Cover Story: Jerked around

Payback is a bitch in the Atlanta Police Department. In July 1999, Sgt. Faye Coffield wrote up a senior patrol officer for refusing to ride with the partner to whom Coffield had assigned him. Coffield's reason was that Officer Larry Geisz, when allowed to ride solo, disappeared from details.

In September 1999, Coffield found herself at the receiving end of a complaint from Geisz, claiming that she had used profanity and had failed to supervise. He said that from November 1997 until July 1999 she cursed in front of her officers and that she said she "didn't care" what they did. Coffield was given an oral admonishment by her commanding officer. She was warned not to use that kind of language and to watch her attitude.

Coffield thought that was the end of it. It wasn't.

What happened to Coffield after that is a study in how the APD treats its officers and why they have left the department in droves over the last five years.

First, her scheduled 90-day loan to the vice unit — the unit with, for obvious reasons, the worst hours in the department — stretched into nearly a year. Then she was transferred with only 24 hours notice to work in Zone 3 in southeast Atlanta, where the father of her son, against whom she at one time had a restrai-ning order, is assigned. After she filed a grievance over the transfer, she was suspended for 10 days without pay for the old complaint filed by Geisz. Now, she's back in Zone 3, looking for a way out.

The trouble has flown both ways. Coffield — an 18-year veteran — filed a lawsuit against the department in 1995, since dismissed, claiming that she was punished for mistakes supervisors ignore when made by male officers.

Coffield, 51, says she feels jerked around by the department, punished and put down more for speaking her mind than for anything she's done on the job. And she says the way Chief Beverly Harvard and her administration has treated her isn't that different from the treatment of most rank and file officers in the APD. And that, she says, explains why police morale is so low — and why the department is having such trouble finding and keeping officers.

At most recent count, the APD was operating with only 1,477 officers; that's 395 below fully staffed. And the numbers keep dropping. According to the department's own Daily Bulletin, 20 officers resigned in the first two weeks of August alone.

The problem isn't a local secret, either. The morale issues are so well-known around the country that the Seattle police came all the way here to try to hire away officers.

Coffield says low pay isn't the main reason the officers are leaving. She says they're being driven out by the department's atmosphere. She echoes the claims of many officers and their professional organizations that Chief Beverly Harvard and her administration have crippled the department's morale with political infighting and that they have created a climate in which officers feel they cannot trust their fellow cops. The APD's internal affairs unit, the Office of Professional Standards, Coffield says, acts as the administration's attack dog, harassing officers for the sake of currying favor with the administration rather than acting as guardians of the public trust.

Although Harvard responded, through another officer, to CL's questions regarding Coffield, she would not discuss the department's morale. However, APD spokesman Officer John Quigley says that press about the department's morale has been based primarily on the comments of recruiters from other departments. Naturally, he says, they're only talking to the officers who want to leave the department, not to the 1,300 officers who are staying.

He also points out that Harvard meets with rank and file officers representing each watch on a quarterly basis.

"It's a shame that it takes street-level officers talking to the chief to get things changed rather than going through the chain of command," Quigley says. "But sometimes that's what it takes. Obviously, every organization can improve, and we're continuing to do that across the board."

Richard Straut, vice president of the Police Benevolent Association and an of-ficer who, by his own admission, has filed 17 grievances in 15 years, says the Office of Professional Standards has been used politically to punish those who speak out against the department's management.

"They have created an environment of hostility," says Straut. "They need to weed the OPS people out ... because they do have a problem with selective enforcement."

More evidence of the Harvard administration's paranoia and micro-management is only as far away as the recent and much-publicized case of Lt. John Oglesby, a 20-year veteran of the department who was fired earlier this year. He was accused of referring to Harvard as a "signal 64," police code for a prostitute, and for saying he wanted to "pull a Mark Barton" on the floor where Harvard's office is located at City Hall East. (Barton killed nine people in a shooting-spree at a day-trading firm in Buckhead in July 1999.) Oglesby's remarks were recorded during phone conversations with a subordinate. The subordinate was taping Oglesby at the request of the Office of Professional Standards.

Earlier this month, the city's Civil Service Board ruled that Oglesby should get his job back and that the APD must pay him for the time he missed from work.

Even officers attending interviews with Seattle recruiters last year expressed so much fear that the department was monitoring their actions that the Seattle police told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution they decided to conduct interviews in another Southern city instead next time.

Coffield wasn't surprised by the cloak-and-dagger methods of the Office of Professional Standards in the Oglesby case. She sees the unit as the retaliation arm of a despotic administration that's out of touch with the daily rigors of police work.

Coffield, who has more seniority than any other female sergeant in the city, has seen it all. She's been in the thick of things that haunt Atlantans still: the dirty officers' scandal in Zone 3, the heart-breaking shooting death of Officer John Sowa and Mark Barton's murderous rampage.

