration to call a truce and start repairing their fractured relationship.

A series of incidents during the past several years — and the way they were handled by the department — have created deep animosity in the department.

Commissioner Chris Eyster, who serves on to public safety committee, said the rift led to last fall’s “no confidence” vote against Chief Joe Ley by the police department’s union and accusations that officers are subjected to a dysfunctional and toxic environment.

The commissioner said the divide has also been widened by the department’s use of a system that tracks arrests and citations to gauge an officer’s performance.

Eyster is blunt about what needs to happen for these issues to be addressed.

“Both sides need to put old scores aside and realize they are all playing on team Ross Township,” he said. “Dredging up matters from the past and continuing to revisit them is not a healthy way to deal with the issue.”

The commissioner said much of the rancor between officers and the police administration stems from the 2019 firing of Officer Mark Sullivan, an eight-year veteran of the department who was charged by agents from the state Attorney General’s office after the department accused him of illegally using department computers to search internal files.

The charges against Sullivan were twice dismissed by district judges and he was rehired by the township last year.

Eyster noted that when Sullivan was criminally charged and fired, the police department had no clearly written policies on who was permitted to access the files in the system.

The absence of written policies also became an issue when the township launched an investigation into derogatory social media posts allegedly made by a police sergeant, the commissioner said.

“We have to have clear policies that cover these issues,” he said. “We should be learning from the past and coming up with ways to deal with these grievances and put them to rest.”

Members of the Ross Township Police Association, which represents rank-and-file officers, could not be reached for comment. The police department deferred comment on the matters to the township manager, who did not respond to a request to discuss the issues.

In the past, members of the township’s administration and elected officials have declined to comment because the matters involve personnel issues.

Eyster said the township is awaiting the final draft of a review of the police department that was conducted by a consultant hired last fall.

Among the recommendations in the review, he said, is scrapping the system used to monitor performance.

“The department uses the Van Meter system, which the union views as a quota system,” the commissioner said. “I’ve looked at that system and it’s fraught with problems.”

He said the major flaw is its lack of an individualized approach to assessing an officer’s performance.

“You have to look at look at each officer’s individual strengths and utilize them,” he said. “That’s what good leadership does. This system tries to treat everybody equally in terms of writing a certain number of tickets.”

He said the system might be useful if combined with other metrics to assess productivity, but questions its value as a stand-alone tool.

While Eyster doesn’t dismiss the importance of traffic enforcement in a township with such a large commercial district “it’s not the over-reaching problem that the police have to deal with.”

While Eyster’s decades-long career as a criminal defense attorney frequently places him an adversarial role with police, that’s not the case when dealing with public safety issues as an elected township official.

“I have great respect for police unless they do something to lose that respect,” he said. “We need to improve the work environment in the police department to get the best out of each officer.

“The job is hard enough without having them come to work worried that the administration doesn’t have their back, especially now with the current of anti-police sentiment that exists. But for that to happen, there needs to be a change in culture on both sides.”