Foreshadowing
On April 4, 2008, Venice Police officer Michael Frassetti was on duty and responding to a reported incident of domestic violence. The call for help was placed by a Michelle Harpster of the 200 block of Harbor Drive. Harpster claimed her neighbor had threatened her with a handgun.

When Frassetti arrived, the situation had already cooled down. Other patrol cars arrived almost immediately as backup, as it is a well-documented fact that the most dangerous calls that police ever respond to are domestic violence disputes. In this case, the alleged gun-toting neighbor had disappeared, nobody else had seen the incident, Harpster reportedly did not want to push for an arrest and appeared to be backing off from her original story. With the evidence against this missing neighbor shaky at best, Frassetti determined that no arrest was imminent or needed at this time.

While at the scene, Frassetti's supervisor, Lieutenant Mike Rose, advised Frassetti that since Frassetti was the first to respond, the junior officer would be responsible for compiling and writing the incident report. Frassetti would later state that he had prepared, signed, and filed the electronic OIR (offence incident report) from the laptop mounted in his assigned police vehicle. That, as far as Frassetti knew, was the end of that.

But it wasn't. That evening would mark the inauspicious beginning of a dark and sinister nightmare that would find the young police officer fighting for both his career and his good name.

A bit of background
Frassetti had been a five year veteran of the NYPD when he applied for and was subsequently hired by the Venice Police Department. He initially started work at VPD in February of 2007. He was doing very well in his new job when family problems from up north forced him to resign eight months later, in October, in order to take care of family obligations.

While I still don't know the full details of that part of Frassetti's life, what I do know is that the problems that forced him to return to the New York/New Jersey area were somehow resolved in surprisingly short order. By January of 2008, Frassetti suddenly found himself free to continue on with life as usual. To that end, Frassetti inquired if it might at all be possible to be rehired by the Venice Police Department. So eager was the VPD to rehire him that his first day back on the force in Venice was January 25, 2008.

That is significant for a very good reason: in January of 2008, the VPD already had a pretty good day-to-day look at Frassetti as an employment candidate from his prior eight-month stint with the department. Even though it had only been three months since he had resigned, they were under no obligation to rehire him. If there had been any signs of negative baggage, they would not have. By all accounts, the department was thrilled to have him back, a sharp contrast to statements that departmental officials would make about Frassetti just a few months later in the aftermath of firing him.

Joshua Rose
At around 1:00 PM on May 28, 2008, Police Chief Julie Williams spotted a red '87 Chevy Camaro driving recklessly over the Venice Avenue bridge, heading for the island portion of Venice. Without knowing who the driver of the Camaro was, she radioed for an intercept. Frassetti indicated by radio that he would respond, and he subsequently caught up with the Camaro in the 100 block of The Esplanade. Several other officers arrived, including Captain Tom McNulty, but Frassetti already had the driver out of the car and answering questions about the alcohol that Frassetti smelled on the driver's breath.

The driver, apparently drunk, was 28-year-old Joshua Rose. Although Rose was well known to officers at the VPD, Frassetti was still a new kid in town and had no idea who he was dealing with. According to one witness account given verbally to me, Rose was wasting no time in letting Frassetti know what a terrible mistake the officer was about to make, although Frassetti was still apparently not getting the full picture yet. Meanwhile, Frassetti found a set of brass knuckles hidden under some clothes on the front seat of the car.

Rose admitted to drinking one 16 oz. beer and he subsequently failed the obligatory coordination tests. Rose would later refuse to give a breath sample at the jail, asking "Why should I? I already failed the other tests."

What Frassetti didn't know: Joshua Rose, the young man he was about to arrest for drunk driving and carrying a concealed weapon (full arrest report as written by Frassetti), was a blood relative of Frassetti's direct supervisor, Lt. Mike Rose (Joshua is either Lt. Mike Rose's nephew or cousin. In the later arbitration hearing testimony and in legal filings, Joshua would be referred to, possibly mistakenly, as Mike Rose's nephew. When asked for clarification by me, Mike Rose refused to comment. Chief Williams stated to me that the relationship between the two men is that of cousins, not uncle/nephew).

