Police unions also have to change their mindset

In the wake of the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd — who died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck — promising momentum has been building in this country for police reform.

Over the past three days, the city of Minneapolis has banned chokeholds, and Los Angeles officials have defied fiscal orthodoxy by announcing plans to cut up to $150 million in police funding and invest that money into communities of color.

Any serious reform effort, however, will demand a re-evaluation of the role of police unions in the United States.

It will require an examination of the way unions negotiate for clauses that hinder the process of punishing police officers who abuse their authority. It will require union leaders to decide that their ultimate obligation is to the public they serve, the public that pays their salaries, and not to bad cops who happen to pay union dues.

San Antonio needs to be at the forefront of that re-evaluation.

Campaign Zero, a police-reform advocacy group, recently looked at collective-bargaining contracts in 81 of the 100 largest cities in this country. They found that 72 of those 81 cities had at least one contract provision impeding police accountability.

Five cities had problematic provisions in all six categories. San Antonio was one of those cities.

Along the same lines, a 2017 Washington Post investigation into police misconduct found that San Antonio had the dubious distinction of being the city with the highest rate (70 percent) of fired police officers reinstated due to collective-bargaining arbitration clauses.

This city’s current policeunion contract expires Oct. 1, 2021, and a new round of negotiations will start early next year. That means San Antonio can be an early test of this country’s collective commitment to reform the culture of law enforcement.

Mike Helle won’t be a part of that negotiation process. The president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association announced Thursday that he’ll be stepping down after 12 years in office. His term will end in eight months.

Helle is an unabashed political conservative who tends to push back against the argument that police officers are more prone to use force against African-Americans than white people.

He acknowledges that some officers who deserve to be fired get reinstated when they take their appeal to the arbitration process, but he pins the blame for that not on the union, but on what he calls the “incompetence” of the opposition.

“I have no appetite to reduce any of our rights due to somebody else’s incompetence on the other side,” Helle said. “Because you’re incompetent and you failed to investigate properly or follow the processes properly and you keep losing because of your incompetence, and now you want me to dumb it down so you win? Nobody will agree to that.”

The major area of contention in the city’s collective-bargaining agreement is Article 28, Section 19, a set of provisions that keep finding their way into every new deal.

Section 19 imposes a 180-day statute of limitation for investigations into police misconduct. It prevents the police chief from taking into account any drug- or alcohol-related violations older than 10 years, acts of intentional violence older than five years and any other violation older than two years.

The contract also gives officers a 48-hour notice before an interrogation and access to all information before being interrogated.

In light of those provisions, and San Antonio’s extremely high rate of officer reinstatement, it’s easy to conclude the deck is stacked against officer accountability.

Not surprisingly, Helle disagrees. But he insists that he’s “not opposed” to having a discussion with city negotiators about adjusting those disciplinary provisions.

“If we’re dealing with common-sense issues based on facts and reality, not perceptions, I think we can entertain those things,” Helle said.

Real police reform in this country will require a change in mindset, from both department and union leadership.

That means accepting that cops have a duty to intervene when one of their fellow officers gets out of line. That means recognizing that a union shouldn’t be in the business of protecting officers who brutalize the people they’re meant to serve.

One of the most depressing recent displays of misplaced officer loyalty happened in Buffalo, N.Y., where all 57 members of the police Emergency Response Team resigned from that unit Friday in response to the suspension of two officers who knocked down a 75-year-old man who was demonstrating against Floyd’s killing.

The man ended up in the hospital, where he is in stable but serious condition.

This is a clear case of malignant union politics, so driven to protect its members that it can’t acknowledge abuses of authority.

It’s a mindset that SAPOA’s next president will need to abandon.