You might expect that an officer who's spent the majority of her career in the city's combat zone — Zone 3 — and has been relegated to work, or has volunteered to work, every major crisis that has come down the line, might let a curse word fly now and then.

And you might think that's the kind of thing her commanding officers could overlook when dealing with a woman who has shown up for work at a place where the morale is almost lower than the retention rate. But you would be wrong.

In August of this year, for her use of bad language, Coffield was suspended for 10 days without pay — a loss of more than $1,400 for her household, which consists of herself and her 16-year-old son, Jason. She doesn't remember the specifics, but she doesn't doubt that she may have said what she's accused of: "I have never seen a department more fucked up than this."

Geisz, who filed the original complaint, has since left the department and could not be tracked down for comment.

Coffield may have made her profane remarks in front of subordinate officers, although she doubts that. Still, she believes that, even if she said those things, she spoke the truth.

Frank Rotondo, president of the Georgia Association of Police Chiefs, won't comment on how "fucked up" the APD may or may not be, but he is puzzled by Coffield's case. "Being punished twice for the same offense is very unusual," Rotondo says. "If it was a matter of continuing behavior for which she had already been disciplined and then applying more discipline, I could see that, but this was the same offense? It's very strange."

Coffield believes her suspension had little to do with her language and everything to do with APD politics. Her July 18, 2000 notice of suspension clearly refers to Geisz's 1999 complaint about behavior that occurred between November 1997 and July 1999, for which she had already been reprimanded a year earlier. The suspension was only handed down after she complained about her transfer to Zone 3 to work with the father of her son, Lt. Michael Crowder, with whom she had a stormy relationship.

Since 1984, Coffield and Crowder have tried to just stay away from each other. At one point in the 1980s, Coffield had a restraining order against Crowder. Coffield also pursued charges against him for failing to pay child support. For the last several years, she says, they've had no problems because they've managed to avoid each other. But in June of this year she was transferred to work evening watch in Zone 3, where Crowder is second-in-command on day watch. There is an overlap between the two shifts.

Her history with Crowder is so well-known in the department that she couldn't believe anyone in her chain of command would seriously place her in a situation that would be tense not only for herself, but for other officers on both shifts.

A ranking officer who has worked in APD administration and who wants to remain anonymous for fear that there would be retribution for his statement believes putting an estranged couple in a zone together is trouble. "Everyone knows about them," says the officer, who knows both Crowder and Coffield. "How could Chief Harvard or anyone else do this? You want to place these two armed officers in a situation where they have to work together? What about what it does to the officers around them? Everyone will feel that they have to take sides, and guess whose side they'll take? He outranks her. That's the problem with the management, they are not thinking. Or they're doing it on purpose."

Crowder says he and Coffield haven't had any problems for years, but he can understand why it might not be a good idea for them to be in the same zone. Crowder, who is happily married to someone else now, says working Zone 3 is a rough job and Coffield has certainly put in her time there.

"I don't blame her for not wanting to be in the zone," he says.

Coffield was doubly crossed about the transfer because after 18 years in the department, she feels she has earned a chance to work day watch so she can be home when her son gets home from school. She says she wouldn't mind working days in Zone 3, but since Crowder's already there, that can't happen.

Answering questions through Maj. Calvin Moss, Harvard told CL that she had no hand in disciplining Coffield — the chief typically isn't involved in suspensions of less than 16 days — and did not make the decision to transfer her, though as required for such a transfer she did sign off on the paperwork. "She says no, an emphatic no," Moss says.

Coffield met with Harvard about the situation, and received more questions than answers. She tape-recorded the conversation.

"Are you saying that someone deliberately transferred you?" Harvard says on the recording, which Coffield gave to CL. "I need to make sure. Are you saying that I placed you ..."

"I don't know," says Coffield.

"Faye, to be honest with you, I don't even know who you are talking about. ... I just need to be clear in my mind that your accusation is that I put you with someone who is the father of your child who is also — I don't even know what rank we are talking about," says Harvard. " ... You say very succinctly in your grievance that the grievance is filed against me — not anybody else — only me."

Coffield then admits that Harvard did not personally transfer her, but states that one of Harvard's deputy chiefs did and that Harvard had to approve of the transfer for it to go through. "I cannot understand why I find myself working in Zone 3 again, why I find myself working evening watch, why I find myself working with my son's father," Coffield says.

Coffield filed her grievance on June 20. On July 18, she was notified of her suspension for the complaint stemming from the events of July 1999.

Her conversation with Harvard wasn't the only one she recorded. One of her tapes includes a tacit acknowledgement from a high-ranking officer that her punishment may have been tied to the grievance she filed. On the tape, she tells Major Harold Dunovant about her frustration over the suspension. Dunovant tells her in a tired, but gentle voice: "That was the reason why I told you not to file that grievance."

