Policing the Police

CWA Tackles Issues Facing Cops and Communities Nationwide

It’s a hot-button topic in communities across the country: Who should police the police? Almost universally, police officers say it’s impossible for anyone outside law enforcement to understand the life-or-death risks and split-second decisions that police work demands.

But when police abuse their powers — when there are allegations of racial harassment, trumped-up charges and excessive use of force — activists say citizens must have a role in holding officers and their departments accountable.

Finding some middle ground isn’t easy. But a provocative forum put on by CWA’s National Coalition of Public Safety Officers in San Diego in September helped police and their critics engage in a healthy debate.

While there were widely different opinions, speakers on both sides said one thing is clear: Whenever a community starts to talk about civilian review, police unions — not just chiefs and administrators — must be involved.

“Law enforcement associations can become part of the solution, one of the parties in resolving issues of community attention,” said District 9 Vice President Tony Bixler, who was once a California police officer.

That’s been the case over the past year in Cincinnati, where rage over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager led to rioting and widespread calls for police reform.

Taking turns at the podium, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer from Cincinnati and the head of the city’s police union described how they worked together to hammer out a reform agreement.

“We asked for the Fraternal Order of Police to be at the table,” lawyer Scott Greenwood said. “We didn’t think we could reach an agreement on reform unless the people who actually do the job were there.”

Roger Webster, president of FOP Lodge No. 69, said he and his officers were defensive at first, cynical about the ACLU’s motives. But both sides learned they had similar goals. “We were on the same page in a lot of matters,” he said. “We wanted fair and equal treatment for everyone — citizens and
cops.”

The two-day conference drew more than 80 people and featured panels on racial profiling and civilian review, in addition to the Cincinnati forum.

About a third of the participants were CWA members, ranging from city police to county sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, corrections officers and parole and probation officers. The CWA coalition represents 20,000 officers in Arizona, Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Maryland, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi and West Virginia.

Coalition Director John Burpo sent invitations to police unions across the country, and said he was extremely pleased with the turnout for the first-of-its-kind event. He’s already thinking about a similar program next year.

“It was a lot more than I expected, both in terms of turnout and content — which was awesome,” Burpo said. “The panels were extraordinary, each in their own way. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.”

While questions from officers to their critics were heated at times, Burpo said the post-conference evaluations indicated that the officers learned a lot from all speakers.

“They unanimously praised the program,” he said. “They said
they gained a lot of insight and they enjoyed having two points of view. It gave them some understanding of how the people they protect think.”

Burpo said future conferences would likely involve even more players. “I’d like to expand it so we not only have the union and the community represented, but also the press, police managers or mayors — someone who has to deal with these issues from the political side.”

Racial Profiling
Statistics lie. Or, at best, they’re misleading.

That was the consensus of law enforcement speakers and their audience at the opening forum on racial profiling. In a well-mannered debate, two veteran CWA police union leaders, Ron DeLord of Texas and Chuck Foy of Arizona, faced off with the Rev. J. Stanley Justice of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey.

Justice argued in favor of having police keep statistics on traffic stops, pointing to a 1999 report by New Jersey’s state police review team charging that troopers were pulling over minorities more often and treating them differently than white citizens. He noted that one African-American doctor driving a Mercedes has been pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike more than 100 times.

“Daily fear, humiliation and degradation is visited upon persons of color who simply wish to do with second thought what other Americans do,” Justice said. “Racial profiling is real, not imaginary, and we’ve got to stamp it out.”

To varying degrees, police acknowledge that profiling is an issue — but not nearly to the extent their critics charge. And keeping statistics isn’t the solution, officers say.

DeLord, the longtime president of CLEAT, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, CWA Local 6911, said numbers are deceptive. Officers assigned to largely minority neighborhoods, for instance, are going to have far higher rates of contact with people of color.

Furthermore, he said the process of taking down information is time-consuming for police and citizens, and can be considered an invasion of privacy. The original proposal to collect data on motorists and pedestrians stopped in Texas would have meant stalling them for five to 10 minutes or more to fill out paperwork, even if they weren’t cited for anything.

The proposal was put forth by lawmakers who wanted a racial profiling bill with criminal penalties for offending officers. But they asked CLEAT for input and ultimately proposed and won passage of a less severe bill. It includes a civil, not criminal, definition of racial profiling and requires officers to compile a small amount of information on traffic stops only.

The data is largely the same information officers collect when they write a traffic ticket but it’s now compiled by agencies and made available to the public free of charge, DeLord said. The information doesn’t reveal anything about stops made by individual officers, only agencies as a whole.

“There was a level of comfort reached for the unions,” he said. “In the end, I could live with the law.”

Although unions opposed the initial bill, DeLord said police are concerned about issues of fairness and equity and showed it by pushing through their own bill requiring departments to provide officers with cultural, ethnic and diversity training.

Foy, president of the Arizona Conference of Police and Sheriffs, CWA Local 7077, said data collection is “a ‘feel good.’ It’s not really a solution.” In Arizona over the last two years, he served on a committee set up by the attorney general to develop a model policy on racial profiling for police agencies.

The policy condemns racial profiling as “unethical and unacceptable” and calls for training and community outreach. Each police agency is to develop its own policy, which may or may not involve keeping statistics.

Foy said whatever the policy, each community’s concerns need to be addressed. Just as citizens count on police for help, police often need citizens’ help, too. “Without citizens making those phone calls, 99 percent of the time we don’t solve the crime. We need their input,” he said.

