Plainfield Mayor loses bodyguards: Right move, wrong reason?

Inexplicably, the Mayor's bodyguards
were drawn from her campaign supporters.

Plainfield Mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs has had her bodyguards reassigned to patrol duties in the wake of a recent wave of shootings that left one man dead and three wounded, according to a report by Alexi Friedman in today's Star-Ledger.

That the security detail would be better deployed on the streets cannot be argued.

However, questions about the way Robinson-Briggs got them in the first place remain unanswered, questions which today's story only underscores.

Previously, Plainfield Today has asked for evidence that the determination of a threat sufficient to require the expenditures of public monies on a bodyguard detail was done by AN APPROPRIATE, INDEPENDENT AUTHORITY such as the State Police or the Union County Prosecutor.

How a threat assessment is gauged.

I always suspected no such independent assessment was ever requested or performed, and Police Director Martin Hellwig confirms this suspicion in today's story (see here) --

The initial threat that spurred the security detail was never substantiated, according to Hellwig. It was relayed in the blog "Plainfield Today," kept by Dan Damon, who said he heard rumors going around about threats to the mayor's life. After a police investigation, the threat was determined to be unsubstantiated. [Note: The investigation was actually conducted by the police and Prosecutor's office, the latter interviewing me at length. -- Dan]

Later, an alleged threat against the mayor was made in a conversation that took place in the Plainfield Library, and was overheard by an employee. There was no official police investigation into that incident, however.

-- UNSUBSTANTIATED? NO INVESTIGATION? -- hardly a reassurance of the independent judgment that should be used when spending such large sums of the taxpayers' money.

Suspicions arose immediately that the detail was a make-work for officers who campaigned for Robinson-Briggs (see the image at top, from Robinson-Briggs' 2005 campaign literature).

The question of how the officers were selected -- and why no female officer was ever assigned to the detail -- were raised but never addressed by Robinson-Briggs or Hellwig, who was then serving as the Director of Public Safety.

Unmentioned in all of this is any discussion of the total number of sworn officers currently in the Police Division.

The Robinson-Briggs administration, which squeaked into office by a 300-vote margin in the face of a write-in campaign for former mayor Al McWilliams by claiming it would significantly increase the size of the Police Division, has in fact done no such thing.

The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports for 2007, posted on the NJ State Police website (see here), show fewer sworn officers in 2007 than in the last year of the McWilliams administration.

And with two now assigned to the Union County Prosecutor's Homicide Squad, there are even fewer to patrol the streets.

One wonders what ever happened to the promise to expand the Police Division.

---

• Plainfield Today --
• "Is the Mayor's security detail necessary?"
• "Is the Mayor's bodyguard properly authorized?"
  
• "Why no female security for Mayor Robinson-Briggs?"
• Uniform Crime Reports: "NJ State Police: UCR, 1999 - 2007"
  
• Threat Assessement --
• Google Books: "Protective Intelligence and Threat Assessment"
• U.S. Secret Service: "National Threat Assessment Center"
  

-- Dan Damon

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