Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
 
| More
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

TMCNet:  Officer files lawsuit over allegations he was drunk

[July 22, 2008]

Officer files lawsuit over allegations he was drunk

(The Pantagraph (Bloomington, IL) (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jul. 22--BLOOMINGTON -- A Bloomington police lieutenant has filed a civil lawsuit against another officer and a labor representative with the police union, charging them with making false allegations that he arrived drunk to a standoff with an armed subject last August.

Lt. Tim Stanesa filed the lawsuit Friday in McLean County Circuit Court. It seeks more than $50,000 each from Sgt. Gayle Cyrulik, labor representative Eric Poertner and the Policemen's Benevolent & Protection Association.

Stanesa was cleared in March of allegations that he was intoxicated when he arrived at an armed standoff Aug. 25 on the 400 block of North Lee Street. In a letter to Bloomington Chief Roger Aiken, the union accused Stanesa of consuming alcohol at a party in LeRoy before he responded to the emergency situation.

Cyrulik remains on unpaid leave from the department pending the outcome of an arbitration hearing on charges that he made untrue statements about Stanesa.

Cyrulik's attorney, Shane Voyles, said Monday that several other officers saw Stanesa in an intoxicated state and sleeping at the standoff. A decision is expected sometime in the fall from the arbitrator.

Voyles said Cyrulik stands by his earlier statements about Stanesa.

The police union did not return calls for comment on the lawsuit.

A case management conference is scheduled for Nov. 7 on the lawsuit.

In his lawsuit, Stanesa contends union officials and Cyrulik knew the charges were false but continued to pass the information to other officers and the news media.

The lieutenant admits to drinking about 27 ounces of 3.2 percent beer at the party before he received the first of several phone calls about the Lee Street incident. He said his blood-alcohol level never approached 0.04 BAC, the level defined under the city's collective bargaining unit as unacceptable for sergeants and lieutenants on duty. By law, a person is considered legally drunk with a blood-alcohol content of 0.08.

Stanesa arrived at Lee Street at 11:37 p.m. Aug. 25 dressed in emergency response gear, said the lawsuit. Stanesa denied sleeping but acknowledged he closed his eyes for about five minutes while waiting for a search warrant.

Stanesa also denied telling other officers that he did not serve as incident commander during the standoff because he had been drinking.

Stanesa argued the alleged defamation has caused him pain, humiliation and harmed his career, saying he was passed over for assistant chief in 2008.

To see more of The Pantagraph, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.pantagraph.com.
Copyright (c) 2008, The Pantagraph, Bloomington, Ill.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]


FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
 
 
| More