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MANSFIELD — An apparent breakdown over losing his K-9 partner led the Richland County Sheriff’s Office to place deputy Raymond Jeff Frazier on paid administrative leave nearly five weeks ago, according to investigation records obtained Tuesday by the News Journal.

Frazier returned to duty June 4 per the psychologist’s approval, according to Maj. Dale Fortney.
Sheriff Steve Sheldon referred all questions to Fortney.
Beyond the breakdown detailed in the report, the News Journal became aware of an alleged incident that may have contributed to Frazier’s placement on paid administrative leave. That episode involved an alleged dispute between Frazier and a tow truck driver at a Mansfield towing company, but the incident was not included in the report, nor was it included in records sent to the News Journal in response to a Freedom of Information request.

In response to a direct question about the incident, Fortney said via a text message that he “thought (the incident) was mentioned” in the investigation report he sent earlier.

As of late Tuesday, Fortney did not respond to further inquiries about why information regarding that incident was not included or when the information would be available.
The information released Tuesday stated that after Frazier’s repeated claims that his K-9 German shepherd, Odin, was not performing its duties properly — namely the canine was not aggressive enough when pursuing suspects — the department decided May 14 that Odin should be transferred back to Sgt. James Sweat for remedial and advanced training.

Frazier was ordered to transfer all equipment, including his cruiser, to Sweat, with the understanding that the K-9 would either be returned to him once it was fit for patrol, or it would be assigned to the jail. It was unclear whether Frazier would receive a new dog if Odin was assigned to the jail, the report stated.

Since March, Frazier has been the only K-9 officer in the department. Frazier repeatedly worried he was never going to see Odin again and said that “if his dog was taken and not replaced, he would be looking for other employment,” according to the investigative report.

That’s when Frazier became upset, the report said.
As he walked out of the meeting room he said, “(Expletive) this and you guys, and if I can’t be in K-9 I’m going to find another job.”
According to the report, Frazier was later seen kicking several chairs in the Roll-Call Room, where he told Sgt. Brian Gunder “I can’t be here today, I will probably go out and do something to get myself in trouble.”
He submitted for a sick day. Gunder later saw Frazier “visibly emotional and crying” in his cruiser, according to the report.
The report also said Frazier made derogatory statements and accusations about other sheriff’s office personnel.
When Gunder asked him if he was going to be all right, Frazier responded, “I’m going to have to be, this place doesn’t give a (expletive) about you. I should have never come to work here.”
The next day, Frazier was placed on paid administrative leave and ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation based on his comments about his other personal problems.
Frazier was cleared to return to work June 4, but Odin remained in training.
Four days later, Frazier was issued an “Instruction of Caution” for “Unsatisfactory Work Performance and Failing to Maintain a Required Standard of Performance.”

This is the second time Frazier has been placed on paid administrative leave since he joined the sheriff’s office in 2001. He served eight days suspension for an “ASORT incident” in 2007.
When Frazier applied for a position with the sheriff’s office in 2001, he was not recommended. Frazier was considered “at high risk for future performance difficulty and at high risk for termination based on test results,” according to Lt. Robert Brown’s evaluation, included in Frazier’s personnel file obtained by the News Journal.
He was hired on as a road deputy the following month.
In the years since, Frazier has become a decorated member of the staff.
Exempting a near two-year period (2009 to 2011) where Fraizer was temporarily laid off, his personnel file holds at least 12 awards for “outstanding” or “exceptional” performance, including Officer of the Year in 2003 and Deputy of the Year and an Intelligence Award in 2007.
He also received the Citizen’s Service Award in 2010 for helping to resuscitate a fellow officer that went into cardiac arrest during a basic SWAT course.

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It is disheartening to see so many people making derogatory remarks about the Sheriff's Office and Deputy Frazier as well. Until you have stepped into the shoes of an officer, please don't comment on something that you don't understand. Officers are not superhuman! Until you can handle a rape case of a juvenile, see intense bodily trauma, handle a domestic with a child present, deal with a doper who is high with their three year old next to them... oh and all in eight hours... These men and women put their lives on the line every single day to protect you and afford the freedoms of speech that you use to target them.

I do know that there are a lot of positive changes taking place in the Sheriff's Office that do no't make the papers. I also know that (as a retired LE Officer) that loosing your partner (K9 or not) is a very difficult situation, especially for a K9 officer (as most dogs become part of the handlers family and live with the handler). Deputy Frazier (and all K9 handlers) spend/spent every day with their/his dog(s) training, working, and when off duty, playing together.

