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Southampton Village Police Chief Thomas Cummings is retiring.
Southampton Village Police Chief Thomas Cummings, whose contract renewal had become the subject of strife among the Village Board, is retiring as the village’s top cop.
With none of the wishing well for future endeavors, reflections on years of service, expressions of gratitude for time devoted to the community or personal remarks of any kind that normally mark such an occasion, the Village Board announced Chief Cummings’s retirement on Tuesday, July 20, by voting unanimously to authorize Mayor Jesse Warren to execute a separation agreement.
Read by Village Attorney Kenneth Gray, the resolution announced the chief’s plan to retire as of September 10. It was not noticed in the board’s posted agenda. It was added to the end of resolutions read at the end of a meeting, the first 90 minutes of which were held behind closed doors in executive session.
The mayor made the motion, which was seconded by Village Board member Gina Arresta.
The vote brings over a year of enmity between the chief and the mayor to a conclusion. The mayor has repeatedly referenced the chief’s salary, rebuking it as exorbitant. However, it was just this year that the chief’s pay reached the same amount his predecessor was receiving almost a decade ago.
Earlier this spring, the chief, who is in his mid-50s, said he was hoping to stay on for another three years.
As the ill will became more and more public, sources said the mayor targeted the chief’s son, a newly hired police officer. While the chief could not be fired, his son Thomas Cummings Jr. is still in a probationary role and could be let go if the chief didn’t comply and retire. Asked about the scuttlebutt last spring, the chief declined to comment on the threat and the mayor dismissed it as untrue.
No sooner did Mr. Warren rebut rumors that he was looking to fire the chief than he held an unprecedented public discussion of the chief’s contract at a Village Board meeting in March. Colleagues on the dais objected to the notion of what amounted to public contract negotiations, but Mr. Warren persisted.
By law, the chief’s current contract is public information. While it is unusual for discussions of contract negotiations to take place while negotiations are underway, there is nothing in the law prohibiting it.
During that meeting, Ms. Arresta used the word “egregious” to describe provisions of the chief’s contract and emphasized that the governor’s base pay is less. However, according to See Through NY, a website maintained by the Empire Center, there are over 50 police officials in the state, most of them on Long Island, whose pay is higher than the chief’s. His base pay this year was $223,299; holiday and vacation pay brought it to over $300,000, and officials estimated the total cost to the village, after adding in retirement and health benefits at $452,493.
By April, the mayor pushed harder in the attack against the chief. He called upon colleagues to strike down benefits in the chief’s contract, which was due to expire. The contract allows for aspects of pay to continue while a new agreement is discussed: the mayor was looking to strip the chief’s benefits. When Village Board member Joseph McLoughlin chose to abstain from the vote, the mayor asked him if he accepted a gift, and repeatedly asked, “Have you accepted a PBA card?” — a question that Mr. McLoughlin refused to answer publicly.
The push continued in May, when a task force convened by the mayor issued an interpretation of a consultant’s review of police operations. The chief described the task force’s review as “full of conjecture and assumptions that are incorrect, as well as being replete with spurious and untrue accusations.”
The task force presentation offered bullet points claiming the consultant’s report revealed “mismanagement and waste in many aspects of the SVPD’s activities.” At the next Village Board meeting in May, that consultant, Edmund Hartnett, repudiated many of the assertions made by the mayor’s task force.
Asked what sparked the animus between the chief and the mayor, Mr. Cummings speculated the trouble began last fall when he made a referral to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office. In an interview with The Press last May, the chief explained that then-Village Administrator and Clerk Russell Kratoville had approached him with concerns about the mayor handling absentee ballot applications improperly without authorized personnel present. The investigation concluded without charges.
Prior to that incident, the chief sought an opinion from the D.A.’s office when the mayor and his girlfriend entered a restricted area in police headquarters late on Saturday night. They wanted to see video of the emotional support wall erected near Agawam Park that was defaced with lewd comments about Mr. Warren.
Chief Cummings was sworn in as the leader of the Village Police in June 2011. This year marks his 34th with the department.
He joined as a patrol officer in June 1987. He served as a plainclothes officer assigned to the East End Drug Task Force and as a field training officer until his 1992 promotion to the rank of detective. He rose to the rank of sergeant in 1995, followed by promotions to lieutenant in 2003 and captain in 2005, when he became the department’s executive officer, or second-in-command. He did not immediately return a request for comment.
