Gerth: Here’s how much LMPD Chief Gwinn-Villaroel is being paid to do nothing

By the end of the day Friday, suspended Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel had earned $1,305.62 since Mayor Craig Greenberg announced he had sent her home with pay the middle of last week.

When other hard-at-work city employees show up Monday morning, Gwinn-Villaroel will have already banked $2,611.24 — as much as some workers make in a month.

If Greenberg still hasn’t done his duty and fired Gwinn-Villaroel by the end of this month, the city will have paid her $11,750.58 for doing nothing as she awaits the verdict of an investigation into her actions caught on an audio recording.

What she said on that audio recording, first aired by WAVE-TV, really was horrendous. The Courier Journal has not independently verified the recording but Greenberg was confident in its authenticity enough to suspend his chief.

Gwinn-Villaroel asked in the recording, “I’m going to ask, is there anybody within this command staff or executive staff you can’t work with?”

When she got around to Major Shannon Lauder, Lauder said, “I cannot work with Major (Brian) Kuriger. He has sexually harassed me and attacked me, and I cannot work with him.”

She didn’t go into detail.

What happened next was even more shocking than Lauder’s claims; Gwinn-Villaroel announced that she was promoting Kuriger to the rank of lieutenant colonel and then she implied if anybody on the staff had a problem with that, well just like in a bad television show, they should turn in their gun and badge.

“I will not have a major that cannot get along and support another major because y’all had an issue,” Gwinn-Villaroel said.

“That is over. And if you can’t do that, turn in your stuff to me today because these troops out here deserve people who can be professional at all times and show up and be present. But if you cannot support me as your chief, if you’ve got a problem with me, turn in your stuff today. I’m giving everybody (until) 5 p.m. today.”

There was no indication as to whether Lauder had made these claims before or if Gwinn-Villaroel knew about them. And Lauder didn’t give any details.

But there is absolutely no way Gwinn-Villaroel can continue leading the department — a department that has 134 female officers, comprising 12.8% of the 1,045-member force — after dismissing claims of sexual harassment and what sounded like an allegation of sexual assault so casually.

There is no way she can continue leading a department when she essentially tells a woman under her command who has made such an allegation that she just needs to get over it or quit her job.

This is stuff that happened in the 1960s and 1970s when women were afraid to come forward when they were groped, kissed and otherwise assaulted at work.

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“People knew it happened; it was just thought of as part of the normal course of events that you had to deal with as a working woman,” Emily Martin, the general counsel and vice president for workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, told VOX as the “Me Too” movement got underway.

Also, Gwinn-Villaroel’s decision to threaten Lauder in front of the rest of her command staff is just poor leadership — the kind of poor leadership that makes those in her chain of command unlikely or unwilling to speak up.

And left to her own devices, we know Gwinn-Villaroel isn’t likely to make the best decision. After all, she was once suspended by the Atlanta Police Department after she rifled through a colleague’s desk to find a drug investigation file implicating her brother-in-law and then lied repeatedly about it.

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Now, at a time that the city may be making cuts to its community garden program, its sister cities program and various other city programs because of budget problems, Louisville finds itself on the hook for not only Gwinn-Villaroel’s hefty salary — $238,277 per year, according to the city’s database — but also the tens of thousands of dollars it will likely cost for former FBI agent David Beyer to investigate it and whatever payout the city ends up making to Lauder because of the damage Gwinn-Villaroel has done to her career.

Greenberg ran for office as a businessman.

He ought to govern like one, at least in this situation.

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No business can survive like this, with its CEO hemming and hawing while paying a top executive to sit at home and do nothing all the while we know that the ultimate decision will be to fire her.

And the ultimate decision has to be the option Gwinn-Villaroel gave Lauder.

“Turn in your stuff … today because these troops out here deserve people who can be professional at all times and show up and be present.”

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Louisville police chief must be fired. We're wasting money on her