Ex-employee shuts down police website over pay dispute, city says

Officials in a Boston suburb are probing a former municipal employee for allegedly taking down the police department’s website amid a salary dispute.

Newton The previous head of information technology for the police department, according to Mayor Ruthanne Fuller, pulled down the official website between late June and early July. The Boston Globe reported on Friday that the website instead sent users to a message urging them to contact Fuller and beg the mayor to restore the page.

Fuller said that the employee controls site access and has not given it to the city. In its stead, Newton has built a new police department website. On Sunday, the previous website was no longer operational.

In a statement to the Globe earlier this week, Fuller said that the employee had shut off “a essential resource for the inhabitants of Newton.” The employee informed municipal authorities of his resignation in March, according to the Globe. The employee thought he was entitled $137,000 in compensatory time at the time he took down the website, according to the newspaper, according to a paper representative.The employee said in a statement that he was “disappointed with the city’s portrayal of the facts in this incident” and that he would work with the city to rectify the issue.