I am attaching a copy of an email that I received as the result of a GRAMA request to the Salt Lake City School District.

As you can see, it is Deputy Chief Ross obtaining personal information from the Salt Lake City School District’s Business Administrator, Janet Roberts.

Here are my questions:

1.     How are these two exchanging personal banking information on a lunch lady from the school district, if the Salt Lake City Police Department currently has no active case on this issue?

2.      Can a police officer gather private information on citizens in the absence of an official investigation?

3.     Given the current command structure within the SLCPD – how and why does the activities of a school lunch lady fall under the purview of the Deputy Chief over the Metro Support Bureau?

I had occasion to run into a Salt Lake City Councilman over the weekend. When I explained to him this latest development he said it was really odd that Deputy Chief Ross would be investigating the school district lunch lady as he was led to believe by Chief Burbank that Metro Support (newly created) was needed to deal with the drug dealing, cartel infiltration into the city and other high concentration of crimes in downtown SLC and N. Temple area. He surmised that perhaps the PD has reason to believe that the lunch lady is involved in some of these types of crimes – ? He went on with some other speculative scenarios as to why a school lunchroom issue was being investigated by the Metro Bureau as he was led to believe that they are extremely busy with the issues mentioned above.

I am more concerned with the fact that based on my last GRAMA request to the SLCPD and the SLCSD, I see no official investigations that are currently open.

A.   Why does a police officer ask an employer for the personal banking account numbers of an employee in the absence of an official police investigation?

B.  Can a police officer obtain that type of information in the absence of a warrant or subpoena?

The only thing I see that would connect Deputy Chief Ross to this issue, is Lt. Trost who works part-time for the school district in several capacities.

As I mentioned to you in our last phone conversation, I believe that the SLCPD is being manipulated by a duplicitous school administration.

The current school administration is currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General for the misapplication of federal education funds in the thousands of dollars. Given their history I find it odd that they continue to use school district resources to harass this lunch lady.

Are these questions that you can answer or do they rise to the level of me having to file an Internal Affairs complaint with Chief Coleman?

Mckell,

I appreciate you sending me a copy of this police report. It is, as the saying goes “a day late and a dollar short”.

You should have provided this information to members of the school board back in July when the District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute and the police closed out the case.

As it stands, this report has been posted on my blog for the past two weeks and has been the subject two newspaper articles. So this is not new information for me and many others.

In your email, are you referring to me in this statement?:

“Since public comments have been made about the status of the investigation and the contents of the report by a member of our board of education that do not accurately reflect the contents of the report…”

If so, my statements have been the result of  constituents asking me questions. I have in turn sought to obtain answers to those questions via email and letters to you and the school board president with negative results.

In the absence of answers from the two of you, I have had to piece together responses through GRAMA and other methods of inquiry.

If you don’t like what I am saying, then why don’t you and the school board president respond to my questions?

You can’t hide from my questions and then turn around and complain with the quality of answers. Answers I might add, I am forced to obtain through other means.

Furthermore, I am deeply troubled by this statement in your email:

“There is a considerable amount of additional evidence that has been collected since the SLCPD conducted their initial investigation. This information will be turned over as requested, which may cause the District Attorney to revisit this matter.”

How can that be? As you are aware, at the March 4, 2014, Board meeting you and Janet were instructed to hire the external accounting firm, Squire & Company to review the financial activities at Uintah Elementary School Lunchroom.

The minutes of that school board meeting reflect the following:

“…consensus was made in light of the feelings of distrust, questions that have been raised, and issues surfaced as a result of the [internal] investigation, that an outside investigation would provide validity to the findings”.

As a member of the School Board, it was my expectation (also publicly declared by the school board president) that your administration was going to hand over all evidence and paperwork to Squire & Co. and the external investigator Ostler. They in turn were to conduct an independent investigation etc. etc…etc…

I find it odd, now that the two external investigations are concluded you are now claiming that “additional evidence” is just now surfacing. Really?

Did the two external investigations conclude prematurely?

Did the school board just waste close to $80,000.00 on two external investigations that missed vital evidence?

If so, how did these two external investigations overlook this so called evidence?

Moreover, if the school board expressed “feelings of distrust” with your administration at the March 4, 2014, School Board meeting, what has changed since then that would cause us to now trust the actions or conclusions of your administration?

Or for that matter, trust any evidence that it now being produced by your administration?

It is frustrating to me, that you continue to ignore the central question of this entire fiasco: Where is the accountability for those on the district level responsible for this debacle?

That is the outstanding question even to this day. I would admonish you to take all of the time and energy that you continue to  expend, discrediting Miss Shirley, and put that energy into accepting responsibility for what occurred.

If you did that, I can assure you that this situation would reach a satisfactory conclusion and everyone could, as it were, “move-on”.

Along with accepting responsibility, would be the commitment to implement corrective action at the district level. If not, I predict your administration is doomed to repeat the same mistakes and blunders only to waste more taxpayer dollars on the next stunt.

In my eyes, from an organizational standpoint, Miss Shirley is the least culpable person in this farce, yet you and your administration continue to be fixated on damaging her reputation. Hasn’t this poor woman suffered enough injustices at your hands?

It is disappointing to me, that even at this late date, you and Janet Roberts continue to scurry around, hunting for new ways to demonize Miss Shirley.

By way of illustration, in my latest GRAMA request to the school district, I saw an email dated September 4, 2014, where Janet is sending the Salt Lake City Police Department, Miss Shirley’s personal bank account numbers. Is that even legal? How can the school district send personal banking information to the police without a warrant or subpoena?

Again, the question of the day: Where is the district level accountability?

Un abrazo,