Through Moss, Harvard says that there is no way that the grievance and the suspension are related, saying that the investigation into Coffield's profanity use began well before the grievance was filed. But she did not address the fact that Coffield had already been admonished, except to say that officers are never punished twice for the same offense.

Coffield, who has given the APD more than a third of her life, might just sound like another disgruntled employee, the way that former Deputy Chief Louis Arcangeli at first sounded like a disgruntled employee in 1999 when he said the department was "unfounding" crimes to make the city look safer. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation verified Arcangeli's charges. And yet nothing ever changed — except Arcangeli's rank, which was busted down to captain. The same thing could happen to Coffield.

She knows this. "Arcangeli told the truth," she says. But the steady look in her eye, as if she's focusing on something far ahead — lets you know that she's decided to stick to her guns.

And she has reason to fear.

The Police Benevolent Association's Straut says the Office of Professional Standards is so subjective that staying out of trouble isn't as simple as just doing your job and obeying the rules. It's a matter of not being chosen to be investigated. And staying out of investigators' sights is an unnecessary distraction from a high-risk job.

To be selected for enforcement, an officer has to make the wrong person mad — or at least that's what Coffield believes.

Coffield joined the APD in 1981, just as the city was recovering from the horrors of the infamous child murders. She moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles. She grew up in South Central, which was a tough neighborhood when Coffield was just a kid collecting money at Los Angeles Second Baptist Church to send to the NAACP and is tougher now. She worked her way through L.A. City College, typing scripts. She graduated with a degree in business administration and after working as an assistant to a film director, went to work for the California Department of Parole.

But L.A. was becoming too expensive. Atlanta was booming and basking in the glow of its black heritage. Coffield made the move and worked as a temp until she applied and was hired at the APD.

Her career seemed to be on a regular track until 1995 when she was assigned to the property crimes division. That, she says, is when her career took a dive orchestrated by management. An officer under her supervision asked to take off some comp time, but the time he took off was more than the comp time he had accrued. So, Coffield deducted time from his vacation time.

She was written up for not recording time properly. So sure was she that she was not in error that she filed a lawsuit over the matter. She alleged that she had been singled out because she was a woman, while male officers who made the same so-called errors were not disciplined. She also alleged that stolen property confiscated by the APD was not being properly handled. She claimed officers were using a stolen television that no one had bothered to return to its owners. Some stolen property, she claimed, was never traced to its owners, although at times doing so was a simple matter of calling in the serial number. And she claimed that officers were given open access to stolen property and many of them cruised through regularly just checking out the daily loot.

The lawsuit stalled out for several years and was dismissed in 1998. Coffield tried to appeal that decision, but her appeal was denied in August 1999.

Last September, Coffield was given an oral admonishment for Geisz's complaint. Her "Failure to Supervise" allegedly stemmed from her statement that the department was "fucked up" and that she "didn't care" what her officers did.

Coffield also filed a grievance against Lt. Ernest Finlay, the lieutenant who orally admonished her, because, she says, the charges were so non-specific. When, exactly, did she make these statements? How could she know exactly when she had failed to supervise when the lieutenant admonished her about a period of nearly two years? And if she had failed to supervise for such a lengthy period of time, then hadn't her commanding officers, including the lieutenant, failed to supervise her?

The admonishment was handed down while she was technically on loan to the vice unit from the communications unit. Her temporary stay with vice stretched from the planned 90 days to almost a year.

Not that her commanding officer in vice, Lt. A.J. Biello, minded. Biello and Coffield made sergeant at about the same time, in the early 1990s. Shortly thereafter, they found themselves trying to keep order during a riot.

"Here we were, people were going crazy. Faye was outnumbered 2,000 to one, she held her nightstick in the air and said 'Charge!' and just dove in and let me tell you, she cleared that street. She cleared that street," Biello says. "Anyone else would have been a hero. But it was Faye, so it just went unnoticed."

Coffield also brought her computer savvy to vice, turning the unit's efficiency up a notch or two. After arresting hookers and taking their beepers and cell phones into possession, under Coffield's leadership the unit started using the www.anywho.com website to trace the numbers, and then used other sites to map their way to the johns' or pimps' homes, where they made more arrests.

"She's a computer whiz," says Biello. "I wish I'd had more things for her to do with the computer in vice so she could've been happier."

Coffield chuckles at this and says that most of the department just uses the computers for memos, but there's so much more to be done with them.

Some things have changed, even since CL started working on Coffield's story.

Her 10-day suspension for the old charge of failure to supervise ended Aug. 12, 2000. She reported to work in Zone 3 on Aug. 17, where she says her detail consists of supervising four officers in two cars as they (in addition to Coffield in her own car) patrol a largely residential, half-mile area around Dill Street in southwest Atlanta.

She says assigning so many officers to patrol such a small area for eight solid hours is a waste of the taxpayers' money, but she does it.

She says, that's her job.??