Four police officers were grounded effective yesterday due to various issues, according to Department of Public Safety Commissioner Claudio K. Norita.<\/p>\n
Norita disclosed that these police officers were involved in traffic accidents, alleged non-payment of bar bills, and so forth.<\/p>\n
Being grounded means that these officers are assigned to non-sensitive assignments such as dispatchers or administrative work, he said.<\/p>\n
Norita said the grounded officers are prohibited from working overtime while the DPS Internal Affairs\u2019 investigations are still pending.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough these happened before I came in [at DPS] we are catching some of these discrepancies in the way things are being administered internally,\u201d said the official, who recently replaced former commissioner Rebecca Warfield.<\/p>\n
Norita said that, in the past, there were a lot of incidents where supervisors made their own decisions with respect to officers committing offenses. As a result, there were discrepancies in the way the cases were adjudicated.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why we are streamlining the process where Internal Affairs takes the lead and there are guidelines on how we serve the punishment. It\u2019s written guidelines that we have, the adverse action,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The commissioner disclosed that one of the grounded officers is Norbert Mettao, who was arrested, booked, and released for alleged disturbing the peace and non-payment of bills at Corner Pocket in Garapan.<\/p>\n
Norita said that if the Attorney General\u2019s Office charge Mettao, then DPS will suspend him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the AGO doesn\u2019t want to charge him, we will deal with him administratively,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Four police officers were grounded effective yesterday due to various issues, according to Department of Public Safety Commissioner Claudio K. Norita.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}