The Straub Tab Continues To Add Up

Frank Straub may be gone, but the bills he left behind for taxpayers keep adding up. The City of Indianapolis has settled lawsuits brought by three high-ranking IMPD officers who were demoted in the wake of the botched David Bisard investigation. Straub ordered the three demoted and blamed for the mishandling of the case by their commander, even though the former IMPD Chief Paul Ciesielski tearfully cried like a baby in later declaring in a deposition that he could not find fault in anything they did. The settlements were paid to Darryl Pierce, Ronald Hicks and John Conley. Pierce recently retired with a comfortable pension payment, while Hicks and Conley were awarded promotions recently. Hopefully, the three men share their reward money with Ciesielski for his good acting job.

The payouts to the three men are criminal in my judgment. It is simply an outrage that Hicks and Conley were given promotions before they agreed to drop their lawsuits against the city. There is no legal theory upon which the three men could have possibly recovered had they continued to pursue their cases. They all held non-merit positions at the discretion of Mayor Greg Ballard and the chief of IMPD, who the last I checked are permitted under the law to decide who holds the positions they held. If they simply disliked them personally or distrusted them, they could demote them. If Straub wanted to blame them for failing to ensure that the investigation was handled appropriately instead of just showing up at the crime scene for a circle jerk in front of the TV cameras, he could do that no matter how unfair it might seem to them or how much that might hurt their feelings or egos.

The fact is that the police department badly mishandled the David Bisard investigation by first failing to discern that he was drunk following the fatal collision he had with several motorcyclists stopped at an intersection, administering a portable blood alcohol test at the crime scene and securing other evidence, including what was in his mysterious black bag, and then by failing to have his blood alcohol level tested at a hospital in accordance with Indiana law. The entire ordeal has cost taxpayers millions of dollars because the police agency decided to employ a chronic alcoholic and then cover for that fact. This is just money the Ballard administration paid out at your expense to save it from the further embarrassment of the botched management of the Department of Public Safety and IMPD by Frank Straub and the man who promised to make public safety job one, Mayor Ballard. Only the taxpayers are paying for their incompetence. Not one person at the police agency has been held to account for the gross incompetence exhibited in the David Bisard investigation. This settlement sets a precedent of every senior management employee of IMPD suing the city for defamation every time their feelings are hurt after they are demoted by their superiors. That's bullshit and crap of the first order. Incompetence at the top breeds more incompetence. Expect mismanagement of IMPD to get progressively worse, if that is possible.

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