This investigative article reveals how US Police Union had been assuming draconian power over the years using money and corrupt lobby system prevalent in USA, and had been getting away committing murders without impunity.
Police unions have become
increasingly right-wing as a backlash to the Obama administration and
Black Lives Matter — and that’s bad news for the cities they police.
More than a year before a Minneapolis police officer, Derek
Chauvin, pinned George Floyd to the ground in a knee chokehold, Mayor
Jacob Frey banned “warrior” training for the city’s police force.
Private trainers across the country host seminars, frequently at taxpayer expense, teaching “killology” and pushing the notion that if officers aren’t willing to “snuff out a life” then they should “consider another line of work.” Frey explained that this type of training — which has accompanied the increasing militarization of the police
over the last few decades — undermined the community-based policing he
wanted the city to adopt after a string of high-profile killings in the
region.
But then the police union stepped in.
The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis worked out a deal with a company to offer warrior training. For free. For as long as Frey was mayor.
Like in Minneapolis, police unions across the country have bucked reforms meant to promote transparency and racial equity in law enforcement. Many of these unions have pushed collective bargaining agreements
that make it all but impossible for departments to punish, much less
fire, officers. These agreements defang civilian review boards and
police internal affairs departments, and they even prevent police chiefs
from providing meaningful oversight, according to community activists
and civil rights lawyers. Meanwhile, the unions have set up legal slush
funds to defend officers sued for misconduct.
Last year in Phoenix, a report
revealed police officers had posted racist memes on social media,
including one officer thanking George Zimmerman, the man who shot
17-year-old Trayvon Martin, “for cleaning up our community one thug at a
time.” Their union officials sought a deal to offer its members a
service to scrub their profile pages. Phoenix officers last Saturday arrested 114 Floyd demonstrators.
And in St. Louis, the city’s first black woman to serve as lead prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, sued
the police union claiming it has tried to obstruct her efforts to
reform the force. A separate union of black police officers sided with
Gardner, saying the department and union has a culture “accepting of racism, discrimination, corruption.” Police in nearby Ferguson, site of Michael Brown’s killing
by an officer in 2014, fired tear gas Sunday night at police violence
protests — as they had done in the aftermath of Brown’s death.
The
phone number for the Minneapolis Police Officers Federation wasn’t
working when BuzzFeed News made several attempts on Sunday to call for
comment. As of Sunday, the union’s website and Facebook account had been
taken down, although it was unclear why. The National Fraternal Order
of Police issued a statement condemning Chauvin’s actions.
This
incident should not “be allowed to define our profession or the
Minneapolis Police Department,” the statement reads, “but there is no
doubt that this incident has diminished the trust and respect our
communities have for the men and women of law enforcement. We will work
hard to rebuild that trust and we will continue to protect our
communities.”
Yet police observers,
scholars, and civil rights lawyers and activists told BuzzFeed News that
the strength of these unions and the deals they struck with local
governments that offer rigorous job protections have helped create
cultures in which the officers are left unaccountable and black and
brown people are left dead.
Jonathan M. Smith, who oversaw the
investigation of 26 police departments as a Department of Justice
attorney and is executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, said labor agreements that prioritize police job security over public safety aren’t in the officers’ best interests, either.“If
you leave a bad officer on the street, that has a very damaging effect
on every other officer,” Smith said. “No one on the street is going to
say that’s a good officer and that’s a bad officer.”
He pointed to Chauvin, who had racked up a number of complaints yet remained on the force, as an example.
“Had
those been addressed in an appropriate way, not only would Mr. Floyd be
alive, we wouldn’t have the disruption in the community and you might
have actually saved his career if you put him on the right path earlier
on,” Smith said.
Instead, Minneapolis’s contract governs
everything from officer pay rates to patrol areas and discipline.
Minneapolis’s contract, similar to others, states that “investigations
into an employee’s conduct which do not result in the imposition of
discipline shall not be entered into the employee’s official personnel
file.” Translation: Since only around 1% of complaints adjudicated since
2012 have resulted in an officer being disciplined, city records show,
most complaints will be erased. That helps to explain why the
department’s Internal Affairs listed 17 complaints for Chauvin, while the city’s public database of officer complaints had 12, and a local advocacy group, Communities United Against Police Brutality, had 10, but several that didn’t match the other two sources. Minneapolis isn’t alone. Cleveland had a policy that required complaints
to be removed from the city’s misconduct database after six months. At
least 40 other municipalities allow for some form of erasure of
disciplinary records, according to a database maintained by the police
accountability organization Campaign Zero.
