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The June 1 announcement arrived on the standard city
of Springfield press release stationery with the word “NEWS”
splashed across the corner in 48 point italics. The content, though, was
strictly old hat: Mayor Tim Davlin had tapped Ralph Caldwell to be chief of
the Springfield Police Department. Davlin’s decision surprised no one. For the
past three years Caldwell has served as second-in-command to Chief Don
Kliment, whose retirement becomes effective June 21. For Caldwell, the
title might as well have been “chief in training”; he’s
never hidden his ambitions for the top spot or his friendship with the
mayor (they often spend weekends riding Harley-Davidsons with a group of
friends).
The recent announcement implied that Caldwell —
a 27-year veteran with a master’s degree and diplomas from the FBI
National Academy and Northwestern University’s School of Police Staff
and Command Program — had ranked second among the six finalists when
Kliment got the nod. In truth, Caldwell’s been bound for chiefdom his
entire career. George Judd, a former SPD officer who rose as high as
deputy chief and is now chief of the Springfield Park District Police, went
through initial training classes at police academy with Caldwell. “I
always told him he’s going to be chief someday. He’s got the
desire, the drive, he really does. He sees all the things that need to be
fixed,” Judd says.
Mike Walton, a former SPD chief who was commander of
the second watch when Caldwell was a young patrol officer, says that
Caldwell has earned at least a chance to run the department: “He was
always was a pretty sharp kid. He seemed very dedicated, he cared, and that
impressed me even when he was a youngster working on the 3-to-11 shift. He
used to come up with a lot of good suggestions.”
Naturally, Caldwell stepped on a few fingers on his
climb up the ladder. One retired lieutenant, who asked not to be named,
says that Caldwell made “some bad decisions” in his quest for
the top spot. Another former police administrator, also unwilling to be
named in print, calls Caldwell “a chameleon and a hypocrite,”
accusing him of “turning his head, going with the crowd.”
But along the way Caldwell has also made many
friends, and he appears to have the support of most rank-and-file officers.
Sgt. Alan Jones, president of the patrol officers’ union, says he
that has no objection to Caldwell’s being chief — at least not
yet. “I don’t have a problem with him.
I’m pretty optimistic, personally,” Jones says. “If Ralph
does something that’s not in the best interests of the officers,
we’d be at odds with him. I’m sure that will come about.
It’s pretty much a love-hate relationship [between patrol and the
chief].”
Caldwell, already acting chief, will become interim
chief on Kliment’s retirement date. To drop that
“interim” tag, Caldwell needs to win the approval of the City
Council. That process begins in the finance committee, which is chaired by
Ward 6 Ald. Mark Mahoney. Uncomfortable with simply rubber-stamping the
mayor’s appointment, Mahoney has requested that Caldwell appear at
the finance committee’s next meeting, on June 26, to answer questions
from all interested aldermen. The council could then confirm Caldwell as
soon as July 3.
Until then, the man who would be chief is
uncharacteristically unavailable to speak up for himself. Though he
initially agreed to Illinois Times’ request for a June 7 interview, he backpedaled on
June 5, sending an e-mail asking “what topic you would like to
discuss with me.” When the reporter responded that she had several
topics to discuss, Caldwell e-mailed: “I would prefer to hold off on
any interviews until after my confirmation.” Because he can hold the
title of interim chief indefinitely, he could, theoretically, maintain this
“no comment” stance during his entire tenure. The freeze-out apparently extends beyond the media.
After a phone interview with a reporter, Judd tried to contact Caldwell
just to chat. A few days later, Judd reported, Caldwell still hadn’t
returned his calls. Caldwell keeping quiet — now there’s a
development that qualifies as a news flash. Of the SPD brass, Caldwell has
always been the most garrulous and good-humored. He signed his e-mails to Illinois Times “Ralph!”
and the punctuation suits his personality. He’s got a quick,
self-deprecating wit and seems to run on a revved-up engine. The word used
by many people to describe him is “energetic.” His sudden
muteness makes some aldermen wary. “It’s like a guy hunkering down, saying,
‘Once I’m confirmed, you can’t do anything about
it,’ ” says Ward 1 Ald. Frank Edwards. “That’s unfortunate,” says Mahoney.
