The Editorial Board
The New York Times
September 3, 2016
Across the country, municipal governments have signed contracts with police unions including provisions that shield officers from punishment for brutal behavior as well as from legitimate complaints by the citizens they are supposed to serve.
That may soon change, as public outrage over police killings of civilians is ratcheting up pressure on elected officials to radically revise police contracts that make it almost impossible to bring officers to justice.
The most striking case in point is Chicago, which has been roiled by a police scandal stemming from a cover-up in the case of a 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald, who was executed by a police officer nearly two years ago.
The Police Department first claimed that Mr. McDonald was brandishing a knife and moving toward officers when he was killed. A video — probably available to the city within hours of the shooting but not made public until last November, more than a year later — showed that Mr. McDonald was moving away from the cops when they shot him 16 times, and that the police were obviously lying.
But it was not until last month that the city’s inspector general recommended firing several officers, some of whom have since retired, for making false statements.
That recommendation was passed on to the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson. Mr. Johnson, who lacks the power to fire the officers outright, has filed administrative charges against five officers with an agency known as the Chicago Police Board, whose members are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the City Council.
It is incredible that this is the first official disciplinary action taken against the officers, 22 months after the killing. And even if the board votes to dismiss the officers, they will be able to challenge their dismissals in court.
As a task force appointed by Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, noted in April, “The collective bargaining agreements between the police unions and the city have essentially turned the code of silence into official policy.”
This absurdly slow process is a direct outgrowth of collective bargaining agreements that actually encourage officers to lie. The agreements bar investigators from questioning officers within the first 24 hours after a shooting, giving them time to coordinate their accounts. They micromanage investigations, limiting what interrogators can do. Beyond that, if an officer lies during an investigation, he or she cannot be charged with making a false statement unless the investigator presents the officer with a new set of allegations that specifically address the lie.
The labor agreements also discourage citizens from lodging misconduct complaints. Among other things, they prohibit most anonymous complaints, a problem in a city like Chicago, where the department has a history of brutality and even torture — and where citizens are understandably fearful of reprisal.
As in other cities, officers in Chicago can challenge disciplinary findings in proceedings overseen by arbitrators, who frequently have a vested interest in pleasing the police unions so they can keep their jobs. One earlier review of arbitration cases found that disciplinary sanctions were “routinely cut in half by arbitrators.” The system makes it difficult for citizens to get a full explanation of how their complaints are handled.
Justice Department investigations in other cities — including Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo. — have uncovered poor police oversight systems. To restore public confidence in the law, elected officials around the country will have to stop reflexively truckling to police unions and demand contracts that actually reflect the public interest.
EDITOR’S NOTE: While most of what this Times editorial says is true, it is a stretch to say that police collective bargaining agreements actually encourage cops to lie. They may give officers the opportunity to lie, but they do not encourage them to lie.
It should be noted why there are police unions in the first place. Before the advent of the unions, cops had no say in how much they were to be paid and they were often wrongly disciplined and fired without recourse
2 comments:
Cops take an oath. That should sum up all their dealings with anyone.
I saw this process first-hand when the formerly great state of California moved into collective bargaining for it's employees, including peace officers. I was a member of, and eventually an officer of, the California Correctional Peace officers Association. Up until that time civil service employees had civil service protections, but they were clumsy and time consuming. There were tons of exceptions to work rules and requirements leaving supervisors and managers great freedom to screw over employees with relative impunity. (For instance, I got a six-week job change once so a married Lieutenant's girlfriend could have my job, and I would have hers, between Thanksgiving and New Year so she would have my days off and I would have hers for those Holidays. Right after New year we were flipped back into our old jobs. This sort of crap happened all the time. Also "internal investigations" were typically conducts by political hacks whose primary reason for getting the job was they were a suit's fishing buddy. These investigations were often hack jobs with a desired, designated outcome that pretty much always came out no matter what the facts of the case were.)
All that being said, unions exist for the protection and betterment of their members, not to protect the quality of the service provided by the unionized organization. The union has an affirmative, legal requirement to do so. It isn't wonderful and, as noted in the article, can give rise to some problems. Never the less it is the system we have, and mostly it works IMHO.
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