Ellen Green-Ceisler Continues To Fix City

A few weeks ago, I noticed lawyer (and, naturally, judicial candidate) Ellen Green-Ceisler attempting to fix the city with her own two hands and a bunch of task forces. (Well, a friend noticed it, actually, but I was the one who wrote about it, dammit!)

Well, Green-Ceisler is back at it again, this time back working on the cops. Yesterday, Internal Affairs released a report saying two officers improperly forced two females locked up to perform a lesbian sex show in order to be released. Yes, that would be a bit improper. (The Inquirer headline uses “coerced,” though I think that’s sort of putting it a bit likely, as if the cops were going, “C’mon! Do a lesbian sex show. I’ll be your best friend!”)

Anyway, in the wake of the horrible report, the Inquirer called up Ms. Green-Ceisler for a quote.

Ellen Green-Ceisler, an expert on police discipline, said the case never should have dragged on for more than three years. The delay, she said, was unfair to the innocent and guilty alike. “This is a shocking story: the behavior of the accused officers, the failure of the investigatory system,” said Green-Ceisler, who once headed a city office that monitored police discipline. “It’s just a failure on so many different levels.”

I don’t doubt Green-Ceisler’s credentials. But do you really need to be an expert on police discipline to know this case shouldn’t have dragged on for over three years?

Report: Jail-cell sex show coerced [Inquirer]
March 2: Ellen Green-Ceisler Will Attempt To Reform City’s Institutions One-By-One If She Has To

Memo Madness Re: Philly Schools Report

You might remember Ellen Green-Ceisler from such posts last week as this one. She’s a lawyer who is running for a judgeship this year, but she also monitored the police department as head of the city’s Integrity and Accountability Office and prepared a report on discipline in the Philadelphia School District released earlier this month.

But whoops! Gar Joseph reports today on a memo accidentally attached to the report when it went out. It was penned by Green-Ceisler, and she wrote about how she felt the commission she did was simply a way for Paul Vallas to attack ex-school safety head Harvey Rice.

Accidentally stuck to the end of the report (”a large, stupid error,” said a schools spokeswoman) is a June memo exchange between Ceisler and Heather Frattone, the district’s director of policy and planning.

In it, Ceisler writes, “At different points during this project, Paul and [other] personnel expressed significant consternation about the OSSA [Rice's Office of Safe Schools Advocate]… . As my study progressed, I sensed that Paul and [others'] main concern was that I discredit the OSSA. In fact during one session with an… employee, I requested some data regarding student arrests. That individual, in my presence, called an employee from the School Police and stated something to the effect that I needed this information because I was hired to ‘trash Harvey Rice’s Office.’ ”

Ceisler goes on to say, “If I had reason to believe, at the outset, that the sole purpose of my contract was to ‘trash’ a critic of the School District, I never would have agreed to undertake this study.”

Even though the woman who authored the report admitted in a memo the district was mainly concerned with trashing Harvey Rice, a school district spokesperson lied, “To suggest that we would go to those lengths is a little absurd… the agenda was clearly not to trash Harvey.”

In other news, whoever accidentally attached that memo to the report has totally been fired.

Gar Joseph | Memo says Vallas hired consultant to fry Rice [Daily News]
[Photo via Al Día]
March 3: Ellen Green-Ceisler Will Attempt To Reform City’s Institutions One-By-One If She Has To

Ellen Green-Ceisler Will Attempt To Reform City’s Institutions One-By-One If She Has To

Inquirer, today, A call for help - then things got worse, about a lawsuit filed against the police department:

The Estevez case echoes the findings of a court-mandated monitor who reviewed six years of officer-involved shootings in a 2005 report.

Ellen Green-Ceisler, then head of the Integrity and Accountability Office, found that the “majority” of internal shooting investigations were “satisfactory.”

However, she wrote: “In some cases, investigators did not ask necessary and probing questions regarding issues relevant to the shooting, did not always address inconsistencies and ambiguities…”

She added, “In some investigations, physical evidence and civilian eyewitness statements that contradicted officers’ version of events appeared to be disregarded. These practices raise questions regarding the impartiality of some investigations.”

The Green-Ceisler report covered cases from 1998 to 2003.

Inquirer, today, Report: District losing control, about the state of the Philadelphia school district:

The Philadelphia School District’s student disciplinary system is plagued by inconsistencies, high turnover in personnel, and a lack of training, staff and resources - all leading to a breakdown in procedure and an insufficient transfer of problem pupils out of the schools, according to an independent consultant’s report released yesterday.

Some school personnel have become so frustrated that they have given up carrying out discipline in all but the most serious cases, said the 47-page report prepared by Ellen Green-Ceisler, who previously monitored the Police Department as head of the city’s Integrity and Accountability Office.

Her report describes classrooms where “little or no learning was actually occurring” and “many of the students in attendance were listening to headphones, sleeping, doodling or wandering around the room talking or shouting.”

Good job with the police and schools, Ellen Green-Ceisler! Now can you get to work on PGW, SEPTA, the Streets Dept., the Zoning Board and the Sixers?

Oh, and, of course, she’s running for a judgeship.

Report: District losing control [Inquirer]
A call for help - then things got worse [Inquirer]