The People Stopping Police Departments From Addressing Colin Kaepernick’s Protest
Paid leave for officers suspected of misconduct is baked into union rules in many places.
After raising hell with football-loving conservatives by refusing to stand for the national anthem at a Friday preseason game, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick explained over the weekend that police treatment of black people makes it hard to feel patriotic.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL.com on Saturday, invoking specific policy-level frustrations with the state of the law enforcement industry. “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Cops often sit on paid leave while under investigation. The Chicago cop who killed Laquan McDonald was on paid leave for a year before ultimately being charged with murder after a cover-up failed. Paid suspensions are common in everything from corruption scandals to sexual assault allegations to abuse of force investigations.
Paid leave pending investigation sounds like a short-term thing. But it isn’t always. Officer Manuel Avila collected about a million dollars in compensation during a nine-year paid suspension in Paterson, NJ, as police investigators probed sexual assault allegations against him. A Florida officer named Charles Hoeffer sat on paid leave for almost two years while under investigation for sexual assault, before department officials used a technicality to fire him.
These extreme cases are outliers. But open-ended paid leave during disciplinary proceedings isn’t an isolated problem, and is often baked into police union contracts.
Contract language is a harder problem than department policies that allow supervisors discretion to let officers collect checks after scandals, said Campaign Zero data analyst and activist Samuel Sinyangwe.
William Porter, one of six Baltimore City police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray to face trial, will…thinkprogress.org
“If it’s department policy, they can change the policy,” he said. “In Dallas recently for example, in part because of the work of activists on the ground there and some advocacy we’ve been involved with, they recently ended the police that gave officers a 72-hr period after a shooting before they had to give a statement.”
“The chief could change that because it wasn’t embedded in a contract. Otherwise it probably wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
But there are a lot of places where contract language formally restricts accountability for misconduct. In several of the largest cities in the country, unions have enshrined a cop’s right to paid time off while under suspicion of wrongdoing, Campaign Zero found in a review of police union contracts in 81 of the largest cities in America.
In seven of those cities, law enforcement officials have no latitude to dish out unpaid suspensions during investigations. Police unions in Washington, D.C., Tampa, Jacksonville, Baltimore, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis have won contract language prohibiting unpaid suspensions or leave, in one way or another. Officials in four more — Minneapolis, Anaheim, Irvine, and Hialeah, FL — have their hands partly tied on unpaid suspensions.
Unpaid suspensions are illegal across the entire state of Nevada, under the state’s police bill of rights.
And in many more communities where contracts do allow for financial discipline when officers are suspected of wrongdoing, unions have installed a loophole. In 14 of the cities Campaign Zero looked into, police contracts allow officers who get suspended without pay to use accrued off time to get paid anyway.
“There’s no reason to suspect the proportions would be any different for smaller cities,” Sinyangwe said. “Three quarters of the top 100 cities have at least some barrier to accountability.”
In Seattle, where officers recently rejected a contract that included some modest improvements on police accountability, current provisions seem especially likely to undermine the disciplinary force of punishments.
The existing contract there says officers can only use paid time off to pay themselves during a suspension if they’ve been taken off the job for seven days or fewer. But when a Seattle cop gets suspended for longer, she can opt to break that punishment up into multiple seven-day chunks and take accrued time to cover each.
Reform advocates aren’t pushing for a hard-and-fast guarantee that officers across the nation will feel their performance and their pay are automatically linked. Instead, Sinyangwe said, the watchword is flexibility.
“Civilian oversight is really important here. To actually have the power to decide these cases, the flexibility to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it’s appropriate for an officer to continue to receive pay while being suspended,” he said. Rules that set across-the-board limits on disciplinary action foster distrust.
One of the least accountable police forces has its city over a barrel.thinkprogress.org
“Ultimately the public pays the salary of the police officer, and entrusts in the police officer a whole range of powers that ordinary citizens don’t have. If that trust is broken, the community should at least have the power to decide that issue at the time, rather than be limited or blocked from doing so,” said Sinyangwe. Changes to those rules are about shoring up police credibility with the communities they serve.
“Whether it’s the chief or the civilian oversight structure that has that power, I think there should be evaluation on a case by case basis of whether or not it’s ok for an office to continue to get pay for what is oftentimes a breach of department policy.”
The fight for police accountability is far larger than questions of compensation, of course. And like the Movement for Black Lives, 49ers star Kaepernick wants to see significant changes to the systems that produce new police officers as well as those that discipline existing ones.
“You have people that practice law and are lawyers and go to school for eight years, but you can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist,” he said at a press conference Sunday. “Someone that’s holding a curling iron has more education and more training than people that have a gun and are going out on the street to protect us.”