Minneapolis police chief ends negotiations with police union

[Cow Poke]

Indeed. You know just as well as I do, that the police also get upset with (actual) police corruption and bad use of force scenarios....it makes us all look bad.

Yeah, I think the "old days" of "never rat out a brother officer" are, for the most part, gone, and most cops recognized that their own credibility is on the line.

[Sparko]

Yeah, I think the "old days" of "never rat out a brother officer" are, for the most part, gone, and most cops recognized that their own credibility is on the line.

I think it is mostly a TV trope. No good officer wants a crooked/racist fellow officer out there. He puts not only the whole department's reputation on the line, but endangers anyone who works with him.

[rogue06]

Minneapolis police chief ends negotiations with police union

This thread is about the Minneapolis POLICE UNION, and may spill over into other POLICE UNION topics.

I know I sound like a broken record on POLICE UNIONS, but I think that's a YUGE part of reforming police departments --- apparently so does Minneapolis' Police Chief.

Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced on Wednesday that he would withdraw from contract negotiations with the force’s police union in an effort to kick-start reform amid criticism over the police killing of George Floyd.

The move comes amid heightened awareness of the role police unions sometimes play in stifling reform efforts that aim to combat police brutality.

“I plan to bring in subject matter experience and advisers to conduct a thorough review of how the contract can be restructured to provide greater community transparency and more flexibility for true reform,” Arradondo said at a news conference in Minneapolis, expressing a desire to examine the department’s disciplinary process and use of force guidelines.

Arradondo also said the department would put in place systems that would allow leaders to identify early warning signs of police misconduct.

Speaking at a news conference later Wednesday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey backed Arradondo's decision to pull out of negotiations.

"He's the right person to lead our department through a full-on cultural shift and restructure the terms of the way that our Minneapolis Police Department does business," Frey said. "Chief Arradondo's decision to withdraw from the union contract negotiations is the right one. It shows courage, it shows integrity, and he has my full support."

The police chief’s announcement followed nationwide calls for an end to racial injustice in policing sparked by the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer.

On Sunday, the Minneapolis City Council announced a veto-proof majority of its members would vote to dismantle the city's police department. But Arradondo vowed the department would continue to ensure the safety of city residents until another system was in place.

"Our elected officials certainly can engage in those conversations, but until there is a robust plan that reassures the safety of our residents, I will not leave them,” Arradondo said.

Arradondo, who in 2017 became the department’s first African American leader, said race is “inextricably a part of the American policing system.”

“We will never evolve in this profession if we do not address it head on. Communities of color have paid the heaviest of costs, and that is with their lives,” Arradondo said. “And our children must be safeguarded from ever having to contribute to the horrific and shameful chapter of this country's history."

Speaking of police unions, I thought you might be interested.

From a piece in the New Yorker^[1] 'News Desk' section:

Source: How Police-Union Power Helped Increase Abuses

Police unions have long had a singular—and divisive—place in American labor. What is different at this fraught moment, however, is that these unions, long considered untouchable, due to their extraordinary power on the streets and among politicians, face a potential reckoning, as their conduct roils not just one city but the entire nation. Since the nineteen-sixties, when police unions first became like traditional unions and won the right to bargain collectively, they have had a controversial history. And recent studies suggest that their political and bargaining power has enabled them to win disciplinary systems so lax that they have helped increase police abuses in the United States.

A 2018 University of Oxford study of the hundred largest American cities found that the extent of protections in police contracts was directly and positively correlated with police violence and other abuses against citizens. A 2019 University of Chicago study found that extending collective-bargaining rights to Florida sheriffs’ deputies led to a forty per cent statewide increase in cases of violent misconduct—translating to nearly twelve additional such incidents annually.

In a forthcoming study, Rob Gillezeau, a professor and researcher, concluded that, from the nineteen-fifties to the nineteen-eighties, the ability of police to collectively bargain led to a substantial rise in police killings of civilians, with a greater impact on people of color. “With the caveat that this is very early work,” Gillezeau wrote on Twitter, on May 30th, “it looks like collective bargaining rights are being used to protect the ability of officers to discriminate in the disproportionate use of force against the non-white population.”

