Showing posts with label unions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unions. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Police reform shines light on disciplinary records

CC0 Pixabay via picryl
A favorable reform to follow the police protest movement of recent years, stemming in particular from the killing of George Floyd, has been transparency around police disciplinary dispositions.

There is room for disagreement over what police reform should look like. I'm of the opinion that it costs society more to have police managing economic and social problems, such as homelessness and mental health, than it would cost to tackle those problems directly with appropriately trained personnel. I wouldn't "defund" police per se, but I would allocate public resources in efficient proportion to the problems they're supposed to remedy. We might not need as much prison infrastructure if we spent smarter on education, job training, and recreation.

Regardless of where one comes down on such questions, there is no down-side to transparency around police discipline. Police unions have cried privacy, a legitimate interest, especially in the early stages of allegation and investigation. But when official disciplinary action results, privacy should yield to accountability. 

Freedom-of-information (FOI) law is well experienced at balancing personnel-record access with personal-privacy exemption. Multistate FOI norms establish the flexible principle that a public official's power and authority presses down on the access side. Because police have state power to deprive persons of liberty and even life, privacy must yield to access more readily than it might for other public employees.

In September 2023, Stateline, citing the National Conference on State Legislatures, reported that "[b]etween May 2020 and April 2023, lawmakers in nearly every state and [D.C.] introduced almost 500 bills addressing police investigations and discipline, including providing access to disciplinary records." Sixty-five enacted bills then included transparency measures in California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York.

The Massachusetts effort has come to fruition in online publication of a remarkable data set. Legislation in 2020 created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission. On the POST Commission website, one can download a database of 4,570 law enforcement disciplinary dispositions going back 30 years. There is a form to request correction of errors. The database, at the time of this writing last updated December 22, 2023, can be downloaded in a table by officer last name or by law enforcement agency, or in a CSV file of raw data.

The data are compelling. There are plenty of minor matters that can be taken at face value. For example, one Springfield police officer was ordered to "Retraining" for "Improper firearm usage or storage." I don't see that as impugning the officer, rather as an appropriately modest corrective and a positive for Springfield police. Many dispositions similarly suggest a minor matter and proportional response, for example, "Written Warning or Letter of Counseling" for "conduct unbecoming"/"Neglect of Duty."

Then there are serious matters. The data indicate termination of a police officer after multiple incidents in 2021, including "DRINKING ON DUTY, PRESCRIPTION PILL ABUSE, AND MARIJUANA USE," as well as "POSING IN A HITLER SALUTE." Again, it's a credit to the police department involved that the officer is no longer employed there. Imagine if such disciplinary matters were secreted in the interest of personal privacy, and there were not a terminal disposition.

The future of the POST Commission is to be determined. It's being buffeted by forces in both directions. Apropos of my observation above, transparency is not a cure-all and does not remedy the problem of police being charged with responsibility for social issues beyond the purview of criminal justice.

Lisa Thurau of the Cambridge-based Strategies for Youth told GBH in May 2023 that clarity is still needed around the role and authority of police in interacting with students in schools. Correspondingly, she worried whether the POST Commission, whose membership includes a chaplain and a social worker, is adequately funded to fulfill its broad mandate, which includes police training on deescalation.

Pushing the other way, the POST Commission was sued in 2022, GBH reported, by police unions and associations that alleged, ironically, secret rule-making in violation of state open meetings law. Certainly I agree that the commission should model compliance in rule-making. But I suspect that the union strategy is simply obstruction: strain commission resources and impede accountability however possible. Curious that the political left supports both police unions and police protestors.

WNYC has online a superb 50-state survey of police-disciplinary-record access law, classifying the states as "confidential," "limited," or "public." Massachusetts is among 15 states in the "limited" category. My home state of Rhode Island and my bar jurisdictions of Maryland and D.C. are among the 24 jurisdictions in the "confidential" category.

"Sunshine State" Florida is among 12 states in the "public" category. In a lawsuit by the Tallahassee Police Benevolent Association, the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously in November 2023 that Marsy's Law, a privacy law enacted to protect crime victims, does not shield the identity of police officers in misconduct matters. (E.g., Tallahassee Democrat.)

