Strategic Copying and Pasting by LPD Chief Chris Jones

[XLFD]

Where do these police chief authors get their ideas?  Rather appropriately, Chief Christopher Jones has scheduled a 6PM meeting on Monday, April Fool's Day, to allow the public to hear about and discuss the Ludington Police Department's (LPD's) strategic plan.  They announced this on Thursday with the LPD's Facebook page, without showing the strategic plan they wanted to discuss.  The City's Facebook page would share the LPD's post, again without showing the plan, but as they allow for comments thereon, I was able to provide that link.

The LPD, made aware of the omission, would re-post a March 5th offering on their page on Friday which they said linked to the plan, but what both of them did was send you to the city's LPD page on their website, which you had to look around a bit to find the plan.  

Chief Jones (seen above) has mentioned the LPD's strategic plan at the two March meetings with a certain amount of pride.  The city's attempt to create its own strategic plan has led to serious allegations of competitive bidding violations and favoritism against city leaders, who deny wrongdoing even when the facts show otherwise. 

Chief Jones has his own problems; along with City Attorney Ross Hammersley, he is being investigated by the state for credible charges of public extortion, by creating a FOIA fee estimation worksheet that was never approved by the city council and among other things, tried to charge $25 for a 31 second phone call overheard on body cam.  

Provided you can find the link in the city's document center, you are led to the first page of 19 that is the cover page of their strategic plan, but when you look at the title of the page it says you are looking at the Durham Police 2020 strategic plan, as seen below:

I wouldn't be much of an investigative reporter if I didn't take a look at the actual Durham (NC) Police 2020 strategic plan and see how it compares to Chief Jones' pride and joy that he's going to unveil to all on All Fool's Day.  The cover page has different pictures, but the format is totally the same and the language is completely the same, except where Jones has replaced "Dunham Police" with "Ludington Police Department", because some might consider it misappropriating or plagiarism otherwise.  As seen in the side-by-side pictures (Dunham's pages will be on the left, LPD's on the right from here on).  

Very clever, chief!  Jones continues to replace DPD with LPD throughout the rest of the plan, and New Jersey with Michigan when required.  The first page shows that the chief likes the original format and font so much that he kept them for his "own" effort.  He also seems to like the headings and words used too, as he rarely changes them or their order over the next 18 pages:

But not everything was copied word-for-word, he did use the existing mission and value statement that LPD has, as seen on the next page:

But you don't see a lot of originality or Ludington-specific parts of the plan over the 19 pages, which not-too-surprisingly is the same amount of pages Dunham PD had, where both finished thusly:

When about 90% of your police department's strategic plan is pirated from a North Carolina PD's plan, you think you might acknowledge the source of your inspiration.  In the news business and in academia, it's called citing your source of information, so you don't take credit for the hard work of others and run into problems if the source claims proprietary rights over what you 'borrowed'.  But you don't see any acknowledgment here, probably because it wasn't mentioned in the original.

Last month, Chief Jones used his office to engage in public extortion, trying to take a lot more money than was legally permitted by city policy by creating his own fee schedule.  This month, Chief Jones is dabbling in stealing intellectual property without authority or citation.  Sounds like the chief is acting more and more like something else that rhymes with "chief".

[Willy]

I guess those in power have not figured out your secret X. And that  is, YOU DO YOUR RESEARCH! The people in charge go about their business thinking their misdeeds will either never be found out or that you won't be checking to make sure that they are doing their jobs honestly and fairly. This seems to be the mindset of many Mason County politicians. It's probably standard procedure every where. We are lucky because you are valiantly trying to keep these people honest. It seems to be an endless task. It would be so much easier and good for the public if our officials just did the right thing and stopped acting like overlords. Thanks for all your doing.

https://ludingtoncitizen.ning.com/photo/corruption-pie?context=user

[XLFD]

Shhh!  You'll give away my secret.  

The good thing about plagiarizing a strategic plan from a city of 300,000 people living near the Atlantic Ocean is that we save around $20K in hiring some outside consultant to probably do the same thing.  Yet, I wouldn't be surprised that the couple hours the LPD spent editing the Durham plan to make it theirs left the 'author' a more than reasonable piece of compensation. 

The bad thing with a plagiarized plan is that it won't really mean anything.  It's like using Wikipedia and/or A.I. to write your doctoral thesis.  It may look and read good, but you won't really have any command over what you've just had the computer do for you. 

[XLFD]

I went to the meeting tonight at city hall.  Police Chief Jones took a couple of minutes at the start of the meeting to talk about his collaboration with the Durham (New Hampshire) PD to create Ludington's strategic plan.  The copies of the LPD plan given out to meeting attendees had this at the bottom of the last page:  "The plan was modeled after the Durham (NH) Police 2020 Strategic Plan, with their permission."  There is no attribution yet on the city website, and one would think that had he not been caught red-ink handed, that he would not have mentioned Durham this evening, giving himself and Captain Haveman the credit for the plan.

Of course, since the chief isn't known to be the best truth teller, I am checking out the 'collaboration' and the 'permission' with a FOIA request looking into correspondence and communications between the DPD and LPD administrators (prior to the publishing of this article).  I'm betting at this point that he will claim that all permissions given and collaborations were over the phone.  Don't erase your phone history, chief, because that's what I'll be looking for next.

[woodsman]

  And you thought no one reads your news articles..  

[Willy]

Is this city of Durham in New Jersey or NC. In your article you refer to replacing New Jersey with Michgian,
"Jones continues to replace DPD with LPD throughout the rest of the plan, and New Jersey with Michigan when required."

[XLFD]

It turned out I was in error, it was actually a different "N" state with two words, Durham, New Hampshire, with a population about twice the size of Ludington, rather than the large city in NC or the neighborhood of New Durham in NJ.  In reviewing the original plan, there was 5 references to the state I could find, but when it came to writing this article, I forgot the exact state:

[Willy]

Thanks for clearing that up.