Other studies revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police are toothless. WBEZ, a Chicago radio station, found that, between 2007 and 2015, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority investigated four hundred shootings by police and deemed the officers justified in all but two incidents. Since 2012, when Minneapolis replaced its civilian review board with an Office of Police Conduct Review, the public has filed more than twenty-six hundred misconduct complaints, yet only twelve resulted in a police officer being punished. The most severe penalty: a forty-hour suspension. When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from 2014 to 2019, it discovered that arbitrators ruled in favor of the discharged police and corrections officers and ordered them reinstated forty-six per cent of the time. (Non-law-enforcement workers were reinstated at a similar rate.) For those demanding more accountability, a large obstacle is that disciplinary actions are often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty the department meted out is tougher than it was in a similar, previous case—no matter if the penalty in the previous case seemed far too lenient.

To critics, all of this highlights that the disciplinary process for law enforcement is woefully broken, and that police unions have far too much power. They contend that robust protections, including qualified immunity, give many police officers a sense of impunity—an attitude exemplified by Derek Chauvin keeping his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, even as onlookers pleaded with him to stop. “We’re at a place where something has to change, so that police collective bargaining no longer contributes to police violence,” Benjamin Sachs, a labor-law professor at Harvard, told me. Sachs said that bargaining on “matters of discipline, especially related to the use of force, has insulated police officers from accountability, and that predictably can increase the problem.”

For decades, members of the public have complained about police violence and police unions, and a relatively recent development—mobile-phone videos—has sparked even more public anger. These complaints grew with the killings of Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and many others. Each time, there were protests and urgent calls for police reform, but the matter blew over. Until the horrific killing of George Floyd.

Historians often talk of two distinct genealogies for policing in the North and in the South, and both help to explain the crisis that the police and its unions find themselves in today. Northern cities began to establish police departments in the eighteen-thirties; by the end of the century, many had become best known for using ruthless force to crush labor agitation and strikes, an aim to which they were pushed by the industrial and financial élite. In 1886, the Chicago police killed four strikers and injured dozens more at the McCormick Reaper Works. In the South, policing has very different roots: slave patrols, in which white men brutally enforced slave codes, checking to see whether black people had proper passes whenever they were off their masters’ estates and often beating them if they did something the patrols didn’t like. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a historian at Harvard, said that the patrols “were explicit in their design to empower the entire white population” to control “the movements of black people.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, many police officers—frustrated, like other workers, with low pay and long hours—formed fraternal associations, rather than unions, to seek better conditions—mayors and police commissioners insisted that the police had no more right to join a union than did soldiers and sailors. In 1897, a group of Cleveland police officers sought to form a union and petitioned the American Federation of Labor—founded in 1886, with Samuel Gompers as its first president—to grant them a union charter. The A.F.L. rejected them, saying, “It is not within the province of the trade union movement to especially organize policemen, no more than to organize militiamen, as both policemen and militiamen are often controlled by forces inimical to the labor movement.”

After the First World War, millions of workers began protesting that their wages lagged far behind inflation, and many police officers got swept up in the ferment. In 1919, Boston’s city police applied to the A.F.L. for a charter; they were angry about their meagre salaries and having to pay hundreds of dollars for uniforms. The police commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis, forbade his officers from joining any outside organization other than patriotic groups, such as the American Legion. The police proceeded to unionize, and Curtis suspended nineteen of the union’s leaders for insubordination. When most of the city’s fifteen hundred police officers walked off the job, rioting and widespread looting engulfed the city. Curtis fired eleven hundred strikers, and Calvin Coolidge, who was then the governor of Massachusetts, supported his hard line, saying, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Coolidge’s stance thrust him into the national spotlight. He went on to serve as Vice-President and President.

For decades, that stance deterred police unionization. But, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, with private-sector unions winning middle-class wages and solid benefits for millions of workers, police officers again started rumbling for a union. Their fraternal orders weren’t doing enough; the police wanted collective bargaining. Officers became increasingly impatient, and militant. In the early sixties, police engaged in a work slowdown in New York and a sit-in in Detroit.

