Police officers on St. Croix will continue to respond to non-emergency calls in nontraditional ways — like using public transportation — if old equipment isn’t updated, union leaders said Monday.
In a press conference, Naomi Joseph, president of the St. Croix Police Benevolent Association, and other union leaders also said conditions at Patrick Sweeney Headquarters are so bad that officers may refuse to enter the building. If such a situation occurs, Joseph said she "dares" Territorial Court judges to hold officers in contempt of recent rulings barring them from staging "blue flu" job actions.
Joseph said V.I. Fire Service inspectors issued dozens of citations after a recent walk-through of Sweeney Headquarters. She said that because of a lack of smoke detectors in the upper area of the building, civilian staff who work in the basement wouldn’t know if a fire was burning until they saw smoke.
The union officials warned the public that response times would be slow because officers won’t use vehicles that are "out of contract." Such vehicles have more than 80,000 miles or have three years of service. Under a union contract, those vehicles are to be retired.
Outside the Sweeney Headquarters, police vehicles with flat tires, broken windshields and other ailments litter the parking lot. Joseph said the department’s budget, which was cut some $20 million for fiscal year 2000, doesn’t have much for maintenance or new vehicles.
Because of the contract stipulations concerning vehicles, the department’s Traffic Enforcement Division has only one car to respond to accidents, said PBA Vice President Joseph Best.
Last week, officers from the Ann Schrader Command in La Reine refused to drive police vehicles to conduct a burglary investigation. Instead they took Vitran, arriving more than two hours later to the victim's place of business.
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