Taser used in South Portland

SOUTH PORTLAND — For the second time in less than three weeks South Portland police officers have used a Taser gun to complete an arrest.

The most recent incident occurred at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, June 19, when police were dispatched to investigate the report of a Jeep stuck in a ditch behind the shopping plaza at 425 Western Ave.

The first officer on scene, Rocco Navarro, found in the passenger seat of the vehicle Vaughn Scott, 35, a transient whose address is listed only as “the Greater Portland area.” The Jeep had been reported stolen earlier in the day.

According to South Portland Police Department spokesman Lt. Frank Clark, Scott was “apparently intoxicated” and, upon recognizing Navarro as a police officer, jumped at a backpack on the ground near the vehicle.  Navarro kicked the bag from Scott’s reach, said Clark, and attempted to make an arrest.

Scott, however, “refused and aggressively pushed and grabbed the officer by the shirt and gun belt,” said Clark. “An altercation then ensued, leading up to the officer ultimately deploying a Taser.”

By the time additional police units arrived, Scott was reportedly in a more cooperative frame of mind.

Scott, whose criminal history includes convictions for motor vehicle burglary, aggravated assault, multiple minor assaults, a previous assault on an officer and eluding police, was taken to the Cumberland County Jail, where he is being held on charges of felony theft and felony assault against a police officer. The case, said Clark, has been referred to the District Attorney’s Office for prosecution.  

According to Clark, South Portland police officers have filed 77 reports detailing “use of force and control,” to date in 2012, including four Taser deployments. 

South Portland police last used a Taser May 31 during a domestic dispute when Nicholas Pallas, 32, retreated to a crawl space in his Ocean Street apartment, using pepper spray to try and prevent officers from taking him into custody.

“The department continues to find the Taser to be an effective response option for officers to use in order to prevent or quickly end violent confrontations and reduce the risk of injury to officers and subjects,” said Clark.  

City police to add staff

SOUTH PORTLAND — Faced with an increased need, an aging staff and few prospects for new officers, the South Portland Police Department is looking to add to it’s full-time staff of sworn officers.

At a City Council workshop Monday, Police Chief Ed Googins said his goal is to beef up the department by two, to 55 officers.

According to Googins, nine officers in South Portland are eligible for retirement, and another four will reach retirement age by the end of the year. That, he said, means nearly one-quarter of the force could disappear at any time. Meanwhile, South Portland has had trouble filling positions. Of 68 applicants for a recent opening, only one person remains, who will attend the Maine State Police Academy in August.

“The rest either dropped out on their own, couldn’t pass the agility test, or we took them out for some reason through the process,” said Googins. “That’s pretty bad and tells you what we are up against to find qualified candidates.”

If the one remaining recruit makes it to graduation, he will bring the force to its full complement of 53 authorized by the City Council.

However, Googins said he wants to add another two officers in order to increase first- and second-shift patrols to five vehicles. Four cruisers are all that’s on the road at most times in South Portland, which, Googins said, is not enough to fully meet the needs of his department.

“You can’t man a radar detail in a neighborhood when you have cars bouncing back and forth answering emergency calls,” he said.

Not all councilors were convinced, however. Tom Blake noted that four squad cards times three shifts is only 12 officers. Even with a fifth car, that still leaves more than 30 officers, said Blake, requesting that Googins bring additional staffing detail to a future workshop.

“I need for information,” he said. “One of my most difficult parts of being an elected representative is balancing the taxpayers’ ability to pay more versus municipal needs. On this, I’m not there yet.”

Still, one of the two positions could be filled by a transfer as early as July 2, according to City Manager Jim Gailey. Googins said he would like to “civilianize” the reporting job done now by Detective Reed Barker and return him to a regular beat.

For the last several years, Barker’s time has been consumed with answering Freedom of Access Act requests and completing reports. The latter function is “vital,” Googins said, because many state and federal grants are keyed to meeting certain minimum reporting requirements on department activity and crime statistics. However, the job “does not require a sworn officer,” said Googins.

Although a formal vote still must be conducted, the City Council agreed to let Gailey transfer up to $20,000 from the contingency fund for the new fiscal year, to start July 1. That money, said Gailey, would be used to hire a replacement for Barker for the final six months of 2012, with exact duties to be determined.

City Council to debate closed-door sessions

SOUTH PORTLAND — The South Portland City Council agreed Monday to stage a series of workshop sessions on how they conduct business, particularly behind closed doors, but only after one councilor was shut down for talking out of turn.

Councilor Rosemarie De Angelis has been a vocal critic of how her peers have handled two recent lawsuits – one in which former librarian Karen Callaghan won the right to campaign for a seat on the school board, and another in which resident Al DiMillo seeks to have health insurance polices held by some councilors revoked as a violation of the city charter, which limits “compensation” to a $3,000 stipend.

