Lightfoot under pressure on reform
Police union contract faces increasing scrutiny
Four years ago, private citizen Lori Lightfoot led a task force that urged the city of Chicago to rewrite police union contracts to eliminate provisions that make it harder to discipline officers.
Now, Mayor Lightfoot is under increasing pressure to make those changes a reality herself as protests triggered by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis cops have renewed calls to eliminate some police protections here.
At issue are clauses that allow officers to delay giving statements after shooting people, prevent the city from rewarding cops who blow the whistle on misconduct, and discourage people from filing complaints by generally requiring them to give their names.
Lightfoot faces a greater challenge in winning the
changes than she did in recommending them, however.
Chicago Fraternal Order of Police leaders vow not to give up disciplinary protections they won over the decades. The union’s president told the Tribune he hopes to expand officers’ rights.
History also gives reason to doubt a quick resolution — city negotiations with the FOP almost always take years and end up going before an arbitrator. Meanwhile, any hope that Lightfoot and FOP leaders might reach a deal on their own could be complicated by their hostility toward one another.
Lightfoot’s administration can get a better contract if it has the political will to insist on change, said Sheila Bedi, a Northwestern University law professor who represents activist groups.
“Anybody who cares about justice and race and policing in the city of Chicago is going to be paying very close attention to the contract negotiations,” she said.
Union President John Catanzara accused city leaders of being ever more willing to unfairly go after cops.
“All we are doing is protecting our members’ rights,” he said. “(The city is) coming after us from all angles like never before.”
Lightfoot ran for mayor touting her police reformer credentials, pointing to experience leading then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s reform task force, as well as heading the Chicago Police Board and a city police disciplinary agency. But during recent protests over police abuse of African Americans, she’s drawn criticism from activists who want more elemental changes than she has so far embraced, such as cutting the police budget.
Lightfoot spokesman Patrick Mullane said the city would fight for changes to the FOP contract, though he declined to say whether City Hall would trade wins in some areas for concessions in others.
Police unions need to “work with the city as a partner — not a roadblock — on accountability and transparency reforms,” he said.
Police protections
The union protections are one element of a sluggish, Byzantine police disciplinary system long criticized for shoddy investigations and light punishments.
The provisions largely went unnoticed before the November 2015 release of video of white Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times more than a year earlier. The footage spurred street protests and calls for greater accountability for police.
The crisis gave rise to a 2016 city task force report and the 2017 U.S. Department of Justice report that criticized the union contracts. Last year, a federal judge enacted a consent decree, a broad court order requiring changes to training, supervision and discipline. The decree, however, states that it doesn’t override existing union contracts but calls on the city to make its “best efforts” to win changes.
Chicago has several officer unions, but the FOP has been front and center in the reform debate. The union represents a wide majority of the city’s 13,000 officers, including the patrol cops who have frequently been involved in controversial shootings and other uses of force. The pushback against the contractual changes is just one battlefront for a union that generally opposes reform and repeatedly has defended members credibly accused of serious misconduct.
The last FOP contract expired three years ago under Emanuel, and the process of negotiating a new one drags on under Lightfoot. The old deal that remains in force still contains numerous disciplinary provisions.
Among them is a rule that gives cops who shoot people 24 hours before speaking to disciplinary investigators. Police argue it’s only fair to allow cops time to process a traumatic event.
Reform advocates counter that delaying interviews gives cops time to match up their accounts. They pointed to the McDonald shooting as evidence that police will give similar details that clash with video footage.
Van Dyke said McDonald advanced on him and waved the knife as the officer backpedaled, and his colleagues backed the account of the teen as a dangerous aggressor. But the video showed McDonald was moving away from Van Dyke before the officer shot and then continued firing as the teen lay nearly motionless on the street. A Cook County jury convicted Van Dyke of second-degree murder. Three other officers were tried and acquitted of conspiring to justify the shooting. Last year, the Police Board fired four cops in the alleged cover-up.
In a similar vein, another rule allows officers to amend their statements after viewing video of an incident, though the wording of the provision is murky. Reform groups summed up their argument against this protection in a 2019 paper.