“I understand the administration wants to make sure the right message
gets out there, but to almost immediately go into an adversarial
relationship?”
“That bothers me that he’s not talking to
the media. . . . I realize he’s not on trial, but he has to work with
the public. He says he’s an open person, and my opinion is, if you
don’t have anything to hide, then you talk to the media,” says
Ward 7 Ald. Debbie Cimarossa. “If I were nominated to be chief of
police, I’d say, ‘I’m looking forward to leading this
department, and here are my plans.’ I don’t understand why
everything’s so secretive.”
Cimarossa sees the situation from a unique
perspective: Not only is she a human-resources professional (formerly the
manager of administrative services for City Water, Light & Power and
now an assistant vice president of human resources for Horace Mann), but
she’s also the ex-wife of former SPD assistant chief Jim Cimarossa,
whose career at the department closely paralleled Caldwell’s. She has
known Caldwell for years and says that the fact that she genuinely likes
him makes this decision difficult for her. “I think Ralph is a very, very nice man.
He’s very smart. But there are some things that, if they are true,
concern me when we’re talking about someone who’s going to lead
a department that’s been in some turmoil over the last few
years,” Cimarossa says. “You can’t have baggage, and you
can’t have baggage with the troops — and some of these troops
know about the baggage.”
S pringfield’s record of police chiefs could
have been created by the scriptwriters for a soap opera. Over the past 25
years, SPD has had nine chiefs, four of whom left office after either a
no-confidence vote or a sex scandal. The one who lasted longest —
John Harris, chief from 1995 to 2003 — was responsible for the
Renatta Frazier race-discrimination scandal that cost the city almost $1
million in legal settlements and left a bitter aftertaste that still
hasn’t been rinsed away. In Harris’ administration, Caldwell was a
deputy chief and a member of Harris’ inner circle. Will he resume
Harris’ my-way-or-the-highway administrative style? Caldwell’s
friend Judd says no.
“Oh God. That’s the only time I
didn’t like Ralph. Ralph was extremely unhappy [under Harris],”
Judd says. “That’s his nemesis. People believe [Caldwell] was
part of the old faction, but he didn’t do it because he believed in
the guy; he did it because of his position. He was the chief — and
with Harris, if you didn’t go along with the ballgame you were
gone.”
Judd says Caldwell acquiesced to Harris’
tactics reluctantly and only because he believed that resistance was
futile. “He didn’t agree with a lot of things Harris did, but
he was the chief, and Ralph was there to support his decisions and the way
he wanted to move the police department,” Judd says. “I used to
sit in Ralph’s office and debate: ‘Why are you doing
this?’ He’d say, ‘Either I’m going to enforce this
policy or the next guy’s going to enforce this policy.’
”
Ward 2 Ald. Gail Simpson finds no reassurance in the
explanation Judd offers for Caldwell’s cooperation with Harris.
“It doesn’t make me feel very comfortable at all if, as opposed
to doing the right thing, he said, ‘I’ll do the safe
thing,’ she says. “That’s troubling, because I think
that’s pretty much what’s gotten the police department in the
mess it’s in.”
There’s no evidence that Caldwell played any
role in the Frazier scandal, aside from one brief and wordless incident. It
was April 2002, and Frazier — a former police officer forced to
resign amid false allegations that she had failed to prevent a rape —
was being evicted from her apartment along with her husband and their six
children. The eviction was questionable — the family had paid the
previous month’s rent — and their friend Rickey Davis, then an
SPD lieutenant, was there with cash in hand, offering to pay the current
month’s rent. Landlord John Vaughn told Illinois
Times that police instructed him to
decline the money and let the eviction proceed. Vaughn, who estimated that he had witnessed as many
as 200 evictions, said that Frazier’s eviction was unique because of
the presence of so many high-ranking police officers. At a recent federal court hearing in a related
lawsuit, Frazier testified that the eviction angered her because officers
were unnecessarily destructive, dumping cleaning fluids on the
family’s belongings. She curbed her rage only when she saw Davis
approach two colleagues for help and noticed that they literally turned
their backs to him.
