Police Ready to Go Off the Record

To the shock and anger of employees at the Laguna Beach Police Department, some of their personal conversations at work were unknowingly tape-recorded over the past several months--including idle comments and even cracks about their bosses.

The problem, police Chief Neil J. Purcell Jr. said Thursday, resulted from “a glitch” in new communications equipment installed at headquarters which should be fixed today.

“The people that are directly affected by the taping are obviously very surprised and hurt by the whole situation,” said police Detective Jason Kravetz, vice president of the Laguna Beach Police Employees’ Assn. “People think that their conversations are going to be used against them and that’s why some folks are very upset about the taping.”

However, Kravetz said police Chief Neil J. Purcell, Jr. assured association members during a 2 1/2-hour meeting on Jan. 14 that employees will not be reprimanded for whatever they have said while being unknowingly taped. The chief “offered his apologies and pretty much answered our concerns,” Kravetz said.

“Nothing was done intentionally and, as I’ve indicated (in a memo to department employees) before, I’m sincerely sorry some people feel offended,” Purcell said Thursday. “No one has been disciplined or would they be disciplined for something said in idle chatter, other than if there was a criminal plot taking place.”

It all started when four new telephones were installed in the department, three in the records office near the front counter and one in the nearby dispatch center.

Because the telephones did not come with a cradle for the receiver, when employees press the release button to end a telephone conversation, the handset microphone continues recording office sounds.

Telephone conversations are normally recorded because department officials want to ensure that employees respond appropriately to the public and to document conversations that might eventually be useful in court, according to Lt. Paul Workman.

“We’re not going to go back and discipline people for calling the chief names or calling the captain names. We really don’t want to hear what these people have to say,” he said. “We don’t have time for it.”

Workman said Sgt. Danell Adams had told him shortly before the massive Oct. 27 fire in Laguna Beach to check out what appeared to be a problem with the telephones, but that he was sidetracked by the blaze.

“That fire was a major emotional event for everyone here so I pretty much forgot dealing with that phone situation,” Workman said.

Earlier this month, Workman released a memo to workers telling them to be circumspect about their personal conversations and to “please consider yourself recorded at all times.” However, he did not say that office conversations were, in fact, being recorded.

After the telephones involved had been tested and identified, Workman said he wrote a second memo saying “as it turns out, you were being bugged.”

Workman now admits he should have handled the situation differently.

“My mind did not think of invasion of privacy,” he said. “In retrospect, I completely sympathize with them. . . . At the time, I’m thinking, ‘We got a problem down in an open records area’ and it just didn’t strike me as something that was going to hurt a lot of peoples’ feelings.”

Also in retrospect, Purcell said, “we probably should have said something to (the employees) before” but “a lot of serious things occurred and it went down on the priority list.”

Mayor Ann Christoph called the uproar “much ado about nothing as far as I can tell.”

“I think you have to also recognize we had a major emergency here and it was not the time to go around fixing equipment,” she said.

However, some new equipment is next on the agenda for the department.

City leaders say the manufacturer has since told the city they have had similar problems with that type of equipment in the past.

“It now appears it is in fact a mechanical error,” Councilman Wayne Peterson said. “The equipment was faulty.”

City Manager Kenneth C. Frank said: “We are working with the company that makes the phones and (will) correct the problem. That’s our intention, to correct the problem and be done with it.”