Citizen Oversight
When it comes to racial profiling, excessive force and even complaints as simple as an officer’s alleged rudeness, many activists believe the answer is civilian review.

A growing number of cities, with mixed results, have established citizen boards in various forms to review complaints against police and weigh in on law enforcement policies.

Even though studies suggest that citizen boards are often less harsh in their decisions than police internal affairs divisions, most police are steadfastly opposed to civilian review.

Sgt. John Rivera, head of Miami’s Dade County Police Benevolent Association, titled his presentation on civilian review, “An Attack on Law Enforcement” and listed 22 levels of scrutiny that police in Miami — and most everywhere — have already.

From officers’ immediate supervisors to an existing city employee review panel, the prosecutor’s office and state and federal criminal courts, Rivera called law enforcement “the most regulated profession” in the country.

Over the past year, Rivera’s PBA launched a multi-pronged campaign to defeat a proposed citizen review panel, using radio talk shows, billboards, booklets and other tools to persuade the county that it wasn’t necessary.

Rivera vented at the ACLU and other citizen activists who fought hard for review. Panelist Will Harrell, executive director of the Texas ACLU, said the antagonism isn’t warranted.

“I’m not sure why you feel so under siege by the ACLU,” Harrell said. “You all have a whole lot more public support than we do and you probably always will. There doesn’t need to be the level of hostility between police and those of us working for reform. We are not the anarchists — they think the ACLU is a sell-out, moderate, mainstream organization.”

While most police strongly believe that no one but fellow officers can understand their jobs, Harrell suggested that police, in their criticism of activists, “don’t necessarily understand civil rights work.”

“We get a lot of pleas for help from police officers,” he said, noting officers who have come to the ACLU over freedom of speech and other issues. “I have the utmost respect for police. We understand that you put your life at risk every day.”

Harrell acknowledged that citizen review boards in many cities haven’t worked as well as activists hoped, many of them with backlogs of cases and too little staff to make them run efficiently.
But he said he believes that it’s still better than no civilian role at all in dealing with complaints and systemic problems in police agencies.

In Austin, Texas, a police monitoring system with a citizen board was created with input from its police union. Mike Sheffeld, president of the Austin Police Association, a unit of CWA Local 6911, didn’t see the need for it at first, but wanted to ensure that police had a role in developing any such oversight.

Sheffield joined the Police Oversight Focus Group to look at developing a system. All parties took their job seriously, as the Austin Chronicle reported in a Sunday magazine cover story that called Sheffield “Austin’s most powerful cop.”

“To widespread shock, the POFG turned out not to be a Punch and Judy show, but as serious and thorough an effort to tackle a complex issue as has lately been seen in Austin,” the story reported.

Sheffield and others visited three California cities, San Jose, San Francisco and Berkeley, to see how their review boards worked. Ultimately, they developed a system using a civilian police monitor to take complaints, which are then investigated by the department’s internal review board.

The seven-member external panel, which goes through the Austin’s citizen police academy and spends at least three days riding with officers in all sectors of the city, can review serious complaints if the department rules they are “unsustained.” Further, the monitor can send other complaints to the panel if they suggest a pattern of misconduct. In any case, all decisions about discipline rest with the police chief.

The monitor and the panel are appointed by the city manager rather than the city council, a decision intended to remove politics from the process as much as possible.

The jury is still out on how well the six-month-old monitoring process will work, but Sheffield is supportive of it — as long as the union has a role.

“Yes, there can be a rational discussion about civilian review,” he said. “But it has to be done at the bargaining table. The union has to have a 50-50 say in the debate.”

Cincinnati Reforms
In Cincinnati, city management and police brass weren’t at all eager to have the police union involved in its process of reform after the 2001 shooting and subsequent riots. It was the ACLU that wanted the line officers on board.

FOP President Webster said managers didn’t want the union to learn too much about problems with training and equipment, among other issues bound to come up in discussions. “The city knew they’d have to do something about it then,” he said.

But the ACLU’s Greenwood said his group knew that no reform pact could be effective without the union involved. Though skeptical at first, union leaders soon saw that their ideas and concerns were being aired. Meanwhile, Greenwood said, “We had to drag the city administration along kicking and screaming.”

The reform group interviewed 8,000 people in Cincinnati and asked them about their goals for the police department and how to achieve them. “What became clear is that African-Americans, the white community and line officers had very similar goals and very similar ideas,” Greenwood said. “Everyone wanted mutual respect, and that drove the reforms we came up with.”

The agreement details a plan for community-oriented policing and sets up a still-pending civilian review panel, whose members will undergo intensive training with officers. About 150 people have applied to be on the board.

Most important to the union, the agreement gives the FOP a clear role in changes in police policy. “Now the city has to consult with all parties in developing new training,” Greenwood said. “If there’s some goofy policy on say, foot pursuits, and it’s not clear enough, it doesn’t go into effect.”

Webster said he was persuaded that the agreement, especially where it gave the union a strong voice, was in his members’ best interest. “Until then, nobody came and said, ‘What do you think about your job?’ They have to ask now.”

City and police managers, recognizing the new powers the agreement would give the union, were largely opposed to it. They were counting on the FOP membership voting down the agreement in spite of the union leadership’s role in creating it. And Webster said they figured they could then publicly blame the union for its failure.

“The mayor went on TV while we were voting and he said, ‘This is going down in flames with the FOP,’” Webster said. The vote was almost 3-1 in favor.

“This was a case where the ACLU and the cops were in agreement,” Webster said. “The city wasn’t enthusiastic, because now we have a part in running the police department.”