“He said, ‘I can’t believe these
guys are treating me this way. I’ve served with them all my
life.’ I realized it was probably more hurtful for him than it was
for me,” Frazier testified, “so I just backed down.”
Davis says that the two were Caldwell and assistant
chief Bill Pittman. Simpson, who in 2003 took an active role in lobbying
the City Council to settle Frazier’s lawsuit, has difficulty finding
words to respond. “It’s not a little thing,” she says.
“That, to me, oh, shows a total lack of . . . I don’t even know
how to describe it.”
Cimarossa says that the story is an embarrassment.
“If that happened, that’s a shame,” she says. “I
think it’s very shameful for anybody in this city to act that way. We
want somebody to lead the department and embrace diversity.”
S ome veteran officers remember an even older
scandal — a mid-1980s investigation into drug use among Springfield
cops. Then-Chief Stan Troyer asked the Illinois State Police to
investigate, and at least one officer, Michael Bennett, was sent to federal
prison on a drug charge. Caldwell has admitted in a deposition that he was
interviewed during that investigation but says that he was never under
scrutiny. Walton, who was his shift commander at the time, says he
doesn’t believe that Caldwell was “ever charged with
anything.”
“The problem with some of the young cops back
in the ’80s, they got too hung up in the job and forgot sometimes
that, hey, we’ve all got rules to go by. We’ve all done
that,” Walton says. “But again, he’s older, he’s
wiser now. We’ve all made mistakes. I think they just need to give
this guy a chance.”
Mahoney says he’s heard about the ’80s
probe but only through rumor. “If anything comes out where he was
involved in drugs after being an officer, I don’t see how he can be
chief,” Mahoney says. “We hold them at a higher standard
because they have to enforce those laws. They choose to be police officers,
that’s what they choose to be, so those are the standards.”
But most current City Council members are more
focused on the issue of Caldwell’s possible involvement in a more
contemporary SPD scandal: the Illinois State Police investigation into the
activities of former Detectives Paul Carpenter and Jim Graham.
Prompted by a complaint filed by former narcotics
Sgt. Ron Vose, the investigation resulted in the firing of both detectives
for numerous violations of department policies and charges of wire fraud
and official misconduct against Carpenter. The complete findings are
contained in a 2,300-page report being kept confidential as a
“personnel matter” by the Davlin administration. Caldwell was, for almost two years, the deputy chief
over the criminal-investigations division, where Carpenter and Graham
worked. Several aldermen have said they don’t feel comfortable
confirming Caldwell until they know whether he’s implicated in the
report. Davlin promises that it contains no information that could damage
Caldwell’s credibility, and has offered to have the chief ISP
investigator answer council members’ questions during an executive
session. Sources who have seen the report tell Illinois Times that the
mayor is correct: The report doesn’t say that Caldwell did anything
wrong. Instead, it says he was simply unaware of the detectives’
activities. According to a summary of the report, Caldwell told ISP
investigators that lieutenants and sergeants kept him out of the loop
because of his complete lack of investigative experience. Still, some
council members say, that’s no excuse. “The issue there is: If he was responsible for
supervising those officers, he should’ve been in the loop,” says
Mahoney. “As police chief, you’re going to have to make sure
oversight is a key component. I think that is a legitimate question for our
[June 26] discussion.”
Cimarossa, citing the summary report’s account
that Detectives Amy Strawn and Tom Bonnett met with Caldwell to air their
concerns about other detectives, says that Caldwell probably knew more than
he’s admitting. “C’mon, Ralph, you’re conveniently
not remembering things,” she says. “I’m having difficulty
even believing that he was out of the loop, because Ralph was always the
kinda guy that wanted to be in the know.”
