Nate Monroe: Records allege lax compliance, sexist atmosphere in Inspector General's Office

An employee whose resignation prompted an investigation into the Jacksonville Office of Inspector General described for city attorneys and Human Rights Commission staffers a flippant, boys club-like environment that could jeopardize compliance with law-enforcement accreditation standards, according to a series of documents that supported some of the conclusions investigators drew when writing a recent report on the office.

The documents, which the Office of General Counsel provided to the Times-Union in a records request, still offer a limited and largely one-sided view into the office overseen by Inspector General Matthew Lascell, who was hired last year and given a mandate to move the office beyond inter-office controversy that ultimately led to the resignation of his predecessor. But they also shed more light on some of the vaguer portions of a report by city lawyers and the Human Rights Commission that found the employee who resigned in the fall was "treated differently from other employees on the basis of her gender."

Lascell, in a statement, said he would address the content of the report, and the allegations from the former employee, at the next meeting of the city's IG oversight committee, which is tentatively scheduled for March 30.

"The OIG follows (Commission for Florida Law Enforcement Accreditation) Standards and will be reaccredited" this summer, he said.

Such accreditation standards, which provide guidelines intended to ensure investigations are fair and thorough, are considered crucial to maintaining the agency's credibility with the public and among other investigative agencies. The former employee described situations in which her direct supervisor, the director of investigations, was either ignorant of those standards or frequently questioned their use. Instead, she accused the office, under Lascell, of "wish(ing) to detach the office’s accountability from" those standards, according to a word document she wrote and provided to city attorneys, summarizing her experiences in the office.

The records the Office of General Counsel provided the newspaper included that seven-page document, as well as images of text messages between the employee and her colleagues about encounters she had with others. City attorneys also interviewed IG employees — interviews they said often corroborated the former employee's accusations — but those interviews were not recorded; the documents provided shed no light on what was said in the course of those interviews.

The former employee, who was an IG investigator, had no comment.

The investigation into the IG's office — which is itself charged with investigating allegations of waste, fraud and abuse within City Hall — began in the fall after the former employee resigned. She wrote an email to Lascell alleging she had suffered "sexual harassment, discrimination, bullying and retaliation" during her time there. Ellen Schmitt, chair of the IG oversight committee, has said she was blind-copied on that email and brought it to the full body to consider how to handle it. The group asked the Office of General Counsel to investigate the allegations, the second time since late 2021 city attorneys have scrutinized the internal workings of the office.

In a report last month, city lawyers and the Human Rights Commission concluded that a supervisor's treatment of the former investigator amounted to a violation of city policy that bans workplace harassment and discrimination. They also concluded that Lascell's failure to report that behavior to human resources was also a violation of policy.

But the report also said the behavior was not so "severe and pervasive" that it created legal liability for the city. And attorneys also said there was not "conclusive evidence" the employee faced "retaliation" and "insufficient evidence" of "intentional bullying" — two other allegations the employee leveled in her letter — even though they found corroboration in the records she provided and interviews they conducted with other IG employees of some of her recollections.

Lascell had previously told the oversight committee that he was unimpressed with the office's track record over the past several years and acknowledged he was looking to "shake things up a little bit."

He characterized some of the employees who had left after he took over as "folks who are vestiges of the old and who aren't happy with the new direction in terms of ... we're doing things differently."

"We're expecting folks to come in, we're expecting folks to do their jobs and to do it aggressively. To have impact and have results," he said.

To be impactful, Lascell told the committee, "you have to ruffle feathers."

That was not the interpretation shared by the former employee, whose recollections during her time under Lascell had echoes of his comments to the committee — though with a decidedly more negative interpretation of how business was being done. "You cant say I wasn’t on board with new way, if you were telling us one things [sic] and leadership something else," she wrote.

She said her supervisor frequently made inappropriate comments ranging from observations about her body to sharing opinions about political and social issues, like "unsolicited comments about Crack and Black people being worse than white people and cocaine," according to the document she provided OGC.

She described her supervisor as cocksure — degrading the work of the office's employees — "yet did not himself know how to do the work." That tone, she alleged, sometimes included a tendency to treat women differently, specifically noting an alleged rule her supervisor had that he would not close the door to his office when a woman was inside.

She also said she was reminded about the role she played in the late 2021 investigation into Lisa Green, Lascell's predecessor, who resigned under pressure after city attorneys concluded she had engaged in a raft of inappropriate behavior toward colleagues and had sloppily managed the office. That investigation was the result of multiple internal whistleblowers — an official legal status that grants the complainant anonymity.

"Everyone knows who the whistleblowers were," she quoted one employee loyal to Lascell as having said.

City attorneys wrote in their report that they encountered "several other issues" raised by current and former inspector general employees, including the way public-records requests are handled, office morale, and "management's discussion with and questioning of its employees regarding this investigation." The former employee included problems with the way public records were being handled in her seven-page writeup but didn't detail any specific episodes, leaving that portion of the report mysterious.

City General Counsel Jason Teal said in an email response to a question about those "other issues" that they were things outside the scope of what the committee had asked attorneys to investigate. The intent, he said, was "generally informing the Committee of the existence of those other areas of concern, but (leaving) it up to the Committee whether they wanted to pursue the new matters."

The oversight committee — formally called the Inspector General Selection and Retention Committee — is composed of officials from the Mayor's Office, City Council, state attorney, public defender, the chief judge of the 4th Judicial Circuit and the citizen chairs of the ethics and TRUE commission, a financial advisory group.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Nate Monroe: Records reveal details about Jacksonville IG probe