Today, Karla Thomas, Commissioner of Human Resources for the City of Buffalo appeared before the Buffalo Common Council to answer questions about the “national search” conducted to hire a new Commissioner of the Buffalo Police Department.  And by “answer questions”, I mean she was visibly annoyed by the requirement to be there and informed the Council that she simply posted the job to various free websites, performed no background checks, did not vet the applications, was not part of the selection process, conducted no followup on the applications, nor was she in any way involved aside from forwarding resumes to the Mayor.  Watch Thomas give us her best Sgt. Schultz impression during the hearing:

If you haven’t been following the story, the Mayor decided to hire Daniel Derenda, who served as Deputy Commissioner of Police under previous Commissioner H. McCarthy Gipson (who was fired while in a hospital bed).  Derenda is a close political ally of FIRST Deputy Mayor Steve Casey and was appointed to the position of Deputy Commissioner with no previous command experience.  He also lacks a college degree or extensive professional education, typically precursors to a nomination to the top police job in one of America’s 100 largest cities.

Marc Odien has the details on the “national search” which included several job postings which were submitted to various job websites this past weekend.

Human Resources Commissioner Karla L. Thomas insisted at today’s hearing (video coming soon) that the use of 14 free Internet sites where the job opening was posted produced 33 “well qualified” candidates out of a pool of 41 applicants.

However one of the two sites she claimed fed the listings to 13 other sites shows a different story.  Note the date: 17 July 2010

As of Saturday, the City began  soliciting applications and resumes for a job they have already awarded to the guy they found by the water cooler during their supposed “national search”.

Let’s be honest here, no “national search” was conducted.  There is no definition of “national search” that could possibly be stretched to define what happened.  In politics, the smallest lies can create the biggest problems.  For being such supposed expert political operators, Casey and Brown repeatedly demonstrate a keystone cops level aptitude for political machinations.  They are just not very good at this whole “Mayoring” thing.

There was no need to promise a national search for the job when they had no intention of actually conducting one.  Not following through and not being transparent about the process only gave their political opponents the opportunity to debunk the Mayor’s story.  Which they are doing with great enthusiasm.

There were two ways to go about the process of replacing Commissioner Gipson.

1.)  Conduct an honest and transparent search for a replacement, much like what was recently done in Albany.  Their task force (appointed by the Mayor) found qualified candidates from around the country and then subjected those candidates to a public review and vetting process.

The pool of 48 candidates for the city’s next police chief has been winnowed to nine, seven of whom are from outside the Capital Region. The group includes the local head of the FBI, the head of security programs for the World Trade Center, the chief of police in Rochester, Buffalo’s former police commissioner, a former top State Police official and a former deputy chief from Detroit.

Deputy Albany Police Chief Steven Krokoff also has made the cut to receive an interview with the advisory task force picked by Mayor Jerry Jennings to vet the resumes — the only internal candidate to survive the process.

The pool also includes the current chief of the Saginaw, Mich., police and the former chief in Gaithersburg, Md.

The names emerged as the panel also scheduled two additional public forums on the chief search.

Initially, the task force, led by retired Albany County Judge Larry Rosen, had planned to keep the names of applicants confidential until the panel had concluded its interviews and forwarded a handful of names to Jennings for consideration. But the task force reversed course on that issue Monday, citing the immense public interest in the search.

Conducting an open search would have yielded top candidates and involved the public in the process.  Simply posting 100 word job descriptions on free websites was not a “search”, it was a passive solicitation.

2.)  Appoint Derenda to the position without conducting a national search.  Elections have consequences and Mayor Brown was re-elected by a massive margin to lead the City of Buffalo and make Commissioner level appointments.  A direct appointment accompanied with the reasoning behind his endorsement, backed up with endorsements of other commanders within the Department would not have lead to an easy confirmation, but it at least would have been honest.  It may have limited the damage to Derenda’s credibility in the community and within the Department.

Unfortunately, the Mayor went the Dean Wormer route and conducted a “Double Secret” national search and did it clumsily.  The internet makes it pretty easy for us to find out how the search was conducted and this one never really happened.