Edwards scoffs at the notion that Caldwell was
unaware: “So a guy’s in an organization a year and 10 months
and has no clue what’s going on? How many years, how many months,
would he have to be in this organization before he figured stuff out?
He’d been there more than enough time.”
Caldwell’s friend Judd, however, says that his
own experience as a deputy chief showed him how tough it can be to keep tabs on wayward
underlings.
“I truly believe Ralph had no knowledge of
that, period,” Judd says, referring to the allegations against
Carpenter and Graham. “Was it brought to his attention would be the
big question. I always say you’re responsible for your division
— but how do you know if nobody tells you?”
During Caldwell’s CID tenure, several notable
incidents should have attracted notice: A feud developed between
Vose’s narcotics unit and the detectives in the major-case unit,
including Carpenter and Graham; another feud developed between these two
star detectives, resulting in Carpenter’s requesting and receiving a
transfer to the property-crimes division; and, finally Carpenter
committed the act that resulted in his wire-fraud charge, faxing a phony
community-service time card to a probation office in another state.
Earlier this year, during a deposition in a federal
lawsuit unrelated to the ISP investigation, a city attorney asked Caldwell
to describe his job duties as deputy chief over criminal investigations.
Caldwell’s answer suggested that he wasn’t intimately involved
in the detectives’ work. “You would be like the policy-maker or the
manager of the division,” Caldwell testified. “Day-to-day
activities would be overseen by the lieutenants and the first-line
supervisors.”
But another deposition filed in the same case hints
that veteran homicide investigator Sgt. Tim Young always made sure that his
superiors knew what was going on in the major-case unit. Young’s
testimony focused on deputy chief Bill Rouse, who was tapped by Kliment to
replace Caldwell when Caldwell was promoted to assistant chief. In 2003,
Young singled out Rouse as singularly uninterested in the activities of the
bureau — an apparent contrast to previous deputy chiefs. “I had other deputy chiefs come in there with
little or no experience, but they have always seemed to be responsive,
interactive, doing things, involved themselves with the guys, asked
questions,” Young testified. “I didn’t have a whole lot
of that from Chief Rouse.”
If he becomes chief, Caldwell will likely find
himself ultimately supervising Graham, and perhaps Carpenter, again.
Sources familiar with Graham’s recent arbitration hearing predict
that he will win his job back, as will Carpenter, unless he is found guilty
of the criminal charges.
I n January 2006, almost three years after
Caldwell’s promotion to assistant chief, Carpenter reached out to him
with what he believed was some big news. The city was (and still is) fighting several
race-discrimination lawsuits filed by former Lt. Rickey Davis, involving
claims of unfair discipline and unequal treatment. In one suit, filed in
2004, Davis claims that he was unfairly passed over for promotion to deputy
chief over investigations. The city’s defense cites various
“performance issues” in Davis’ work record, including
allegations that he was often unavailable during the overnight shift. At
one point, SPD internal-affairs officers tried to substantiate rumors that
Davis was spending time with a woman other than his wife by placing a
tracking device on his car. Davis, however, foiled this effort by catching
his colleagues following him around town. Through family connections, Carpenter discovered that
Davis had indeed carried on an affair and visited a woman during the
overnight shift. Once he persuaded her to talk to city officials about the
affair, he called Caldwell’s cell phone. Carpenter, then under
investigation and on administrative leave, told Caldwell that this woman
could “blow the [Davis] case wide open.” Caldwell knew that the
embattled officer hoped that this phone call would earn him brownie points
with the administration. “I think Paul in his mind — this is me
thinking now — thought it might help his case that he was under
investigation for and would make him look like he was coming forward with
some information,” Caldwell testified. “Like a hero?” Davis’ attorney
asked. “He didn’t say that, but possibly,”
Caldwell answered. The woman had agreed to meet with Caldwell and
Kliment, but Kliment declined to go, Caldwell testified. Instead, Caldwell
was told to take along assistant corporation counsel Jim Lang and to let
Lang handle most of the talking. Judd says that Caldwell did not want to participate
in this meeting. “He thought he was being set up,” Judd says,
“but he was told he had to do it. He didn’t want to do it at
all.”
