Police, fire negotiators reach deal on contracts

Police and fire unions have reached employee agreements with the city of Little Rock for a 2021 contract, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. announced Wednesday evening.

According to the mayor, the agreements were accepted by “unified negotiating teams” for two unions from each department, including organizations representing minority groups within the police and fire departments.

For the Little Rock Police Department, the unions were the Little Rock Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge No. 17, as well as the Black Police Officers Association, Scott said.

For the Little Rock Fire Department, the unions were the International Association of Fire Fighters as well as Fire Leaders Actively Maintaining Equality, also known as FLAME, an organization that represents Black firefighters.

The Fraternal Order of Police, the city’s largest police union, had previously objected to a city request for inclusion of a certain number of Black Police Officers Association representatives on the police negotiating team.

In a Nov. 16 letter to the mayor, then-Fraternal Order of Police President Ronnie Morgan accused the city of unfairly imposing on the union a requirement to include four representatives of the Black Police Officers Association at the negotiating table.

He called the request for a negotiating team with a total of nine members “totally unnecessary” and “counterproductive.” The Fraternal Order of Police was requesting federal mediation to resolve the dispute, Morgan said.

However, that request for mediation was later dropped. At the time, Morgan declined to comment on how the impasse was resolved.

“We are currently no longer at impasse and we are negotiating, and we look forward to signing a contract with the city in the near future,” Morgan said in early December.

In his statement issued Wednesday, Scott described the agreements accepted by the four unions as a first for the city.

“Bringing minority organizations to the negotiating table for police and fire contract talks has never happened before, and I’m proud of the work of our team to bring it to fruition,” Scott said. “We are charting a new course of unity for Little Rock, one that insures all voices are represented.”

The agreements include minority representation from the associations representing Black police and fire officials during all contract negotiations in 2021, according to Scott’s statement.

Nevertheless, based on Scott’s statement, it was not immediately clear whether the language of the 2021 agreement is meant to resolve the quarrel over Black Police Officers Association representation that prompted this fall’s dispute between the Fraternal Order of Police and the city in order to prevent the two sides from reaching the same impasse in the future.

In a phone interview Thursday, Fraternal Order of Police President Lt. Zachary Farley said his union remains the exclusive bargaining unit representing police officers in negotiations with the city.

With regard to the resolution of the contract dispute in November, Farley said, “We didn’t add any seats or we didn’t, you know, trade any seats. But we all are in agreement with the package that the city and the FOP have come together for.”

At the same time, Farley said agreements have been reached — he hesitated to describe them as “concessions” — to make sure the union’s negotiators include “as much of a broader perspective as we can” with groups representing officers outside of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Farley said the Fraternal Order of Police is “willing to have those conversations, but we’re still the bargaining unit.”

For much of this year, the Fraternal Order of Police has been at odds with Police Chief Keith Humphrey, whom Scott appointed to the top job in 2019.

Over the summer, members of the Fraternal Order of Police approved a no-confidence resolution on Humphrey and criticized an internal letter describing apparent racial division in the department which the chief sent to police officials during the Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd.

Humphrey, in turn, has specifically targeted the Fraternal Order of Police and several of its members in a federal countersuit filed in late September that accuses many individuals of conspiring to force his ouster.

In contrast to the Fraternal Order of Police, the Black Police Officers Association has expressed its public support for Humphrey.

The president of the Black Police Officers Association, Sgt. Rodney Lewis, did not respond to a voicemail left Thursday.