Police union leader John McNesby blasts Controller Rebecca Rhynhart over critical Police Department audit

Philadelphia police union leader John McNesby on Wednesday attacked City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart over her office’s critical audit of the Police Department, saying she sought to make the police look bad to advance her expected run in next year’s mayoral election.

“According to this report, the Police Department does nothing right. I mean nothing,” McNesby said at a Wednesday morning news conference at the Northeast Philadelphia headquarters of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5. “I understand the person who’s the author, who holds responsibility for this report, is looking to run for mayor, and that’s great. If you want to run for mayor, we wish you luck, but don’t do it on the backs of hardworking, overworked police officers in the city of Philadelphia.”

» READ MORE: Philly Police Dept. has inconsistent strategies, slow response times, and outdated systems, city controller says

Rhynhart’s report identified significant shortcomings throughout the department, including lax evaluations of its crime-reduction strategies, major staffing shortfalls, haphazard deployment, outdated technology, and widespread use of sworn officers to perform administrative tasks.

Issues identified in the report have contributed to outcomes like a low homicide clearance rate and slow 911 response times that are worse in Black and brown neighborhoods, Rhynhart’s office found.

“It’s not the Police Department’s fault. We’re out there doing our job, and doing it very good over the last few years,” McNesby said.

He also criticized Rhynhart for her office’s findings over the racial disparities in police response times, saying she was “trying to make it a racial issue.”

“That’s insane,” he said. “We don’t answer calls based on whether anyone’s white, Black, Asian, Italian, Irish — it doesn’t matter. We answer calls in the order in which they were received.”

» READ MORE: Philadelphia police response times have gotten 4 minutes longer, about 20% worse

Rhynhart spokesperson Jolene Nieves Byzon said the report “shows that districts with higher populations of Black and Brown residents have 911 response times that are twice as slow as districts with the highest white populations.”

“That is a fact,” Nieves Byzon wrote in a statement. “It was not disputed by the Philadelphia Police Department.”

She added that the report “makes it abundantly clear that there are systematic issues at the police department that need to be addressed.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. McNesby would rather politicize an issue instead of address its root cause,” Nieves Byzon said.

McNesby on Wednesday also addressed for the first time the controversy over abuse in the generous Heart and Lung disability benefit program, which has allowed hundreds of officers to get paid tax-free while they say they are too hurt to work.

An Inquirer investigation, “MIA: Crisis in the Ranks,” found that some officers have held down second jobs, or started businesses, while they collected the benefit, in violation of police policy.

» READ MORE: More than 650 Philly cops say they’re too hurt to work. But some are holding down second jobs.

The Inquirer also revealed in the ongoing investigation that 11% of officers were classified as “injured on duty,” a vastly higher rate than other cities, such as Chicago (3.3%) and Portland, Ore. (1.9%).

The union has played a critical role in the alleged abuse over the program — including selecting questionable doctors who have signed off on officers receiving the benefit — and McNesby had previously avoided answering questions.

Rhynhart’s report found that 572 Philadelphia police officers were off the job, and that the program lacked proper oversight. Further, the number of officers who have missed more than a year’s worth of work due to a single injury has skyrocketed, from just 10 during the 2017 fiscal year, to 124 during the 2021 fiscal year.

McNesby said 500 officers were currently off duty as of Wednesday morning. He placed much of the blame on the city but said the union had problems as well.

Some were addressed in the FOP’s most recent contract with the city, he said. “We made arrangements to have Heart and Lung only covered for people taking police action, not somebody sitting in a room and bumps their elbow on a cabinet — that’s not going to take place anymore,“ he said.

“We need to get those cops back to work, and we’re willing to sit down starting this afternoon and put some of them back to work,” he said. “Not all 500. There might be maybe 10% of that — I’m guessing, roughly — that can go back to work immediately. But the process is flawed on their end. Not to say we don’t have some issues on our end.”

» READ MORE: Code Blue: The Philadelphia police union repeatedly recruited disability doctors with questionable practices

Staff writers David Gambacorta and Anna Orso contributed to this article.