Waterford — Three police officers and a sergeant on the midnight shift were doing a whole lot of nothing when they were supposed to be working, according to an internal investigation the depart-ment released this week.

One officer was found to be spending hours of his time at home while on duty, another admitted to resting in her cruiser during her shift and a third allegedly spent hours of his shifts parked in a single location.

The investigation also found that the sergeant in charge of them routinely turned off the computer in his cruiser so that he couldn't be tracked during his shift and failed to reprimand the officers for their behavior, according to the report.

“This all focuses around performance on the job as an officer, and what I saw was very little, and that's what bothers me,” Police Chief Murray J. Pendleton said Thursday.

In August, several officers on the midnight shift informed a lieutenant that their fellow officers were sleeping on the job, and the department launched an investigation into every officer on the shift. After pulling up records that tracked locations of each officer's cruiser and the time spent at those locations while on shift, the department suspended Sgt. Andre Parker for 10 days without pay and reduced his rank for five days. Officers Norman Malbaurn and Jonathan Pettigrew were suspended without pay for 10 days, and Officer Nicole Dupont was suspended without pay for three days.

According to the investigation, Malbaurn's vehicle was tracked over 10 days, and logs showed that he had spent 31 hours at his own home while on duty. An officer who was sent to find Malbaurn after he didn't respond to a call told investigators he found Malbaurn sleeping on his couch.

Malbaurn, who has been with the department eight years and has a base salary of $54,662, denied sleeping on the job, according to the report.

A review of Pettigrew's activity found that in 17 midnight shifts, he spent 26 hours in “prolonged situations of non-movement” in remote areas of town.

“Most disturbing is the date of Aug. 20, 2007,” Deputy Chief Maximilian J. Thiel wrote in a Nov. 28 memorandum to Pendleton. “He worked a double day shift, went home for the evening shift and came back for the midnight shift. Records show that from 1:39 a.m. through 7:01 a.m. he was in one location behind the medical building on Parkway South.”

Pettigrew told Thiel, according to the investigation, “he saw nothing wrong with sitting in one location for an extended period of time reading a book or magazine if activity was slow.”

Pendleton said officers should be catching speeders and drunken drivers.

Dupont — who along with Pettigrew has been with the department fives years and is paid a base salary of $49,837 — told Thiel she had slept at the police department on her lunch break and has “rested” in her parked cruiser to refresh herself, according to the report. Over 14 days, the investigation found that Dupont had spent 17 hours in “prolonged situations of non-movement,” also in remote areas of town.

Dupont is now a youth officer assigned to Waterford High School.

Pendleton said Thursday that it is inappropriate to sleep at any time during a shift, because if an officer were needed to respond to a call, that officer could be groggy.

“The midnight shift is problematic to anyone who works it,” Pendleton said. “It's a very difficult shift to work. The profession is guilty of attempting to burn the candle at both ends — you're working double shifts. But that's not an excuse.”

Pendleton said that while it could be inferred that the officers were sleeping, the investigation was unable to prove that any were sleeping on the job.

Officers on the midnight shift also alleged that Parker, the sergeant in charge of the midnight shift, was sleeping in front of his subordinates and turned off the computer in his cruiser so that his location and whereabouts could not be tracked.

When Parker was interviewed for the investigation, he said he had turned off his computer so that he could check up on the officers he was supervising without them knowing his whereabouts. Parker told Thiel he was aware that Pettigrew had a tendency to go “immobile for substantial periods of time.” He said he brought the matter up with Pettigrew twice but made no further effort to monitor his behavior, according to the report.

Parker assigned Pettigrew as his “traffic enforcement guy,” according to the report, although Pettigrew made only three traffic stops during the month of August.

“(Parker) stated that he would not force an officer to write traffic infractions as that would be considered a 'quota system,' ” according to the report.

“Sergeant Parker went so far as to challenge the interviewers stating they would not find any traffic violations on Route 32 after midnight,” the report stated.

The investigation also found other instances in which Parker failed to notice that officers under him were improperly monitoring prisoners, taking prolonged coffee breaks or checking in from areas of town where they had not been assigned.

As a result of the investigation, Parker, a 19-year veteran of the department with a base salary of $63,253, was demoted to the rank of patrolman for his first five days back at work last month and ordered to attend a training program called “Achieving Goals for Middle Managers” at the Connecticut Police Academy.

Pendleton said suspensions were decided by multiplying each officer's hourly rate by the obvious number of hours they were inactive. He said he did not think firing the officers would have been the appropriate action to take.

“These officers are good people,” he said. “They represent a substantial investment. I think it's incumbent on us to look at bad decision-making and see if we can salvage something.”

Pendleton said the matter is now the subject of a union grievance. A union representative could not be reached Thursday night to comment.

j.wernau@theday.com

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