Previous Discipline, Media Attention Sway Arbitrator

A North Point (Fla.) dispatcher will be reinstated and receive a year’s back pay after an arbitrator’s ruled police officials fired her because of press attention, and were inconsistent in their application of discipline. Dispatcher Nadia Kashitskaya was fired earlier this year for not sending officers to investigate a citizen’s report of a man lying on the pavement outside a pick-up truck stopped in the roadway. A second caller reported the man 19 hours later, and police found the man dead, possibly from drugs after he crashed his truck into a power pole. The police chief fired Kashitskaya, saying she failed to properly obtain a location from the caller or send officers. Kashitskaya and her union appealed, and now an arbitrator agreed that the discipline was too severe. Arbitrator Irwin Socoloff noted a previous incident—which he claimed was identical—when a dispatcher did not send officers to a missing child report. That dispatcher received only a written reprimand, he said. Socoloff said the city was only interested in taking action in the wake of several high-profile dispatcher mistakes in Florida. He also found that the city was inconsistent with its discipline in the Kashitskaya case, and ordered her reinstated with back pay, about $32,000. Read about the arbitrator’s ruling here, and a newspaper columnist’s opinion on the ruling here.