Some advocates claim this waiting period is nothing more than an opportunity for officers to get their stories straight and escape scrutiny.
And
even if an officer is found in violation of department policies, police
chiefs don’t always have the final word in firing them. Like most labor
union contracts, members have a contractual right to a grievance
process. That process, in most contracts, means that fired officers can
plead their cases in front of an arbitrator, as outlined in state labor
laws. A St. Paul Pioneer-Press investigation found that about 46% of the time arbitrators ruled in favor of fired officers, allowing them to rejoin the force.
Dave Bicking is a community activist with the group Minneapolis for a Better Police Contract
who describes himself as “an old union guy” and a supporter of
officers’ grievance and arbitration rights. He said he’s read chilling
accounts of officer behavior but has agreed with the arbitrator’s
decision to reinstate the officer because the decision hewed to the
rights laid out in the contract.
“Because the city never
disciplines anybody, any discipline is inconsistent with past practice,”
he said, referring to the common practice of basing decisions on past
precedent. “You can’t discipline now because you’ve never disciplined
before. It’s a real Catch-22.”
Ron DeLord, a former Texas state
police union leader and an attorney who has negotiated scores of law
enforcement contracts, said blame for robust officer protections
shouldn’t rest with the unions.“Who hires the police?” DeLord
asked. “Who trains the police? Who writes the policies? Who pays for the
continuing training and who pays the salaries to get the type of people
that you want to be there? Not the union.”
That’s on the cities, DeLord said.
Bicking,
the activist, agrees. He said Minneapolis has shirked responsibility
for reforming the department by hiding behind a contract they’ve done
little to change.
“Always in the past, you bring up anything to
city council and they’re like, ‘Ahhh, we wish we could do that but our
hands are tied by the police contract,’” he said. “And then every three
years, they ratify the exact same language and days later they’re back
to, ‘We can’t do anything.’”
“This kind of inaction is why the city is burning,” Bicking said.
Yet there’s a reason why so many elected officials relent when police
contracts come up for renewal. The unions have political clout —
offering politicians a big voting block of their members and those who
support them. They also raise campaign contributions for elected
officials who support their agenda.The FOP has its own political action committee complete with its own lobbyists to push legislation benefiting police. Local chapters have been political actors, too, pouring $700,000 into a Santa Ana City Council race to unseat a councilor who voted against a pay increase for officers.
In San Francisco, the city’s police officers’ association also spent $700,000 to try to beat former public defender Chesa Boudin,
who successfully ran for district attorney on a progressive agenda.
That union money was almost as much as Boudin had raised for his own campaign.
Police
unions in cities across the country have a force with which few city
officials want to reckon. In Los Angeles, for example, the city is
looking to save $139 million by furloughing 16,000 employees who will
see a 10% pay cut after the coronavirus cratered the economy. But the
mayor won’t back away from a 4.8% LAPD raise that will cost the city
$123 million in the next budget year, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
New York, too, faces a budget shortfall
estimated at $10 billion in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. New
York Mayor Bill de Blasio has proposed chopping 3% from schools while
only cutting the police budget by 0.3%.
Yet the unions’ political power isn’t without its limits.
Activists
in Austin pressured city officials in 2017 to reject a proposed
contract with the police department that didn’t provide enough police
oversight. Through those efforts, the city council voted down the
contract, becoming what’s thought to be the first governing body to do so. The Austin Justice Coalition
pressed the union to cede more ground, including increasing the amount
of time to investigate civilian complaints, an independent oversight
board, and an online complaint system.DeLord, the police union negotiator, was on the other side of the table from the Austin advocates.
Some
of the reforms wanted by advocates remind DeLord of 1969, when he
joined the Beaumont, Texas police. The Supreme Court had recently
decided that police had to read suspects their rights before questioning
them. That line heard time after time in cop shows and movies? “You
have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can be used
against you” is the byproduct of that ruling.
DeLord remembers a sergeant bemoaning that reading those rights signaled “the end of policing.”
The
resistance by some police officers to the changes activists want now
remind DeLord of that Beaumont sergeant and his reaction to the Supreme
Court ruling — that these changes, surely, will be the ones to end
policing.
“We’re entering a new world but it’s a new world that
each generation entered,” he said. “Are we ever going to get to 100%?
Gandhi and Mother Teresa aren’t available ... But it’s an evolution.”
In Minneapolis, Floyd’s death has made the need for that evolution even more urgent.
It comes at a time when the city is in the middle of negotiating a new police contract.
But
neither Bicking nor other activists pressing for more oversight can say
much about those talks. That’s because, earlier this year, the union
asked to move the talks behind closed doors.
The city didn’t oppose it.
