Blatant Disregard Of Reality
One of the bigger questions left hanging from the termination letter that the N.C. Department of Correction issued to Councilmember Warren Turner, who was fired this week from his job as a state probation officer, isn’t whether the action was justified, but rather why it hadn’t been taken earlier, or whether it would have been taken at all if Turner’s other problems hadn’t bubbled to the surface.
Tuner’s string of what DOC officials labeled “blatant disregard” of command directives and basic job responsibilities stretch back to May 2009 and includes 19 cases where Turner misrepresented home visits to check probationers under his watch, along with an additional 14 cases where Turner was out of contact for months at a time with offenders and failed to perform required drug screenings of them in a timely manner.
In one particularly damning case, Turner filed a report that stated he had made a face-to-face visit in March with an offender in Charlotte, when in fact the offender had the previous November moved to Maxton and in January had been charged there with communicating threats.
In another instance, Turner filed for 3.5 hours of overtime on April 27 for, according to the request he submitted, “seeing offenders and doing drug screenings” because the DOC “system went down.” Yet the very same day, during DOC hours, Turner and his attorneys conducted an interview with WBTV’s Steve Crump, while phone records show Turner made 31 phone calls unrelated to DOC business that consumed more than two hours.
Turner, in fact, spent a staggering amount of time talking on his city-issued cell phone, taking care of “secondary employment” business, while on the DOC clock. He was warned multiple times to not conduct city business during his DOC work hours, but spent hundreds of hours doing that just, gabbing away on his city-issued cell phone.
In one case, during a March 25 meeting, Turner was specifically instructed not to conduct city business during DOC hours. Within an hour of the meeting, Turner had made or received nearly two hours worth of calls on his city-issued phone.
The records released by the DOC also show that Turner had several meetings and coaching sessions where he was time and again reminded to not engage in city business during DOC hours and instructed to improve his offender case management.
Turner has previously said he plans to appeal his firing and his attorney had claimed the reasons that led to his client’s dismissal were “procedural BS.”
Turner might want to start looking for a new job – and a new lawyer.
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