The Board Room at the Township Building, where the Commissioners usually conduct business in front of mostly empty chairs, was at capacity, and then some, on Wednesday night (March 15). Members of the Lower Merion Police Department and their supporters were there to express their disapproval of the commissioners’ recent decision to override Superintendent Michael McGrath’s recommendation that Officer Charles Murphy should be suspended for eight hours. Instead, the commissioners gave Murphy an 80-hour suspension.
While the supporters of the police represented the overwhelming majority in attendance at the meeting, there were dissenting voices as well. A few dozen community members supported the 80-hour suspension, and some were still calling for Murphy’s removal from the department altogether.
Murphy had been involved in a tasing incident with a motorist on January 8.
Rich Kramer, past president of the Lower Merion FOP – If you start with this nonsense that you’re pulling right now, you are going to promote a tight-lipped group that will not report. You have a command staff now that is wondering whether the commissioners actually back them. I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I’m telling you, you acted inappropriately.
Sandra Thompson, President of the State Conference Leadership of the NAACP – In any other job, you get disciplined, and you have to follow that discipline. So even the police department should not be above that. And what happens often is that city councils and townships and boroughs all across the state and the nation – is basically you get held hostage. You get hostage by all the groups and the people and the family and the contracts and the F.O.P. that come up and say almost veiled threats – “We’ll walk out. We won’t police the neighborhoods. We won’t do our jobs unless you do what we say.”
Yossi Abramson (to thunderous applause) You cannot have a first-class township without first-class public safety.
Crytal Blunt He escalated. And because he was escalated, she got escalated. And if he would have remembered the training … then none of this would have happened. He threw that all out of the window because he got angry because she didn’t do what he wanted her to do – right then and there.