City of Tulsa monitors what its employees view on the Internet

The City of Tulsa fired an employee for looking at pornographic pictures on his office computer. <br/><br/>Several others face suspensions - and at least two quit after the city started monitoring the

Tuesday, May 11th 2004, 10:03 am

By: News On 6

The City of Tulsa fired an employee for looking at pornographic pictures on his office computer.

Several others face suspensions - and at least two quit after the city started monitoring the websites viewed by city employees. News on 6 reporter Emory Bryan looked into the records to see how much of a problem it is for the city. Each time someone at the city logs onto the internet - a computer keeps track of it.

If they access pornography - it quickly comes to the attention of a supervisor - and over the last couple of years the record indicates it's ended the careers of several people. The city of Tulsa has 4,000 employees - and many have access the Internet on their office computer.

For some it's a gateway to pornography that they've had to explain to the boss - because the city monitors what employees do on the Internet. Dale Hunter runs the department that keeps track of it. "We don't automatically trigger the alarm when someone gets to a website; it's when we see it happening over and over again." The city logs each visit to pornographic websites - they know the website - and how much time was spent looking at it.

In the last 2 years that's led to reprimands for seven employees - including 2 Tulsa Police officers, one of them a corporal.

But the most extreme case was at the airport - where an employee spent so much time on the web - he was fired. That employee accessed 38,000 websites in a single month - though not all of them were porn. Investigators found 200 nude pictures on his computer, half of them children - he was also accused of sexual harassment - and fired.

Two police officers - each lost 2 days of vacation.

In Public Works - 2 workers were suspended without pay for 1 day.

The Human Rights Department suspended an employee without pay for 5 days.

And in the Parks Department - one employee lost 2 days - another, 3 days.

The city's Human Resources director, Mike Bates believes the monitoring system works. "I think we've had a reduction in that kind of activity, it's hard to know because obviously there are a lot of site and people are human and sometimes they do something wrong, but our intent is to ensure that people are inappropriately using city equipment."

City of Tulsa officials say besides the one man who was fired - a couple of employees quit when confronted about their Internet activity.

Not everyone gets a reprimand - the computer picks out about a dozen people each year for investigation - but sometimes it flags something as a porn site when it actually is not.