PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – The director of Oregon’s Department of Public Safety Standards and Training resigned last weekend and is now speaking out against the investigation that spurred his departure.
Jerry Granderson was the director for just over a year, hired in March 2021 and filed his resignation letter last Sunday. Granderson denies the allegations made in the investigation, saying he would be the first to admit to any wrongdoing.
Granderson, who retired from the FBI after 23 years, says his first concern was when the investigation was brought up during his evaluation with Board of Directors Chair, Darren Bucich.
The evaluations are publicly accessible, which struck Granderson as unprofessional to bring up an investigation that had not been completed.
“I must defend [in] an open forum. I think that’s fundamentally wrong, that it’s not fair. It violates any level of common sense when it comes to HR. What employee should have an evaluation, good or bad, in front of his peers or his colleagues or his constituencies?” Granderson said in an interview with KOIN 6 News.
Bucich said he could not comment on the resignation or investigation and referred questions to DPSST’s public records department.
The investigation details were not immediately confirmed to KOIN 6 News, though Granderson detailed them in his interview.
There were allegations of discrimination, forcing out good people, and hiring on the basis of race and discrimination.
Granderson believes most people left because of COVID-19 mandates or policies that were being put into place under his watch.
Granderson, who is black, also says he was hiring to make the department more diverse, one because the state legislature required it and two, he was looking only at qualified candidates who would also make the department more diverse.
“Diversity is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing,” he said. “It’s something that the Secretary of State’s audit even had the finding of one of the things that have been regularly observed or have been observed by myself…is, with respect to the training section particularly, is that 99 percent of that representation is white males,” Granderson said.
Granderson says one of the reasons he resigned is to avoid the investigation from distracting the governor or the department.
One policy was looking at changing uniform colors from all black to, as Granderson describes, avoid a militaristic perception.
Another he caught flack for was only authorizing active officers to carry firearms on the department grounds. That policy was decided on before Granderson’s arrival, but he felt it was the correct procedure.