When is a public invitation in HB NOT an invitation? When you have constructive criticism.

When, as happened to yours truly this afternoon, on a visit to the Hallandale Beach Police Dept. HQ -you know, the Police Dept. that doesn't have an actual sign on US-1 or side streets indicating where it's located- to get some basic info about their Citizen Watch program and get contact info on the person who runs it, as well as questions about the accreditation report that was, supposedly being celebrated.
The one you spent taxpayer's funds to advertise in the paid ad, below.
But as is so often the case in Hallandale Beach when city employees are asked simple, reasonable questions and get requests for information that city residents are legally entitled to, a police official like Capt. Robert Rodgers gets beliigerant and forgets that I don't work for him, he works for me and other city residents.
Long story short, he starts acting defensive and starts saying things that are not factually correct, and not the sort of thing that you usually hear from -I remind you, city emploees- going so far as to often accuse you, the taxpayer, of "busting his balls."
Meanwhile, Hallandale Beach Chief of Police Thomas Magill just looks on quietly in the hallway doorway, as if this was the sort of harrangue he's used to his employees making.
Perhaps it is.
Then again, maybe it's just Capt. Rodgers' MO.
(And yes, before you ask, Magill was wearing that omnipresent camera of his that seems to be permanently affixed to his body. The same one that he was wearing when he was behind me in City Manager Mike Good's office on Wednesday afternoon -when, following nothing but buckpassing by the city's City Clerk on Monday regarding whether or not the city had yet made the phone call to COMCAST to tape the Wednesday night tax reform forum- I wanted to know what was happening. Yes, it's the same camera that Chief Magill was toting at the hurricane forum weeks before, when the room was more full of city employees than HB residents.)
On Monday, I'll get into all the particulars and the mis-disdirection when they said that they didn't know or find the email address of the person that is the city's police information officer (PIO) Andrew Casper.





It's never a good sign for the residents of the city that Chief Magill doesn't know or can't find the email address of the person that city taxpayers pay to answer media questions, and when you go to the city's website, http://www.hallandalebeach.org/Directory.asp you find:

June 30, 2007
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First Name: Andrew
Last Name: Casper

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