State College to pay more than $130,000 to fight the reinstatement of once-fired police officer
State College is set to pay more than $130,000 to fight the reinstatement of a police officer the borough fired after a series of internal investigations into allegations of misconduct, a spokesperson wrote in an email Monday.
The borough racked up the tab defending against a grievance filed by the union that represents officer Joseph Scharf and filing two subsequent appeals, both of which it lost.
State College has until Nov. 6 to petition the state Supreme Court to hear a third appeal. The borough, spokeswoman Kayla Lafferty wrote Monday, has not yet decided whether it will file.
Scharf was fired from the State College Police Department in December 2020. He returned Jan. 1 and is participating in a retraining program, a condition ordered by an arbitrator to curb what she described as his “rogue, lone wolf tendencies.”
Public court documents did not indicate Scharf had returned to the department earlier this year.
Scharf’s reinstatement was further conditioned as a “last-chance agreement,” with arbitrator Kathleen Jones Spilker warning “any repetition of the conduct and violations seen in this case shall result in his immediate termination without recourse to the grievance procedure or arbitration.”
Scharf was also suspended five days. Spilker’s ruling ordered he be reinstated with seniority, back pay and all benefits. The borough does not have any “final numbers” on how much back pay Scharf is owed, Lafferty wrote.
How did we get here?
Scharf was fired after an internal investigation into three allegations of misconduct.
In one incident, Scharf drove 87 mph in a 25 mph zone and passed a civilian vehicle at 72 mph while in pursuit of a speeding driver. The driver did not even realize a police officer was attempting to catch up to him.
In another, he failed to report a high-speed pursuit until three days after it happened, despite being told by two detectives to make a timely report.
Borough leadership found the third to be the most serious, one that warranted termination on its own. While on bicycle patrol, Scharf improperly deployed pepper spray into the driver’s side window of a moving vehicle during what should have been a routine traffic stop for a headlight violation.
Spilker did not dispute the allegations against him after listening to at least three days of testimony. She wrote in a November 2021 opinion it was understandable for borough police Chief John Gardner to recommend Scharf be fired.
“A reasonable person in the place of an arbitrator could justifiably recoil in disgust and horror at his admitted conduct,” Spilker wrote. “One has but to put oneself in the place of an innocent bystander who may have been injured or killed because of the grievant’s hijinks. He was pursuing cowboy justice, without proper regard for the possible consequences.”
Scharf’s conduct, the borough argued, exhibited a persistent tendency to act on his own, a disregard of police rules and training, and an inflated sense of urgency.
An internal affairs board — made up of four officers of different ranks and a division commander — found Scharf violated 10 department policies during the three incidents. It recommended a five-day suspension and a written reprimand.
The police department’s top officer didn’t buy it. For the first time in his career, he recommended one of his officers be fired.
The board’s recommended discipline, Gardner said, would not “prove effective in bringing about the positive change in performance and behavior that is required.” Borough Manager Tom Fountaine signed off on Scharf’s firing.
“No one wants to get criminals or bad guys off the street any more than I do, but there’s a right way and a proper way to do it. And oftentimes the end doesn’t always justify the means, and I think that’s the perfect illustration of this point here,” Gardner testified during an arbitration hearing. “I applaud him for his aggressive nature in how he wanted to pursue his job, but sometimes you have to take a step back and look at what am I doing, what am I trying to accomplish here and am I going to make things better or am I going to make them worse by my actions.”
But Scharf argued Gardner violated department policy by considering other incidents beyond the three that led to an internal investigation. Spilker agreed, finding his termination was not supported by just cause.
The borough sought to have Spilker’s ruling overturned, but Centre County Judge Brian Marshall upheld the ruling. Spilker, he wrote, neither exceeded her authority nor ordered the borough to violate public policy.
“While the mandatory reinstatement of a police officer that has been found by both the Borough of State College and the Arbitrator herself to be a danger to public safety and a threat to the citizens of Pennsylvania is certainly repugnant to public policy, this Court is constrained to follow the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s determination that such a result is in fact the intention of the legislature,” Marshall wrote in his eight-page ruling.
The state Commonwealth Court earlier this month affirmed Marshall’s ruling.
Messages left with Scharf’s attorney have not been returned. The State College Police Association — the union that represents the police department’s rank-and-file officers — declined comment.