Judd’s account matches Caldwell’s own
testimony given in an April 2006 deposition. An attorney asked, “So
you were a reluctant participant?”
“Absolutely,” Caldwell replied. The meeting with the woman didn’t produce the
desired results. She brought along a box of photos, tickets, and receipts
to prove her relationship, but Caldwell and Lang failed to collect the
items. She wouldn’t allow them to take notes and later refused to
sign an affidavit summarizing the meeting; Caldwell had to sign it instead.
When city attorneys tried to argue that Davis had lied on his interrogatory
answer by saying that he hadn’t visited the woman while on duty,
Davis’ attorney, Courtney Cox, rebuffed the claim by pointing out
that their question had encompassed only the previous five years. The
affidavit signed by Caldwell was too vague on dates to prove otherwise. In fact, the episode turned out to embarrass the
city, because Cox used it as an excuse to explore the on-duty socializing
of other high-ranking police officers, including Caldwell. In the April
2006 deposition, Caldwell admitted under oath that he had carried on a
long-term sexual relationship with a woman other than his wife, often
visiting her home during lunchtime. He testified that he mainly saw his
female friend on weekends and that the lunchtime visits typically lasted
only 45 minutes to an hour — the duration of the visits being the
main difference between his activities and Davis’.
Caldwell, though still married, is separated from his
wife. Even his buddy Judd avoids talking about that topic. “I don’t think I could say anything bad
about Ralph. His family life is a whole different thing; I won’t get
into that. His determination and drive in law enforcement has always been
No. 1,” Judd says.
The oath that Springfield police officers take
— and that Caldwell will be administering as chief — includes
this statement: “I will keep my private life unsullied as an example
to all. . . .”
Does Caldwell’s private life affect his chance
to be chief? Probably not. Mahoney, who will be in charge of the
council’s question-and-answer session with the appointed chief,
isn’t much interested in what Caldwell does on his own time. “We’re not asking about his private life
but how he has responded and acted as a Springfield police officer,”
Mahoney says. “That’s really not any of our business on a
professional level. What it does tell us is, you have all these connections
to situations where maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to bring in
somebody from outside.”
Cimarossa has a more personal reaction but
doesn’t see this issue as make-or-break. “It bothers me as a
woman and as a woman formerly married to a cop. Decisions like that can
cloud your judgment. Is it a showstopper? Probably not, but it does concern
me,” she says. “Cops are known for that stuff. Why do you want
a chief that does that?”
Edwards takes issue only with Caldwell’s
participation in the case against Davis. “What a guy does on his own
time is his own time, but you can’t attack a junior officer
you’re supervising for [doing] the same thing you’re doing.
There cannot be a double standard,” he says. And then he has another thought: that this revelation
may explain why Caldwell was unaware of Carpenter’s and
Graham’s activities. “Maybe his lunch break lasted longer than
he thought,” Edwards quips.
The only other contender for the job of police chief
is the abstraction known as “a national search.” At least four council
members — Simpson, Mahoney, Ward 5 Ald. Sam Cahnman, and Ward 8 Ald.
Kris Theilen — say that accepting applications from outside
candidates would be a worthwhile exercise. Walton, the former chief, says that the new chief
should come from within the department. “They don’t need any
more outsiders. The last two outsiders were disasters, and you can quote me
on that. Please quote me on that,” he says. “There’s no
reason, in my opinion, to go outside the department.”
Simpson sees no reason to rush. “Caldwell can
be our acting police chief until our nationwide search is done,” she
says. “We should find someone who has experience running this size or
larger department, someone who can be a problem-solver, someone who knows
the law and will follow the law and expect his people to do the same
thing.”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2007.
