Christopher Peak Photo
Officer Jason Bandy at Wednesday night’s termination hearing.
Officer Bandy, without make-up.
A trio of face tattoos nearly cost Officer Jason Bandy his job — but now a tube of makeup might help him make up with the chiefs who sought to kick him off the force.
Bandy offered that literally face-saving compromise of applying concealer every day on the job, during a termination hearing Wednesday night at the department’s Union Avenue headquarters.
The Police Commission called the hearing to consider the Acting Chief Otoniel Reyes’ recommendation to fire Bandy over his new tattoos, which cover parts of his face and neck and remain visible to the public when he patrols the streets. Bandy had rejected a previous settlement deal to avoid the termination.
During the two-hour hearing, a lawyer for the police union needled Reyes about what rules Bandy had actually broken and whether the department had fairly considered any work-arounds to keep Bandy in uniform.
After new evidence came up about why Bandy had rejected the settlement deal, the lawyers for both sides asked the Police Commission to hold off on making a decision for 30 days. It turns out Bandy said he will agree to the chief’s key demand — that he conceal the face and neck tattoos. So the two sides will now negotiate other aspects of the settlement.
The “Last Frontier”
Bandy, with three new tattoos.
Bandy has been to a termination hearing before, for a different reason: He was fired in 2010 for calling in sick to work, then going out to a bar anyway, getting drunk with two fellow cops, urinating on the bathroom floor at the Center Street Lounge and refusing to leave, until he was arrested for breach of peace and interfering with an officer. The department later rehired him.
Since Bandy first became a cop in 2008, his body has been covered in ink. He has illustrations of a poker hand, a roll of dice, a portrait of Don Corleone from “The Godfather” and of Jesus Christ, a serpent-wrapped Eve under the Tree of Knowledge, floral blooms and a perched bald eagle that spreads its wings across his jugular veins.
But the department brass said the latest marks on his face — “Veni, Vidi, Vici” on his forehead, for the Roman emperor Caesar’s boast over his conquered rivals; “D” by one ear, for Detroit; and the Roman numerals for 4004 BC by the other ear, for a 17th-century scholar’s calculation of the world’s start date — finally went too far. (Read more about that in the first story reported on this subject by the Register’s Mary O’Leary.)
Even among tattoo-parlor regulars, marking up one’s face has long been considered extreme, partly because of its association with prison culture, where those serving life sentences didn’t worry how society would judge the teardrops, crowns or swastikas on their face. “If you want to be transgressive,” Anna Felicity Friedman, a tattoo historian, told The New York Times last year, “the last frontier is the face.”
Christopher Peak Photo
Acting Chief Otoniel Reyes, who recommended Bandy’s termination.
Acting Chief Reyes said that he doesn’t have a problem with body ink; in fact, he admitted that even he has a few tattoos. But he argued that face tattoos just don’t fit with the department’s brand.
“Your face is the first thing the public sees when you walk into a room, and you represent a brand of the New Haven Police Department,” Reyes said. “When an officer walks in with tattoos on their face, there are segments of the population that we serve that may be confused and offended. They may not understand what that’s all about, and they may question the mental stability of an officer. At the end of the day, when we’re out there, we’re not supposed to be a distraction to the people that we serve; we’re supposed to be a comfort. We submit that when an officer does this, it takes away what the brand of the department means.”
“We’re not individuals here; we’re part of a team and we’re part of a brand,” Reyes added. “When an officer puts three tattoos on their face, they are trying to control the image of the department, and we can’t have that.”
The termination hearing was the first test of Reyes’s leadership of the department. He assumed the job of acting chief this week after Chief Anthony Campbell quit in protest over the top brass’s health benefits. (Campbell initiated the termination process against Bandy for the tattoos.)
Snickers & Glares
Bandy talks with supporters during a break.
On Wednesday night, Bandy showed up in full-dress uniform, with concealer and foundation powdered over his face to hide any of the black lettering.
His supporters, several of them sporting tattoos down their arms, filled up the conference room and overflowed out into the hallway. As the questioning heated up, a few standing behind the chief started to snicker, and Reyes turned back to glare at them.