“This provision, in effect, allows officers to lie as long as they have not reviewed the video or audio recordings, by giving them a consequence-free opportunity to change their statements after being confronted with contrary evidence,” said the Coalition for Police Contracts Accountability, a Chicago-based group of activist organizations and lawyers.
FOP officials say police uses of force often unfold quickly under chaotic, traumatizing circumstances, and the union has defended cops who made statements contradicted by video.
In addition, the police contract holds that complaints made against officers generally must be backed by signed statements, and cops must be told the names of the people complaining about them.
Police union officials argue that allowing anonymous complaints would lead to false accusations. The lack of an affidavit, however, has prevented the investigation of thousands of allegations over the years.
The bar to anonymous complaints, however, goes beyond the city contract. State law also calls for allegations against officers to come with a signed affidavit.
Another provision at issue centers on whistleblowing. The contract says cops cannot be “promised a reward” for giving information to disciplinary investigators. Reform advocates say that could dissuade potential whistleblowers from coming forward. They note that CPD officers often are accused of observing a “code of silence” and enforcing consequences on cops who call out egregious misconduct.
Karen Sheley, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said the disciplinary provisions make it harder to hold cops responsible for misconduct.
“If we’re going to have reform … officers have to be held accountable,” she said. “That accountability can’t happen until the union contract is fundamentally reformed.” Around the country, unions have won disciplinary concessions from city governments more focused on money than technical disciplinary matters, said Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska Omaha who has studied police union deals. He said elected officials are now seeing it’s tougher to pull something out of a contract than it is to put it in.
“Getting something out of a contract is a pretty steep mountain. We’re really stuck in a very difficult situation here,” he said.
An illustration of that difficulty can be seen in a nearly decadelong legal battle over how long the city can keep police disciplinary records.
On Thursday, the Illinois Supreme Court delivered a win to reform advocates by negating a provision of the FOP contract that calls for the destruction of such records after five years. Lightfoot praised the ruling while Catanzara said he “couldn’t be more disappointed.”
Lengthy, arduous process
Chicago is considered the birthplace of the labor movement, but police here didn’t unionize until relatively recently. Mayor Richard J. Daley “used to tell us police, ‘Don’t worry about a contract while I’m alive, but after, when I’m gone, you better get a contract.’ So we did,” John Dineen, the first Chicago FOP president, recalled in 2016.
The first Mayor Daley died in December 1976, and police signed the first contract in 1981. Former officials from both sides of the bargaining table have acknowledged that police protections were added to contracts as city officials focused on the financial bottom line.
Even before disciplinary protections arose as a major issue, the negotiation process often has been arduous.
Police are legally barred from striking, but if negotiations stall they can turn to arbitration, a process in which a neutral third party hears both sides on specific issues in dispute and makes rulings.
Three of the last four FOP contracts have gone to arbitration. In 2010, for example, an arbitrator’s ruling resolved a host of issues ranging from wages to promotions to officers’ physical fitness.
This time around, the FOP called for arbitration in December. In that month’s union newsletter, thenPresident Kevin Graham complained about the city’s position on disciplinary provisions, among other things, as he alleged that City Hall was “trying to throw us under the bus.”
At the time, Lightfoot said she didn’t think the union had met the requirements for arbitration. Where things stand now is unclear. Mullane, Lightfoot’s spokesman, did not answer a Tribune question about the city’s current position on arbitration.
Catanzara, elected union president in May, said the arbitration demand remains on the table but in the meantime he wants to keep negotiating. He said no bargaining sessions had been scheduled as of this week, but he hoped to make progress after July 4.
In addition to holding the line on disciplinary protections, Catanzara said he’d like to modify the requirement that all cops live in the city and add a provision that would spell out the process for stripping cops of their police powers.
Catanzara has extensive personal experience with the disciplinary system, as the subject of at least 35 complaints and several suspensions. The brass have twice tried and failed to fire him. He’s currently stripped of his police powers amid an investigation into allegations he filed a false or misleading police report accusing then-Superintendent Eddie Johnson of breaking the law by allowing anti-violence marchers onto the Dan Ryan Expressway.
“Anybody who cares about justice and race and policing in the city of Chicago is going to be paying very close attention to the contract negotiations”
— Sheila Bedi, a Northwestern University law professor who represents activist groups