Note the dates here -- the Harpster incident takes place on April 4, 2008. Joshua Rose is arrested by Frassetti on May 28, 2008, almost two months later. This will become very important later.

One other thing to consider before final boarding onto this insane roller coaster: According to testimony at Frassetti's arbitration hearing as given by both officers and supervisors, if there are any problems with an officer's electronic incident and arrest reports, the officer is usually approached within a day or two by his supervisor and advised of the problem, thus giving the officer a chance to resolve the issue with no reprisal or anything of the sort, and the later testimony indicated a plethora of problems that officers had encountered in dealing with the department's quirky and temperamental computer system. 

Strangely, that never happened with Frassetti regarding the Harpster incident from April 4. Somehow, the entire incident report had disappeared, but nobody ever told Frassetti that until after Frassetti had arrested Joshua Rose on May 28. On June 4, 2008, exactly two months after the Harpster incident and exactly one week after the arrest of Joshua Rose, Frassetti was interviewed for the first time about the missing Harpster report by...

(wait for it... wait for it...)

his supervisor, Lt. Mike Rose.

Also on June 4, Frassetti was told for the first time that he was the subject of an internal affairs investigation (referred to as an IAI in subsequent official paperwork), and had been since May 14. Subsequent paperwork indicates that Mike Rose wrote an initial complaint accusing Frassetti of deliberate destruction of departmental electronic documents, and that initial complaint was dated May 14.

So everything is on the up and up, right?
If true, the May 14 date would put the beginning of the internal affairs investigation as having started 14 days before the arrest of Joshua Rose, which is all well and good.

So that's all kosher, right? Well, maybe not. Two items of note are extremely problematic when looking at the department's version of the official timeline of events.

First, per police employee guidelines and union contracts, when an officer is undergoing an internal affairs investigation, he is supposed to be notified immediately. Frassetti didn't know about the IAI (internal affairs investigation) until his supervisor, Mike Rose, notified him about it on June 4, a week after Frassetti had arrested that same supervisor's nephew/cousin/whatever. That, in turn, means that the department had engaged in an internal affairs investigation for three weeks prior to notifying Frassetti. That's a pretty big no-no, but not necessarily an unprecedented one as I know of at least one other internal investigation where the department committed the same error.

But that pales in comparison to my second problem in following the police department's logic. The really big whisper that keeps nagging at me and at everyone else that has taken a wandering look at this case: the motives, not only of Frassetti for supposedly destroying an otherwise innocuous incident report, but the department's motive for launching an internal affairs investigation over what should have been perceived as just another (of many) routine electronic document SNAFU's.

This is where things just don't add up, and not just for me or Frassetti's fellow officers that were rooting for him to win this case: even attorney Edwin Ford, the arbitrator in this case, wrote in his final judgment that the department's investigation was "overly zealous" and "seriously flawed."

Why was Frassetti THE ONLY PERSON EVER to undergo an internal affairs investigation over a missing report at the VPD, especially when, by all accounts, it was well known that this was anything but a unique problem? According to extensive anecdotal testimony from over a half dozen officers at Frassetti's arbitration hearing, the department's computer system can be capricious and arbitrary at best in its selective retention of data, and cantankerous and insane at worst. While whole reports had rarely disappeared in their entirety, many had become electronically garbled on numerous occasions, sometimes with hilarious results.

Officer Betty Camp: Big Brother ate my police report
For example: Officer Betty Camp testified that a day or so after initially filing an electronic arrest report, she went back in to the report to modify it, only to discover that her entire prose narrative had disappeared and had been replaced by the text from another report about a different offender that a different officer had filed sometime prior to Camp filing her report. Incredibly, Bob Anderson downplayed this and other evidentiary examples of data retention failures as immaterial to Frassetti's defense that the computer system basically ate his homework.