The council has refused two settlement offers proffered by DiMillo and recently agreed to appeal the court’s decision in the Callaghan case. All three votes took place behind closed doors in executive session.

That, says Mal Leary, president of the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition, puts the council on dangerous ground, in jeopardy of have those actions declared “null and void.”

De Angelis argued that while it was appropriate for the council to debate the lawsuits in executive session, final decisions on how to proceed should have been roll call votes taken in public.

She likened the issue to council hearings on poverty abatements, where personal information is poured over in private, but the vote on whether to forgive all or part of a tax bill is done in the open, albeit with no names mentioned.

“That you are required to do by law,” said the city’s contracted attorney, Sally Daggett, of Portland firm Jenson Baird Gardner Henry, who was on hand for a council workshop session Monday.

“But you are not obligated to discuss legal strategy,” said Daggett.

“I agree with the discussion on strategy being privileged,” countered De Angelis. “But this was a decision, it was a vote that should have taken place in public, so that everyone knows where each councilor stands.”

De Angelis went on, repeatedly referencing the Callaghan and DiMillo suits, noting that decisions to appeal or not settle were “certainly not consensus decisions.”

Finally, after nearly five minutes, Councilor Maxine Beecher, who had squirmed forward in her seat throughout, spoke out.

“I think we really need to not be having this discussion,” she said, intimating that De Angelis was coming too close to telling tales out of school by stumping for her right to say she had been in a minority that opposed the actions approved by the council.

Mayor Patti Smith agreed, shutting down De Angelis and asking the remaining councilor to honor Beecher’s request for discretion.

But Leary says De Angelis is the one with the law on her side.

“That councilor is absolutely right,” he said Tuesday. “In court, any decision taken by the council in executive session is null and void under state law. The whole purpose of the executive session is to give the council the flexibility to discuss legal issues, but any decision has to be made in public.

“This is well established in Maine law,” said Leary. “I am really kind of baffled at what the city attorney must be thinking. I would advise the council to consult with the Maine Municipal Association.”

In previous interviews, City Manager Jim Gailey has said the council decisions to appeal one case and refuse settlement in the other were “not really votes,” but consensus decisions.

Leary backs De Angelis, who says any agreement on how to proceed necessarily involves a vote of some kind.

“They have to vote at some point,” he said. “It’s just ludicrous to say we reached a consensus. How do you know you reached it? At some point you have to count heads.”  

More recently, Gailey has refused to say what decision was reached regarding DiMillo’s second settlement offer, discussion in a June 11 executive session that lasted 45 minutes.

“I don't talk about executive sessions,” he said, via email the following day.

According to DiMillo, he initially agreed to drop his suit if the council would agree to hold a public workshop session on the issue of councilor compensation. After that was turned down, sending the suit into “alternative dispute resolution,” DiMillo said he made a stronger request of demanding a public vote on the issue.

“I don’t really expect them to agree to that,” he said. “They don’t want any public admission that they are in violation of the city charter, so they just want to ignore this in hopes that it will eventually go away, or that I’ll give up fighting it.”

At its most recent meeting, the council agreed in public to launch a Rule 80-K lawsuit against a couple who had refused to move a shed that encroached on property lines. Daggett said she did not feel comfortable moving on that case without public affirmation from the council. Although Councilor Gerard Jalbert argued that the council was “micromanaging” by weighing in on a matter normally handled at the code enforcement level, Tom Blake argued the council had a “fiduciary responsibility” to vote, because it would cost taxpayer money to wage a court battle.

According to Gailey, the city has spent $2,513 through June 12 defending DiMillo’s suit. The most recent number provided by Gailey on the Callaghan case, given in early May before the decision to appeal, put the cost of that suit at more than $17,000, before her attorney submits his bill.

Noting that it could “spend hours on each topic,” the council agreed to future, as yet unscheduled debate on five issues raised by councilors in recent weeks for discussion.

One session will debate, “taking votes in public after items have been discussed in executive session,” and “public disclosure of executive session privileged information.”

A second will cover “use of social media and electronic communications” and “city councilor interaction with city boards and committees.”

These two appear to spin out of recent controversy regarding debate conducted via email about the city’s downtown farmers market, which ended with several councilors appearing before the Planning Board to discuss a street closure aimed at giving the market a new home.

A third workshop could see the council debate the need for a code of ethics.

How far future questions get could depend on other action taken by the council on its standing rules. One suggestion raised Monday was the concept of requiring assent from two councilors before any item is placed on a workshop agenda.

Some councilors, including Jalbert, talked that idea down from Gailey’s original proposal of three nods, saying discussion of three councilors outside of a public meeting could be a violation of Maine’s Freedom of Access laws. However, De Angelis said even the one-on-one discussions needed to obtain a second for an agenda request could devolve into too much private talk on public business.

But De Angelis did not get a chance to really argue the point as, following Beechers’ request, the remaining councilors agreed to forestall debate for later workshops.

