Bent Corner

If the Herald-Mail newspaper is going to continue smearing the reputation of Hagerstown City Councilperson Kelly S. Cromer, I guess I will continue to blog about it.  Being that the Washington County Ethics Commission cleared Cromer of acting unethical the day she was pulled over by a Hagerstown police officer for speeding, I thought the Herald-Mail would move on.

Evidently I was wrong.

Today’s edition included a front page story reporting that the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) voted unanimously on July 16 to rescind Councilwoman Kelly S. Cromer’s associate membership. This was before the Washington County Ethics Commission even ruled on the matter. Their decision wasn’t made public until July 31.

Today’s article included something that appears to be factually wrong. It reads:

She also was quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her because she questioned the validity of a program under which some city employees are permitted to drive city-owned vehicles to and from work.

She was never quoted as saying the police department had a vendetta against her. Someone who claimed to have been with Cromer when she took a phone call from the reporter from the Herald-Mail asking about the incident claimed on a message board that at no time in the phone conversation did Cromer say the word “vendetta”.

Shortly after reading that, I emailed Dan Dearth, the reporter who wrote the article, and asked him if Cromer actually said the world “vendetta”.  He promptly replied:

Rick,

I never quoted her directly as saying that. I asked her whether she felt some city officials and some members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She said, “Yes.”

Thanks.

Dan

Dan Dearth was the one that chose the word vendetta, not Cromer.  She only answered in the affirmative when asked if she felt “some” city officials and “some” members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She did not answer in the affirmative that she felt that the entire police department had a vendetta against her.  The key word is “some”.  The way it reads in today’s paper is that Cromer was quoted as saying the entire Hagerstown police department had a vendetta against her.

She never said that.

Can anyone even blame her if she does feel that some in the Hagerstown police department have a vendetta against her? How else did the newspaper learn about the traffic stop three weeks after it happened?  Someone leaked the story to the newspaper and it wasn’t because they were a supporter of Councilperson Kelly Cromer.  They did it to make her look bad and the Herald-Mail seems to be going out of their way to do everything they can to help.

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I promised myself a while back that I would stop writing letters to my local newspaper, the Herald-Mail. I wrote a letter last year where I referred to the deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell as “an idiot”. My comment was edited by someone at the Herald-Mail to read that I called him “a fool”.

They made me sound like Mr. T.

I read something this morning that made me do a reversal on my self imposed no-letter to the editor policy. It was a heavy-handed piece of drivel pretending to be an editorial calling for, among other things, Cromer to write a check to the United Way (huh?) for claiming that a Hagerstown police officer was “lying” when he submitted a report stating that she asked him if he “knew who she was” when he stopped her for speeding.

I doubt they will publish my letter. If they do, I will make sure to link to it. If don’t publish it, I will post it here.

This isn’t the first time the Herald-Mail has editorialized about the Cromer traffic stop. On June 14th they published an editorial accusing Cromer of being too quick in accusing the police of a vendetta.

What they failed to mention was that it was the Herald-Mail — not Cromer — that came up with the word “‘vendetta’.

I read a post over on the Herald-Mail message board written by someone claiming to be a friend of Cromer’s. Among other things, this person claimed to have been with Cromer when she received the phone call from the Heard-Mail reporter asking about the incident. This person claimed that at no time did she hear Cromer use the word “vendetta” when talking with the reporter.

Huh?

Last week I emailed the reporter who wrote the story and asked him if Cromer said the word “vendetta”. I got a response almost immediately. He wrote:

I never quoted her directly as saying that. I asked her whether she felt some city officials and some members of the police department had a vendetta against her. She said, “Yes.”

So there you have it. The mystery is solved.

Hagerstown Police Chief Arthur Smith is weighing in on comments made by Hagerstown City Councilwoman Kelly Cromer concerning a supposed vendetta against her for looking into the city’s take-home vehicle program.

He wrote a memo to Hagerstown City Administrator Bruce Zimmerman asking that something be done.

From the Herald-Mail:

“This traffic stop was conducted on May 26, well before any contentious debate in reference to take-home vehicles.”

That’s not entirely correct. I remember reading about Councilwoman Cromer’s interest in the take-home vehicle program before May 26. In fact, I emailed both Councilwoman Cromer and Herald-Mail reporter Dan Dearth about this subject on May 19. Something I read in the article caught my attention:

In February, The Herald-Mail filed a public information request seeking the cost the city incurred to provide employees with vehicles for fiscal year 2006-07 and to date for fiscal year 2007-08. The city responded almost a month later, saying, “There is no document that satisfies your request.”

This didn’t sound right to me. I used to have a job where I was given a company car. One of the things I had to do was to keep a detailed record of the miles I drove each week. I had to keep track of both the miles I drove on company business and the miles I drove for personal reasons, such as driving back and forth from my home. These personal miles had to be kept track of so that a dollar value could be determined and then this dollar amount would be reported on my W-2 as taxable income.

The City of Hagerstown has to keep track of the cost of all personal mileage. Otherwise they would not be able to correctly report this figure to the IRS. That’s something they simply don’t have a choice in doing.

As far as vendettas are concerned, why did someone from the Hagerstown Police Department leak the story about the traffic stop to the Herald-Mail three weeks after it happened? If Police Chief Arthur Smith doesn’t appreciate what Councilwoman Cromer is saying about one of his officers, maybe his police department shouldn’t have leaked the story to the newspaper.