In fact, if you look carefully at the arrest report of Joshua Rose that Frassetti authored and filed electronically, you can see on page 7 (circles and question marks inserted by me for emphasis) where the VPD's computer system arbitrarily inserted information from a prior criminal case against a different defendant with a different case number, as filed by a different VPD officer. That is almost the exact same problem as described by Betty Camp in her testimony and later poo-pooed by City Attorney Bob Anderson as immaterial to Frassetti's situation.

It is worth noting here that I obtained Joshua Rose's arrest report not from the police department but from the Clerk of Court's electronic files (State vs. Joshua Rose) where a copy still resides, so this was not an alteration that either I or any police officer could have made in order to provide an ironic anecdotal example to support Frassetti.

Hell, even Police Chief Williams testified that the department's computer system was problematic, but despite that seeming inconsistency in her stance that the system could not possibly allow anything to go wrong, she was still fiercely adamant that Frassetti had committed willful destruction of electronic data and then lied about it to cover it up.

The ultimate proof, according to Williams: Mike Deneweth, from our city's stellar IT team (this is the same moronic bunch that couldn't figure out how to back up city council emails until after a lawsuit was filed against the city), stated on the first day of testimony that he could prove from the logs that Frassetti had used his department-issued password to log in to the department's computer system at a later date and altered the Harpster report by deleting data from most or all of the data fields.

Well damn. That's it, then -- bang the gavel and close the books, this buggerer with a badge is definitely guilty. Hang the bastard. No need to look any further.

But...

Tonight, the part of Perry Mason will be played by Nevin Weiner
Under cross examination on the second day, Deneweth admitted that security of the police department's password protection scheme, as set up by the city's crack IT perfessionals, was virtually non-existent. Supervisors and other employees (both civilian and police) had access to each others' user names and passwords due to a predictable pattern employed by the IT department in assigning user names and passwords. Anyone who knew the pattern (and, according to testimony provided by other police officers, that would be all city employees) would have known Frassetti's password simply by knowing his name and his badge number.

By the time that Frassetti's attorney, Nevin Weiner, was done with Deneweth, a flustered Deneweth was still insistent that Frassetti was guilty and that the department's computer system was perfect, this after admitting under oath that he couldn't really prove that Frassetti had done anything wrong at all. In fact, all  Deneweth could really nail down was that someone (maybe Frassetti, maybe not) had used Frassetti's password and had altered the file; but that due to the insecure nature of the passwords, that could have been any other officer or even a civilian employee.

The department's case against Frassetti was still possibly winnable right up until the cross-examination of the department's IT guru, Michael Deneweth. Deneweth's panicky backpedaling from his own prior testimony was easily the moment that this Titanic made contact with the iceberg. This case was over, it was all up to time and gravity now. It probably didn't help that during Deneweth's testimony, Chief Williams let out an audible groan and City Attorney Bob Anderson's eyes about popped out of his head. It was immediately apparent to me that Anderson had either overlooked this little tidbit of information or that Williams had kind of accidentally failed to tell him about it.

Ya know what you call that kind of testimony when it is elicited by a defense attorney during cross-examination? Cuz you've seen it in every single episode of Perry Mason and Matlock, and probably most of the episodes in Murder She Wrote... come to think of it, it happens a lot in Scooby Doo as well. Answer: Ya call it the exact syllable that comes out of your mouth when the scriptwriters and actors unveil the lie -- ya call it an "Oooooooops!!!!!" In this case, a monstrously-sized one.

One other thing that popped out of Chief Williams pirated copy of Pandora's Box that Deneweth opened -- according to Deneweth's logs, nobody could place Frassetti as being near his computer when the alleged alterations took place.

Add that to the fact that nobody could come up with any kind of believable motive as to why Frassetti would want to destroy an incident report about a possible domestic smackdown where nobody was arrested and no arrest was imminent, and one has to start asking -- was this whole thing a fit-up?