All I am asking is that you take a moment to ponder what it would be like to be in these men and women's shoes. You have no idea what it is like to wonder if you are going to go home at the end of your shift or if it will be your last watch. Have some compassion for the men and women who face your greatest fears every day. Look into your own life as to why you have such a dispassion for officers because many times people are involved with law enforcement not because of good but because someone has broken the law.

Behind every badge and gun is a man or woman who woke up this morning and put their pants on the same way you do.

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Dear Members of Congress,

We write to express our concern about recent reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, and acknowledged by the Obama Administration, which reveal secret spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States.

The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments. As reported, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.

Leaked reports also published by the Guardian and confirmed by the Administration reveal that the NSA is also abusing a controversial section of the PATRIOT Act to collect the call records of millions of Verizon customers. The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other "identifying information" for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.

This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens' right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that protect their right to privacy.

We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA's and the FBI's data collection programs. We call on Congress to immediately and publicly:

Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;
Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

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Rand Paul’s misguided case against the NSA
By Charles Lane, Published: June 10

The bane of Big Government, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is inviting Americans to join him in a class-action lawsuit to stop what he says are unconstitutional invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency. “I’m going to be seeing if I can challenge this at the Supreme Court level,” he declared Sunday on Fox News.

Who would win Paul and 10 Million Citizens v. NSA? Paul’s first problem would be a lack of standing to sue in federal court. It’s not enough to claim that the government is threatening your rights; applicable precedent says you have to show a “concrete and particularized” violation of those rights or, at least, an imminent one.

A few months ago the Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit by lawyers, journalists and human rights activists seeking to strike down the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the NSA conducts data-collection programs — including, we now know, PRISM. These plaintiffs called the NSA’s activities a “dragnet,” much as Paul likens them to one of King George III’s general warrants.

In a 5 to 4 decision, the justices dismissed the complaint as “a speculative chain of possibilities.” The plaintiffs in that case, Clapper v. Amnesty International, were protesting surveillance of potential conversations with people overseas, whereas Paul says his focus is all-American communications. That might make a difference — but at a minimum, this brand-new precedent cuts against Paul.

Nor do things look promising on substance. The government needs a court-issued warrant, based on probable cause, to listen in on phone calls. Consistent with that, the 2008 FISA amendments say that the government has to get a warrant if it wants to query one of its digital databases and examine the content of an American communication.

But since the 1979 ruling in Smith v. Maryland it has been well settled that the government does not need a warrant to look at phone records — information about, say, the duration and direction of calls that companies routinely gather from their customers, who therefore have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

To the extent that the NSA is gathering only “metadata” about people’s phone calls and their activities on social media, Smith v. Maryland is on the government’s side.

True, the FISA court works in secret — not ideal for a purist civil libertarian. But remember that the court was established as a remedy for the unchecked executive-branch snooping of the 1960s and 1970s, and that it was further empowered under the 2008 amendments to remedy perceived excesses of the George W. Bush administration.

Metadata and private content travel together on the Internet, so it’s technically easy to look at the latter after accumulating the former. But the 2008 statute requires the government to take steps — known as “minimization” — to limit warrantless access to private data.

Maybe those procedures are routinely violated. Yet for all his claimed knowledge of wrongdoing, leaker Edward Snowden has yet to specify a single such instance.

Paul’s best argument would be that the Obama administration stretched the meaning of the 2008 FISA amendments when it sought, and obtained, a FISA court order requiring Verizon to turn over phone records so that the government could use them to create a searchable (with a warrant) database.

As Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney argue in the New Republic, this might be more than Congress intended when it authorized the government to seek “tangible things” that are certifiably “relevant” to a national security investigation.

Still, it would be of significance at the Supreme Court that the administration persuaded a federal judge to accept its reading of the statute and that at least some members of Congress acquiesced as well.

In short, Paul would be asking the justices not only to revise decades of constitutional doctrine but also to second-guess FISA court orders and the will of Congress. That would be a tall order since, as Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote in the Steel Seizure Case of 1952, the executive branch’s authority is “at its maximum” when it acts according to duly enacted statute.

Paul should reread Jackson’s opinion, written just after the United States had defeated Nazism and was preparing to confront another global threat, Soviet communism.

What he’ll find are the reflections of a deeply experienced lover of liberty who understood that the Constitution was not, as he put it elsewhere, “a suicide pact.”

It ordains both individual freedom and collective safety — and hence a democratic process, subject to judicial review, through which Americans and their representatives decide how much liberty, if any, to trade for protection against terrorism and other threats.

Jackson’s morally serious words remind us that it’s much harder to make such choices, and be held accountable for them, than it is to sit in the back benches of the Senate and criticize.

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