In 1964, New York’s mayor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., blessed a compromise between his police commissioner and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. The P.B.A. renounced the right to strike and was recognized as the bargaining agent for the city’s police. Wagner had previously agreed to bargain with other municipal unions, but he had held off with the police, because of its singular role and of fears that officers might strike. (The National Labor Relations Act of 1935—sponsored by Wagner’s father, Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr.—gave most private-sector workers a federal right to unionize and collectively bargain, but left it up to individual states and cities to decide whether to grant the same rights to government employees.) As a full-fledged union, the P.B.A. didn’t wait long to declare war against any push for increased accountability. In 1966, New York’s new mayor, John V. Lindsay, after being pressed by the Congress of Racial Equality, added four civilian members to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board; the original three members were deputy police commissioners. Then, as now, many African-Americans complained about police misconduct. The P.B.A., which renamed itself the Police Benevolent Association last year, bitterly resisted adding civilians to the board. When the City Council held a hearing on civilian review, the union mounted a five-thousand-member picket line in protest. The P.B.A. then organized a public referendum aimed at eliminating the board. It put up posters showing a young white woman exiting a subway and heading onto a dark, deserted street. “The Civilian Review Board must be stopped,” the poster read. “Her life . . . your life . . . may depend on it. . . . [A] police officer must not hesitate. If he does . . . the security and safety of your family may be jeopardized.” As the vote approached, the P.B.A.’s president, John Cassese, had played on racial divisions, declaring, “I’m sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting.” Lindsay, the American Civil Liberties Union, and New York’s two senators—the Republican Jacob Javits and the Democrat Robert F. Kennedy—opposed the P.B.A.-backed referendum. In a humbling defeat for liberals, sixty-three per cent of New Yorkers voted to abolish the review board.



Source

© Copyright Original Source

That's a little over half of the article. If you want the rest, click the link provided above.












1. A decidedly liberal publication (HERE and HERE as well)

[Cow Poke]

Speaking of police unions, I thought you might be interested.

From a piece in the New Yorker^[1] 'News Desk' section:

Source: How Police-Union Power Helped Increase Abuses

Police unions have long had a singular—and divisive—place in American labor. What is different at this fraught moment, however, is that these unions, long considered untouchable, due to their extraordinary power on the streets and among politicians, face a potential reckoning, as their conduct roils not just one city but the entire nation. Since the nineteen-sixties, when police unions first became like traditional unions and won the right to bargain collectively, they have had a controversial history. And recent studies suggest that their political and bargaining power has enabled them to win disciplinary systems so lax that they have helped increase police abuses in the United States.

A 2018 University of Oxford study of the hundred largest American cities found that the extent of protections in police contracts was directly and positively correlated with police violence and other abuses against citizens. A 2019 University of Chicago study found that extending collective-bargaining rights to Florida sheriffs’ deputies led to a forty per cent statewide increase in cases of violent misconduct—translating to nearly twelve additional such incidents annually.

In a forthcoming study, Rob Gillezeau, a professor and researcher, concluded that, from the nineteen-fifties to the nineteen-eighties, the ability of police to collectively bargain led to a substantial rise in police killings of civilians, with a greater impact on people of color. “With the caveat that this is very early work,” Gillezeau wrote on Twitter, on May 30th, “it looks like collective bargaining rights are being used to protect the ability of officers to discriminate in the disproportionate use of force against the non-white population.”

Other studies revealed that many existing mechanisms for disciplining police are toothless. WBEZ, a Chicago radio station, found that, between 2007 and 2015, Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority investigated four hundred shootings by police and deemed the officers justified in all but two incidents. Since 2012, when Minneapolis replaced its civilian review board with an Office of Police Conduct Review, the public has filed more than twenty-six hundred misconduct complaints, yet only twelve resulted in a police officer being punished. The most severe penalty: a forty-hour suspension. When the St. Paul Pioneer Press reviewed appeals involving terminations from 2014 to 2019, it discovered that arbitrators ruled in favor of the discharged police and corrections officers and ordered them reinstated forty-six per cent of the time. (Non-law-enforcement workers were reinstated at a similar rate.) For those demanding more accountability, a large obstacle is that disciplinary actions are often overturned if an arbitrator finds that the penalty the department meted out is tougher than it was in a similar, previous case—no matter if the penalty in the previous case seemed far too lenient.

To critics, all of this highlights that the disciplinary process for law enforcement is woefully broken, and that police unions have far too much power. They contend that robust protections, including qualified immunity, give many police officers a sense of impunity—an attitude exemplified by Derek Chauvin keeping his knee on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, even as onlookers pleaded with him to stop. “We’re at a place where something has to change, so that police collective bargaining no longer contributes to police violence,” Benjamin Sachs, a labor-law professor at Harvard, told me. Sachs said that bargaining on “matters of discipline, especially related to the use of force, has insulated police officers from accountability, and that predictably can increase the problem.”

