Police contracts can stand in the way of accountability
— A stipulation in a Kentucky police contract prohibited officials from initially firing the officers involved in Breonna Taylor's death in Louisville.
The disciplinary history of a Chicago police officer who fatally shot Laquan McDonald had been deleted under the department's contract, so officials didn't know about the officer's previous bad behavior.
A Seattle officer fired for arresting an elderly Black man who used a golf club as a cane got $100,000 in back pay, thanks to the union contract that said the investigation missed a deadline.
Collective bargaining agreements for officers provide protections that stand in the way of accountability, even when the federal government is overseeing an agency through a consent decree, experts said. The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer ignited protests and calls for change, but experts say police contracts threaten to undermine those efforts.
Contracts designed to ensure officers receive fair wages and benefits have spilled over into public policy.
“We're ignoring the purpose of the bargaining rights and we're allowing them to step outside of what they were originally supposed to cover,” said Ayesha Bell Hardaway of the Case Western University School of Law.
“When talk about discipline, accountability and use of force protocols, we should not be talking about collective bargaining rights because those terms have no business inside of the contracts in the first place.”
When contracts are written in private negotiations, that means little input from communities.
“Without transparency there can't be any accountability,” she said.
James Pasco, executive director of the 351,000-member National Fraternal Order of Police, recently said the issue should be better screening and more training for recruits, not limiting contracts.
“We don't get to decide who our members are,” he said.
Stephen Rushin, a Loyola University Chicago law school professor, has studied police contracts nationally and detailed their problems in an article published in the Duke Law Journal.
“A substantial number of these agreements limit officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, mandate the destruction of disciplinary records, ban civilian oversight, prevent anonymous civilian complaints, indemnify officers in the event of civil suits, and limit the length of internal investigations,” he said.
Some contracts let an officer see videos of offenses before an officer is interviewed, give an officer a 48-hour delay before they speak to internal affairs and allows an officer to appeal a punishment to arbitrators who can overturn rulings, an Associated Press investigation found.
“These examples bolster the hypothesis that some union contract provisions may impede effective investigations of police misconduct and shield problematic officers from discipline,” Rushin said.
The problem is more than union overreach, he said. “It's an indictment of the city for granting those concessions. Police unions only have the power that politicians give them,” he said.
Seattle is an example of how elected officials allowed police unions to insert controversial measures during closed negotiations, over the objections of community groups.
“The Seattle story is a microcosm of what's happening elsewhere in the country,” Rushin told The Associated Press. “It highlights perfectly this conflict between major reform efforts and the extent to which labor protections can make it hard to engage in real change.”
In 2011, a federal judge found that the Seattle Police Department had engaged in a pattern of excessive force. The city entered into a settlement agreement, or consent decree, the following year and passed an accountability measure for additional oversight.