Leary said De Angelis had a right to air her grievances on how the council handles its business, up to and including revealing how she weighed in on any decision.

“Privileged information is one thing, but by not letting her say how she felt about a decision, or not letting her say how she voted, the other councilors are really denying her freedom of speech,” he said. “It really goes again the fundamental nature of democracy.”

Effort continues to preserve veterans’ stories

SCARBOROUGH — Just in time for Independence Day, the experiences of two Scarborough veterans who fought to preserve democracy during World War II have been preserved in the Library of Congress.

Mark Dyer, a 35-year Central Maine Power lineman and troubleshooter, completed the first round of 25 interviews between 2003 and 2007 in cooperation with one of the subjects, Kenneth Dolloff, now 92, who went ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Dolloff was then an active member of Libby-Mitchell American Legion Post 76, and through that association learned of the Veterans’ History Project, launched by the Library of Congress in 2000 to preserve oral histories and other artifacts from those who fought on the front lines in the nation’s various wars.

When Dolloff approached Dyer for help, the younger man readily agreed. Though not a veteran himself, Dyer is a self-declared “World War II buff” who reveled in stories told by the men he met at the town’s Dunstan Fire Station, shortly after he joined the fire department in 1969 at age 16.

“There were several people on the company who were World War II vets and it always intrigued me to listen to their stories first hand,” he explained, at his Flintlock Drive home on Monday. “Now, those men are in their mid-80s and they’re dying by the hundreds every day.”

In fact, according to the National World War II Museum, there are roughly 1.7 million men and women left alive of the 16 million who served in World War II, but they are dying at a rate of 740 per day.

Of the 25 veterans whose stories were preserved by Dyer and Dolloff, some have passed on since the 2007 publication of their wire-bound book, “Scarborough’s Greatest Generations: Histories of Scarborough Residents During World War II.” One of those who have since died was Lester Hashey, a Scarborough resident from the early 1970s and an exception to the Dyer/Dolloff rule of focusing solely on those who lived in Scarborough when joining the service, based on his status as one of the soldiers memorialized in the HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers.”

“Every name we had to check,” recalled Dyer, noting that 60 years after the fact, there were surprisingly few records, even at the town office, detailing who served from Scarborough. By cross-checking multiple sources, Dyer and Dolloff came up with 383 names, finding along the way two who died in the war but are not named on the town’s Word War II memorial and eliminating one who fabricated his service.

“It took us five years and still there were more people we couldn’t get to,” said Dyer. “And then when it came time to do the interviews, it was hard to get some guys to even talk, because they had to go into their closets, where they had suppressed a lot of those awful memories over the years.”

The 90-minute audio recordings taken with each veteran did not dwell on gory details, said Dyer, but still there were a lot of tears.

“We told them, we just want to preserve your general experiences for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, where it will be preserved forever,” said Dyer. “Still, I know some of them suffered for weeks afterward because of their interviews.”

Scarborough Town Council Chairman Ron Ahlquist says those tears came back this spring when Dyer added his father Clarence to the list of histories preserved.

“I was kind of a mess,” he said, with a warm laugh, noting the pride at having his father’s experiences recorded for posterity.

Clarence Ahlquist volunteered for the U.S. Coast Guard after the attack on Pearl Harbor and spent the war as a carpenter building bases, always arriving at each island after the fighting was over.

The other recent addition to the project, 92-year-old Arthur Purington, also saw no fighting, spending his time after being drafted as a U.S. Army mechanic in Alaska, distinguishing himself as an instructor of new recruits until returning home to a career as a much sought-after mason.

Although neither Ahlquist nor Purington ever fired a shot in anger, they are no less heroes for their service, said Dyer. World War II, he said, required a full national effort, with those who served in support roles just as vital as those whose names appear on memorial stones. “World War II was the last truly patriotic war, not like the political wars we’ve had since.”

Although Dyer doesn’t plan to reopen the 2007 book, the two recent interviews sent to the Library of Congress as personal favors, he does encourage others to take the reins.

“It was just so much work to do what we were able to complete,” said Dyer. “The majority of the people we weren’t able to get to the first time are dead, I’m afraid, but I’m happy to help anyone who’d like to complete an Veterans’ History Project interview packet on their own.”

The reason to do so is as important as ever, says Dyer. 

Recently, he gave a talk on his project to a history class as Scarborough High School. The students showed only the most desultory of interest and not one could say for certain if a member of their family had served in World War II at all, let alone what he or she might have done for the war effort.

“It was kind of disappointing, really,” said Dyer.

But, he says, that clarifies why he and Dolloff launched the project, and why he made two late additions while he still could.

“It meant a lot, to know that the lives of these people have been documented, that was a real satisfaction,” said Dyer. “Now, if the time comes when one of these young kids today is interests, that information is there for them to find, as opposed to the others who have passed, who’s contributions will be forgotten.”