For decades, members of the public have complained about police violence and police unions, and a relatively recent development—mobile-phone videos—has sparked even more public anger. These complaints grew with the killings of Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and many others. Each time, there were protests and urgent calls for police reform, but the matter blew over. Until the horrific killing of George Floyd.

Historians often talk of two distinct genealogies for policing in the North and in the South, and both help to explain the crisis that the police and its unions find themselves in today. Northern cities began to establish police departments in the eighteen-thirties; by the end of the century, many had become best known for using ruthless force to crush labor agitation and strikes, an aim to which they were pushed by the industrial and financial élite. In 1886, the Chicago police killed four strikers and injured dozens more at the McCormick Reaper Works. In the South, policing has very different roots: slave patrols, in which white men brutally enforced slave codes, checking to see whether black people had proper passes whenever they were off their masters’ estates and often beating them if they did something the patrols didn’t like. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a historian at Harvard, said that the patrols “were explicit in their design to empower the entire white population” to control “the movements of black people.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, many police officers—frustrated, like other workers, with low pay and long hours—formed fraternal associations, rather than unions, to seek better conditions—mayors and police commissioners insisted that the police had no more right to join a union than did soldiers and sailors. In 1897, a group of Cleveland police officers sought to form a union and petitioned the American Federation of Labor—founded in 1886, with Samuel Gompers as its first president—to grant them a union charter. The A.F.L. rejected them, saying, “It is not within the province of the trade union movement to especially organize policemen, no more than to organize militiamen, as both policemen and militiamen are often controlled by forces inimical to the labor movement.”

After the First World War, millions of workers began protesting that their wages lagged far behind inflation, and many police officers got swept up in the ferment. In 1919, Boston’s city police applied to the A.F.L. for a charter; they were angry about their meagre salaries and having to pay hundreds of dollars for uniforms. The police commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis, forbade his officers from joining any outside organization other than patriotic groups, such as the American Legion. The police proceeded to unionize, and Curtis suspended nineteen of the union’s leaders for insubordination. When most of the city’s fifteen hundred police officers walked off the job, rioting and widespread looting engulfed the city. Curtis fired eleven hundred strikers, and Calvin Coolidge, who was then the governor of Massachusetts, supported his hard line, saying, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.” Coolidge’s stance thrust him into the national spotlight. He went on to serve as Vice-President and President.

For decades, that stance deterred police unionization. But, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, with private-sector unions winning middle-class wages and solid benefits for millions of workers, police officers again started rumbling for a union. Their fraternal orders weren’t doing enough; the police wanted collective bargaining. Officers became increasingly impatient, and militant. In the early sixties, police engaged in a work slowdown in New York and a sit-in in Detroit.

In 1964, New York’s mayor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., blessed a compromise between his police commissioner and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. The P.B.A. renounced the right to strike and was recognized as the bargaining agent for the city’s police. Wagner had previously agreed to bargain with other municipal unions, but he had held off with the police, because of its singular role and of fears that officers might strike. (The National Labor Relations Act of 1935—sponsored by Wagner’s father, Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr.—gave most private-sector workers a federal right to unionize and collectively bargain, but left it up to individual states and cities to decide whether to grant the same rights to government employees.) As a full-fledged union, the P.B.A. didn’t wait long to declare war against any push for increased accountability. In 1966, New York’s new mayor, John V. Lindsay, after being pressed by the Congress of Racial Equality, added four civilian members to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board; the original three members were deputy police commissioners. Then, as now, many African-Americans complained about police misconduct. The P.B.A., which renamed itself the Police Benevolent Association last year, bitterly resisted adding civilians to the board. When the City Council held a hearing on civilian review, the union mounted a five-thousand-member picket line in protest. The P.B.A. then organized a public referendum aimed at eliminating the board. It put up posters showing a young white woman exiting a subway and heading onto a dark, deserted street. “The Civilian Review Board must be stopped,” the poster read. “Her life . . . your life . . . may depend on it. . . . [A] police officer must not hesitate. If he does . . . the security and safety of your family may be jeopardized.” As the vote approached, the P.B.A.’s president, John Cassese, had played on racial divisions, declaring, “I’m sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting.” Lindsay, the American Civil Liberties Union, and New York’s two senators—the Republican Jacob Javits and the Democrat Robert F. Kennedy—opposed the P.B.A.-backed referendum. In a humbling defeat for liberals, sixty-three per cent of New Yorkers voted to abolish the review board.