While there’s no explicit policy forbidding tattoos, the top cops argued that Bandy’s three facial tattoos violate the department’s requirements that all officers maintain a “neat and clean appearance” and a “businesslike manner.” Reyes argued that the prohibition on face tattoos didn’t need to be written down.
“It comes down to common sense. It’s probably the most important tool an officer has,” Reyes said. “I would equate that to an officer not falling asleep on the job. There’s nothing on the books that says you can’t fall asleep on the job. There’s no specific rule, but it’s covered by the general orders.”
The union’s lawyer, ex-cop Marshall Segar, responded that a policy like that is too general to be enforceable. He said it should be “void for vagueness.”
Commissioner Greg Smith holds up a copy of the disputed settlement offer.
But as the two sides sparred, the crux of the argument eventually came down to whether the department had really given Bandy a chance to meet its standards. That’s because the question of whether Bandy could use make-up to hide his facial tattoos got mixed up with other settlement negotiations, Segar said.
At first, in November, top cops transferred Bandy to booking and asked him to have the tattoos surgically removed. But they relented after Bandy’s dermatologist said that kind of operation would be costly, would take several months and would leave permanent scars at his hairline.
Working with corporation counsel and labor relations, they came back with a more detailed offer in February that said Bandy could stay on the job as long as his tats stayed out of sight.
But the deal came with a few catches.
The settlement said Bandy could face “potential termination for noncompliance, whether such is intentional or not.” Bandy said that put his career at risk during every thunder storm or heat wave.
Even after the deal was amended to give him a reprieve when “the chief of police determines that extenuating circumstances excuse such noncompliance,” Bandy still said he wasn’t sure he’d be treated fairly.
Should Women Cops Shave Their Heads?
Marshall Segar: Would you fire other officers over dress-code violations?
The union pressed Reyes about whether other dress-code violations would put an officer up for termination hearings in a testy exchange.
Segar: Do female officers with long hair wear their hair up, in accordance with policy?
Reyes: Yes, sir.
Segar: If during a tussle, a fight or some other type of police-related action, if their hair was to fall off their head and be non-compliant, what would you tell them to do?
Reyes: To put up their hair.
Segar: Would you tell them to shave their head?
Reyes: I wouldn’t say that.
Segar: If an officer showed up with a wrinkled uniform, what would you tell them to do?
Reyes: I’d tell them to iron it.
Segar: Would you tell them throw it out and buy a new one?
Reyes: If it was damaged.
More importantly, the department’s offer would have also required Bandy to withdraw two complaints he’d filed with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO), alleging gender-based discrimination and retaliation. But Bandy said he didn’t want to give up his due-process rights.
In late February, he turned the package down. Another meeting was set up for mid-March, but after the city cancelled, it hasn’t been rescheduled, Segar said.
“The issue here is that the chief has said that Officer Bandy refused accommodations. That’s untrue. He’s here before you tonight in the fashion as you would see him on the street, but the accommodation is not solely that,” Segar said.
“He’s not going to agree to withdraw the CHRO, but he’s willing to comply with a directive from the chief of police to cover his tattoos,” Segar added. “As with anybody else who had facial hair, long hair, unshiny shoes or unkept uniform, if the chief said, ‘Shine your shoes,’ he would do it. He will comply with a directive, which has not been given by the chief, to cover your tattoos.”
Jarad Lucan: We need a month to discuss a new deal.
After that back-and-forth, the commissioners called for a five-minute break. That stretched on as the attorneys met in Chief Reyes’s office to talk over the deal.
Once they returned to the conference room, Jarad Lucan, a partner at Shipman & Goodwin hired to represent the police department, said that Reyes hadn’t been aware of exactly why the earlier negotiation fell apart. He asked for more time to see if a compromise could be reached, and the commissioners agreed to table the hearing for 30 days.
On the way out of the meeting, Bandy, Segar, Lucan and John Rose, the city’s corporation counsel, all declined to comment on the upcoming negotiations.
What I find the most appalling is the fact that this guy has supporters! Do I see State Rep. Paolillo in one of those pics? He doesn't belong on the job....period!