Now-former Detroit Department of Transportation chief safety officer Corie Holmes is suing the city, alleging a retaliatory termination for “misrepresentation of authority” for investigating a number of incidents that, as described in a Detroit Free Press column, are not necessarily “safety” issues. Like when bus system supervisor Andre Reece said “Why are you tryin’ to squeeze tight? Just let it go” and “I bet I can make it jiggle,” to driver Dayna Ruff while grabbing her ass as the two were making out in the front of a parked city bus, well, the bus was parked safely on the side of a street.
They weren’t trading pics of their genitals while Ruff was driving with passengers on board, so that’s outside of a safety officer’s jurisdiction. Same goes for the $300,000 no-bid contract for IT services by “Total Care Restoration,” a company with no experience whatsoever in the IT sector and almost certainly didn’t render any actual services for the automated people-mover system. If they didn’t write a single line of code to run the system then how could that have been a safety issue?
Now the January 23rd late night incident involving now-also-fired DOT Chief of Staff Jennie Whitfield is a closer call since she did create a safety hazard by throwing a glass bottle at a pigeon during a drunken tirade at the Rosa Parks Bus Station and then claimed she was simply pressure testing security personnel’s response. Yet even though Whitfield was eventually fired, Holmes was repeatedly told he was exceeding his remit by flagging the deranged Friday night meltdown by his superior, and that insubordination proved to be the final nail in the coffin of his time at the agency.
Put together it’s an important lesson to those who aspire to answer the call of public service: Just look busy instead of actually trying to make a difference in the workplace, however small.