Lower Merion’s police union passed a unanimous vote of no confidence in its chief

The union representing the Lower Merion Police Department on Tuesday passed a unanimous vote of no confidence against the township’s police chief and is calling for his removal, officials announced Wednesday.

Joe Braun, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 28, said the vote against Superintendent Michael McGrath was supported by all 73 of the union’s active-duty members, which includes patrol officers and sergeants. Braun planned to address the township council at its scheduled meeting Wednesday evening.

“There are a lot of disgruntled police officers, and a 73-0 vote is extremely damning,” Braun said. “It sends a huge message to the superintendent, his command staff, and the commissioners, and especially the public.”

McGrath, a 40-year veteran of Lower Merion who has served as its commanding officer since 2009, has about 18 months left on his contract, according to Braun. Neither McGrath nor Township Manager Ernie McNeely returned requests for comment Wednesday about the allegations by the union’s members.

Tensions have been simmering in the suburban department since July, when a high-ranking lieutenant admitted to providing test answers to a cadet candidate who passed the oral portion of the officer’s exam with unusually high accuracy. After being questioned by command staff, that lieutenant admitted to “overly coaching” the recruit, who was then disqualified from becoming an officer.

McGrath suspended the lieutenant for only three days, a punishment that Braun and the union members felt was unfairly lenient — they believe that had any of them been caught cheating or being dishonest, they would have been fired immediately.

“If you don’t have integrity as a police officer, you should not carry a badge and a gun, and I think anyone in society can agree with that,” Braun said. “In Lower Merion, we like to hold ourselves to a higher standard. But with command staff, that standard doesn’t exist.”

Several active-duty officers told The Inquirer in recent weeks that that decision poisoned morale in the small department. It reinforced the suspicion they had long held that McGrath was playing favorites, protecting command staff members loyal to him.

“If McGrath takes a shine to you, you’re golden,” said a 20-year veteran of the department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation by McGrath and township officials. “It’s incestuous, the way they promote from within. There are never any new ideas.”

At an August meeting of the department’s Civil Service Board — the entity that oversees testing for police cadet candidates — McGrath addressed a group of 11 union members who worried that the entire pool of cadet candidates had been tainted by what they called “the cheating scandal.”

The superintendent pushed back against the assertion that the lieutenant cheated and said that the candidate in question didn’t “ace the test,” as some union members asserted.

McGrath said he felt the punishment was appropriate for the lieutenant, who admitted what he had done when confronted.

The testing company retained by the township has safeguards in place to ensure that test scores aren’t tampered with, according to McGrath, and it had not identified “any abnormalities” in any of the 17 other recruits who took the test this summer. He noted that those candidates still had other tests to pass before becoming officers, including background checks and polygraph testing.

And while McGrath said it’s acceptable for experienced officers to provide some coaching to cadet candidates, he called the “overcoaching” by the lieutenant “the stupidest thing [he had] ever seen.”

Still, the explanation did little to sway the union members present, who said they feared the appearance of leniency would harm public perception of the department.

“This lieutenant has destroyed the integrity of the department. He’s shaken it to its core,” Sgt. Tom Luke told McGrath at the meeting. “I don’t know how you fix that, other than to say ‘You’re done, you’re fired.’”

Other former and current Lower Merion officers who spoke with The Inquirer said problems with morale are nothing new. In the last few years, multiple officers — including some sergeants and a lieutenant — retired early, losing out on thousands of dollars, according to Braun.

Another sergeant was forced to retire earlier this year, officers told The Inquirer, over allegations that he used discriminatory language in front of a Latino officer.

McGrath and the department have been the subject of several lawsuits, most recently a federal discrimination suit filed in 2019 by former officer Jo Anne Pepitone. In her suit, Pepitone said the department was “infested with a culture of accepted sexually harassing and gender discriminatory conduct.” McGrath, she said, “turned a blind eye” to that conduct, which included an officer sending her nude photos and the spread of false rumors that she was having a sexual relationship with her supervisor.

Pepitone settled the lawsuit in October 2020, according to court records.

In the spring of 2020, Lower Merion’s administration announced that a township-wide employee survey would commence. Multiple officers said they were eager to voice their complaints about the culture in the department under McGrath.

Braun said the results of the surveys, which have never been released publicly, were “catastrophic” and overwhelmingly negative.

Despite this feedback, Braun and other officers said, no substantive changes have been made to the department.

“Now everyone is p—ed off, but who do we go to?” said one officer. “We can’t go to the superintendent, because nothing gets done. It’s the same issues over and over.”