Source

© Copyright Original Source

That's a little over half of the article. If you want the rest, click the link provided above.












1. A decidedly liberal publication (HERE and HERE as well)

Yeah, Police Unions are becoming quite the problem --- the left LOVES unions -- except these ones, but they can't speak out against them, so they have to pretend they don't exist.

[mikewhitney]

Didn't various unions get taken over by the mob? What happens when the police union is taken over by the mob?

[Cow Poke]

Didn't various unions get taken over by the mob? What happens when the police union is taken over by the mob?

It is legend that a number of unions are part of mob operations.

Mafia/Union Ties Still Strong

It was the Teamsters Union that wanted to "organize" the Police Department where I served, but they were voted down.
The THREE officers who were trying so hard to unionize us were the classic "bad apples", and shortly thereafter, were no longer with the Department.

[Cow Poke]

Didn't various unions get taken over by the mob? What happens when the police union is taken over by the mob?

It is very desirable for the mob to control the police unions, because the officers become incentivized to "look the other way" when the protection rackets and other organized crime operate.

[mikewhitney]

It is very desirable for the mob to control the police unions, because the officers become incentivized to "look the other way" when the protection rackets and other organized crime operate.

I heard (maybe from a city police chief's son) that certain let's call them shady people were not to be pulled over for traffic stops. The son as much, as I understand it, worked as body guard for the shady people.

Note that this is not a request to defund police. It just means that the world is not always as simple as we would like it to be.

[Cow Poke]

I heard (maybe from a city police chief's son) that certain let's call them shady people were not to be pulled over for traffic stops. The son as much, as I understand it, worked as body guard for the shady people.

When I was PD, I talked to a good friend of mine about switching to the Sheriff's Office, and he told me "you don't wanna do that". He showed me a list of names of persons he was not allowed to arrest, because they were either "special donors" or "persons of influence".

More than a few times, Ron had to drive a drunk home rather than arrest him for DUI, because his name was "on the list".

Note that this is not a request to defund police. It just means that the world is not always as simple as we would like it to be.

It's really not - and it's hard to find people of good solid moral character who want to put up with the crap of having to reform a stinking mess.

[Thoughtful Monk]

I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.



I'd be interested if you hear anything else on this.

So, the liberals are at odds with THEMSELVES --- it's the LIBERALS who are so "Union friendly" and it's the UNIONS that prevent reform!

There is now a local group trying to defund (or at least majorly slash the budget) but they don't seem to be getting anywhere with our mayor or city council. I was a little surprised to read in the local paper that some council members were getting feedback that people didn't want changes to how the police act.

[whag]

When I was PD, I talked to a good friend of mine about switching to the Sheriff's Office, and he told me "you don't wanna do that". He showed me a list of names of persons he was not allowed to arrest, because they were either "special donors" or "persons of influence".

More than a few times, Ron had to drive a drunk home rather than arrest him for DUI, because his name was "on the list".

Maybe systemic problems like this should have been addressed earlier before anger boiled over into the streets.

Oh wait, “bad apples.” Just a few bad apples.

[Cow Poke]

Maybe systemic problems like this should have been addressed earlier before anger boiled over into the streets.

The one I cited was addressed long ago.

Oh wait, “bad apples.” Just a few bad apples.

Do you play the lottery?

[Cow Poke]

There is now a local group trying to defund (or at least majorly slash the budget) but they don't seem to be getting anywhere with our mayor or city council. I was a little surprised to read in the local paper that some council members were getting feedback that people didn't want changes to how the police act.

I think this whole anarchy thing is changing the minds of a lot of people. It's showing the extreme left for who they are, and to what extent they will go.

I really think it's too bad that Trump can't seem to play the winning hand that is being delivered to him on a silver platter.

[Thoughtful Monk]

Maybe systemic problems like this should have been addressed earlier before anger boiled over into the streets.

Oh wait, “bad apples.” Just a few bad apples.

That might be the reason it's different here is that the bad apples were dealt with. We had some incidents about 5 years ago and apparently the police and the community worked out a better system.

[Thoughtful Monk]

I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

I'd be interested if you hear anything else on this.

Yesterday, the announced a community group to reform the local police in the county. I like the fact that the city police chief and county sheriff both have a seat at the table. I think this is a sign it will be a negotiated solution and not an imposed solution. They have an aggressive timeline but it's still going to take 2 years with the goal of ushering in community policing. I think this is good and I hope everyone will be patient while this is worked through.