Saturday, September 2, 2023

Saturday, April 15, 2023

Students join labor demands for living wage at RISD

(UPDATE, April 18: Labor and RISD reached a tentative agreement, Wazlavek tweeted last night.)

The Rhode Island School of Design—famous alumni include Seth MacFarlane, BFA '95 (Family Guy, The Orville)—has lately been embroiled in a labor dispute.

I saw, and heard, protestors yesterday morning when I drove to the nearby Providence Amtrak station. They made plenty of noise, yet in an artsy, celebratory way. You really don't want to mess with creative types. With faculty support, students are demonstrating alongside custodians.

An attorney-alum of my torts and comparative law classes is working on the matter from the Teamsters side. Aaron Wazlavek (SSRN) has been on site this week.  (Video NSFW: adult language. That's just how labor rolls.)

According to arts independent Hyperallergic, "[c]urrently, the average wage of a RISD custodian, groundskeeper, or mover is $16.74 per hour. The lowest wage is $15.30. Teamsters Local 251 has fought for a $20 minimum wage ...."

The living wage for one adult with no children in Providence County, Rhode Island, is $17.42/hr., according to the MIT calculator.  The minimum wage in Rhode Island is $13/hr.

In March, New York University law students made headlines demanding a choice between credit hours and an hourly wage for work on law review. 

The New York students have a point. I've long been critical of unpaid internships. Nowadays, U.S. law schools require free labor in many guises. Call it "field placement," "externship," "pro bono"—even new lawyers are expected to "volunteer" before they can get paying jobs. It's all subversion of the simple principle that one should be paid for one's work. Corporations and employers delight in pushing American work-life balance in the wrong direction. The legal education system and accrediting American Bar Association are complicit.

The set rate for student labor—when we pay in real money; I just hired a research assistant for the fall—at UMass Law in south-coast Massachusetts is $15/hr. The living wage for one adult with no children in Bristol County, Massachusetts, is $17.88, according to the MIT calculator.

Latest reports suggest that RISD and labor will find a middle ground between $15 and $20. I hope it's at least halfway.

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Student comment calls on police unions to do their part for accountability reform, revelation of truth

Michelle M.K. Hatfield, an alum of my Torts I-II classes, has published a comment, Can Police Unions Help Change American Policing?  

This comment nicely links the need for police accountability with the right to truth, a theme better known in post-apartheid South Africa than in American policing, and suggests that police unions could do more to stimulate socially constructive reform.  Here is the abstract:

Police unions are part of the problem in American policing. Could police unions also be part of the solution? This Comment begins by putting into practice the dialectic we must achieve at a societal level by detailing the ways in which police and Black Americans have been positioned to be in conflict from the seventeenth century to the present, and by discussing the formation of police unions. American society needs truth-telling about the history and present context that drives police officers into deadly conflict with Black Americans to heal, trust, and effectuate a more perfect system for public safety. This Comment wrestles with the need to understand several truths at once: that police organized into unions in part to protect the rank-and-file from managerial abuse; that the American policing system is in many ways designed and implemented against Black Americans; that police unions organized in the Civil Rights Era to protect police officers from discipline for following orders; and that deep, structural change should include police unions. Less fundamental changes that leave in place the core of American policing, without examining its racist foundations and incentives toward brutality and lethal force, will not serve to bring about lasting reconciliation. This Comment reviews several ways to improve the management of police departments put forth by labor and policing scholars and suggests that the promise of such reforms could motivate participation in a truth process. The conversation about policing reform in the United States has expanded and deepened tremendously in the past year, and it continues to evolve and take on new dimensions. This Comment urges policymakers to create a truth process as part of police reform and suggests that the process be implemented via the police unions because the voices of police organizations that represent rank-and-file officers are a critical ingredient for meaningful change.

Needless to say, police accountability has become a recurring theme and point of student interest in my courses, including Torts and Freedom of Information Law.  Ms. Hatfield gave me and my law-librarian-extraordinaire spouse Misty Peltz-Steele the privilege of feeding back on this article prior to submission for publication, but that's me riding coattails.  Ms. Hatfield prepared this superb paper principally upon her own impressive initiative and in ample fulfillment of the paper requirement of a popular course in labor law taught by my colleague in public policy, Professor Mark Paige.

The comment appears in the UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review, 2021:211.