Juvenile justice officers say boss is the problem

One by one, youth probation officers stepped in front of the Clark County Commission to allege intimidation, retaliation, nepotism, wrongful discipline and terminations by their department’s leadership.

A couple dozen union members showed up to an unrelated, special budget meeting March 28 to announce recent votes of no confidence against John “Jack” Martin, the director of the county’s Juvenile Justice Services.

The result was a lopsided 167 to 8 vote, said the unions that represent the officers and their supervisors.

“We are emotionally tapped out. We are tired. We are losing officers,” said Tamara Partridge, a 15-year veteran of the department. “Officers are so emotionally drained.”

“I’m crying because it’s a passion,” she added. “It’s a passion of us who are here, and we do need help. There is no confidence; no confidence in our director.”

The state’s Open Meeting Law prevented commissioners from responding at the meeting, but the county later that day acknowledged being “aware of the issues the union is raising and are working through the next steps.”

The Review-Journal has learned that one of those actions appears to be an investigation by Littler Mendelson P.C., a third-party law firm that specializes in employment and “labor law solutions.”

A spokesperson said this week that county management has implemented a process to “properly vet” the complaints and probe “as needed.”

“Additionally, employees in the Department of Juvenile Justice have been communicated to about how to engage in this process, if they have concerns to raise, and have also been reminded about their protection from retaliation when raising issues of concern,” spokesman Erik Pappa wrote in a statement Tuesday.

The county ignored multiple interview requests to speak about Martin or the investigation, and two of the seven elected commissioners the Review-Journal reached out to declined to comment. The rest did not respond.

Hoping for a change

The probe is separate from multiple lawsuits and complaints to state and federal officials for alleged “arbitrary and capricious investigations” against youth probation officers, said Matthew Richardson, vice president of the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers and the president of the Juvenile Justice Supervisors Association, in an interview this month.

“We’re hoping the county manager and County Commission either fires the director or that they prompt him to resign so we can get in an appropriate leader,” Richardson said. “We really need to get back to concentrating on serving the community and not fighting the director, or what attack from the director comes next.”

Martin heads a department with three branches: detention, probation and the Spring Mountain Youth Camp, a facility that houses a yearly average of 240 male offenders ages 12 to 18, according to the county. There, the children are afforded “therapeutic, educational, social, medical and recreational needs.”

“We make sure that they get up, that they are fed, properly clothed,” Richardson said.

Through programming, the officers “teach them skills to cope and learn,” he said. “We help the kids through a lot of their crisis at the time. I really think when you put kids in these facilities, they’re going through a life crisis. We try to guide them along.”

Those officers assigned to the streets are dispatched to potentially volatile scenarios with little more than a bulletproof vest, which not all are certified to wear, former officers told the Review-Journal.

Unarmed, understaffed and with plummeting morale, the officers said the strain of their often-dangerous work is exasperated by Martin’s alleged ruthless leadership. Attrition and unjust firings are depleting their ranks, making their mission untenable, the officers told commissioners.

Before being appointed director in 2013, Martin worked in juvenile justice services in California, Arizona and Hawaii, according to his Clark County biography.

Calls to his office requesting an interview were not returned.

A coach wrongly accused

Officer Johnny Fletcher was fired the day the basketball team at Spring Mountain that he coached was due to play a state championship last year. Months earlier, he was supervising a teen who had been cursing at staff, refused medications and was threatening “to beat somebody up,” Fletcher told the Review-Journal.

A struggle erupted when the teen didn’t obey Fletcher’s instructions to go talk in a conference room, and the officer tried cuffing him. Fletcher said he suffered injuries to his knee, lower back and elbow, but was still ordered to take the teen to downtown booking, even though the officer was hurt and uncomfortable with the situation.

Fletcher said his supervisor later told him that he was under investigation for choking the teen, who was bigger than Fletcher. The officer was interviewed by a county investigator, Las Vegas police and the county’s Child Protective Services department.

Fletcher alleges that the supervisor made up the accusation and that Martin went along with it. He contends that surveillance footage and investigative documents contradict the claims against him and prove that the boy was repeatedly coerced to testify he was choked.

Fletcher was reinstated to the department through arbitration this year but has yet to be called back to the department, which is trying to transfer him to detention services, he said. He hasn’t been paid since he was fired last March and said he is waiting on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to finish its investigation before he considers filing a lawsuit.

Fletcher doesn’t plan on staying at the job, he said.

“I want to get accountability and be part of the union,” he said. “It’s hard to keep doing this work when people in power use these kind of tactics against you.”

Kevin Eppinger, president of the Juvenile Probation Officers Association and a 28-year veteran, said morale at the department is at an “all-time low.”

In an interview, he said that federal guidelines dictate officers should supervise 35 youth offenders but that some are assigned “double.”

Ideally, the probation officers would spend adequate time with the teens, visiting with their circles, steering them to positive crowds and encouraging them to join rehabilitation programs, Eppinger said.

The department has 181 officers in its ranks, and 164 are union members, he said.

“One of the things I’ve found remarkable, when we issued a vote of no confidence, it increased my membership by 13 new members within a weeks’ span,” he said.

Andrew Regenbaum, executive director of the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers, noted that the no-confidence votes were similar to those against former Henderson Police Chief Thedrick Andres late last year. Andres retired in February.

“This boss is not doing things the right way, not following the rules,” Regenbaum said about Martin. “(He is) mistreating employees, a management style contrary to what would be expected in a county like Clark County.”

Disparaging remarks

Retired officer Daniel Rizzo remembers distasteful, “off the cuff” remarks from Martin, like the time after the officer was passed over for a promotion when he encountered the director out eating with a leader of a private sector organization.

“Yeah after I fire you, you can work for this guy,” Rizzo said Martin told him. “I don’t need to hear that as an employee of Clark County who’s trying to do the right thing.”

Rizzo said the only thing Martin told him about why he wasn’t promoted was that he had written a C paper in his master’s program at UNLV.

Another time, Rizzo said, an officer had just been promoted when Martin quipped, “It only took him 25 years to do it.”

Rizzo, who repeatedly told the Review-Journal that he wasn’t disgruntled about the ordeal, said the stressful job left him traumatized.

Juvenile probation is dangerous, he said, noting that the officers in the street sometimes have to run into houses with armed youth. In either case, he added, officers needed support, not “jokes.”

When he retired nearly two years ago, Rizzo said he pushed to have an exit interview with Martin, but his attempts were rebuffed.

Rizzo said the department’s overall mission is strong, in theory, and that guidance from someone with even basic by-the-book leadership skills would ease some of the issues.

“Omit Jack from the equation,” he said. “The place would be better.”

Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com. Follow @rickytwrites on Twitter. Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.