Connecticut State Police regularly hold assessments for troopers who want to get promoted to positions including sergeant, lieutenant, captain and major.
Last February, nine troopers passed a captain’s assessment. Seven were promoted.
Two were not, getting the lowest passing grades despite 44 years of experience between them.
Lieutenant Adam Rosenberg said he's had big responsibilities with Connecticut State Police - supervising fixes to the agency’s payroll system and overseeing multiple barracks.
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“At one point, I was the acting major of eastern district, that's probably 200 to 250 people reporting to me,” Rosenberg said.
Despite four decades of combined experience, he and another lieutenant were told they finished eighth and ninth out of 11 in a captain’s assessment last year. The last two failed.
“I was acting at the time as a major. And this was for a captain's position. And I did worse on this test than any other tests that I’ve taken with the state police,” Rosenberg said.
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Rosenberg, who is Jewish, believes he may have fallen out of favor after filing a complaint about an email not about him, or sent to him - but that he learned about - where a public safety staffer he didn’t get along with used the phrase “Inbred Jews” in the subject line.
“And the person who did that still has a job. Under any other conditions for any other company, they would have been fired. Right then and there,” Rosenberg said.
As NBC Connecticut Investigates first reported, an investigation did not result in any discipline for the public safety staffer who said his phone autocorrected the offensive phrase, even though the FBI and Apple said this was not possible.
Rosenberg and fellow longtime Lieutenant Steve Samson, who is of Pacific Islander descent, both believe they were discriminated against in the captain assessments, and have retained Attorney Mario Cerame.
Cerame sent a demand letter to the state for the original email with the assessment scores.
“We believe very strongly that our clients performed better in the raw assessments, then the final results that were issued by the department, by the Connecticut State Police," Cerame said.
In his demand letter, Cerame said going forward, Connecticut must follow the same assessment protocols neighboring states use, including:
- No fellow troopers on the assessment panels
- Assessment questions must be devised by contractor giving the assessments and must be changed each day to prevent them from getting leaked
- All assessments must be recorded
“We believe that people of Connecticut have every right to know about the integrity, or lack of integrity in this testing process,” Cerame said.
A recent state investigation was unable to substantiate if the captain’s assessment scores were altered.
Cerame questions the thoroughness of that probe, which is why he delivered a demand letter for documents.
A state police spokesperson said there is no word if agency leaders have reviewed it, and they would probably not comment on a pending matter.
