DEPOSED KING JAMES WANTS TO TAKE HIS COURT TO DOYLESTOWN
The Free Press, October 16, 2003, With additional unedited text

To tell you the truth, I was shocked. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I really didn’t expect borough police chief James McFadden to be leaving us so soon. Giving up all that control. After all, the party had just begun. Was it something we said?

No sooner had the council’s new rules governing the department gone into effect when Mac said hasta la vista, baby. The Self-Terminator. He announced his retirement at age 52, after 30 years on the force. With full pension, of course, $33,000 per year. Consider it a going-away present from the taxpayers. The announcement of his departure at a local ambulance company was greeted with a standing ovation.

Perhaps we should have seen it coming. A man who has been in total control of his kingdom for 20 years, now having his every move open to scrutiny by a new council committee. Officers permitted to use their own discretion instead of having to clear everything with him. Forced cooperation with other police departments, which may not do things his way. And the press watching everything. The thought of having all of these intruders in his up-to-now private world just got to be too much.

McFadden won’t be leaving until February, but it will be interesting to see how he handles himself in the meantime. Will he follow the new department rules? Will he order the new weapons council has found to be necessary? Will he arrange for the required training so the officers can use those weapons after he departs? Will he offer the mandated cooperation to other area departments?

To give you some idea of what to expect, consider this: Pennsylvania requires that every police officer take 16 hours of training each year in order to keep their certification. Without that certification, they can not work. Training courses are given throughout the year at the police academies, and schedules of those classes are sent out to all departments starting in the prior year. Classes available for 2003 were first announced in 2002.

So when did McFadden give that schedule to his officers? The first week of October. That’s October, 2003. The tenth month of the year. If you noticed a lack of police coverage last week, it was because so many QPD officers were away at school. According to sources in the department, it has been like this every year. And for absolutely no good reason, except McFadden’s passion for control.

So where does Mac go from here? Does he do the Terminator thing and melt away, although without the “I’ll be baaaaack”? Or ride off into the sunset, to become another Florida or Arizona retiree? Not a chance. The man is young, and a lifelong cop. And lifelong cops have lots of friends who are lifelong cops. Friends who are willing to spend the taxpayers’ money on hiring their friends, no matter how questionable the circumstances of their previous employment.

In this case, the friend is new Bucks County Sheriff Edward “Duke” Donelly, a former police chief. Multiple sources say that McFadden expects to be working in his department next year, probably as a high administrator. The Duke gets the final say on his hirings, but the response from others in county government has been a pause, and then “Nooooooo, that couldn’t be”. Morale, watch out below. Mac may be changing the color of his uniform, but don’t expect him to become a bird of a different feather. It may take a while, but brace yourself for the same kinds of problems in Doylestown that we lived through for two decades in Quakertown.

And, of course, there is the question of who will step into Mac’s jackboots here. The highest-ranking man in the department is Detective Sergeant Timothy C.F. Gaumer, a strong McFadden supporter. No doubt the Mac will back him for the job. Most QPD officers will not. They have their own special interpretation of the meaning of his middle initials: Cop F---er. They see him as a King James clone. Borough council would be well advised to think long and hard before getting themselves right back into the same mess they just cleaned up. They also should take the opportunity to remove the police chief’s job from civil service. Mac talked them into it 20 years ago, and they have regretted it since.

Quakertown police are quite well paid, and council has shown a recent willingness to spend the money necessary to properly arm and maintain the force. With the right man at the helm, the relationship could be very good. They should have no trouble attracting and hiring an excellent chief from outside the area, someone who has no potentially harmful local reputation or embarrassing personal agenda. Someone with a background of actually listening to the elected leaders, and the citizens.

When Stu Woods died, Richland needed to replace him with a man of similar philosophy. Quakertown needs to replace McFadden with a man of totally opposite philosophy. Mac has given council an unexpected opportunity to Terminate old problems. A wise choice now will go a long way toward keeping them from coming baaaaack.