Barriers to police reform

In the wake of George Floyd's killing by a Minneapolis police officer, many voices have cried out for police reform.  Some recent articles detail the difficulty in achieving it.

An early bulls-eye has been painted on police unions as barriers to reform.  This Chicago Tribune article by Dan Hinkel notes some of the union contract rules in Chicago make it difficult for elected officials to hold police accountable:

Four years ago, private citizen Lori Lightfoot led a task force that urged the city of Chicago to rewrite police union contracts to eliminate provisions that make it harder to discipline officers.
Now, Mayor Lightfoot is under increasing pressure to make those changes a reality herself as protests triggered by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis cops have renewed calls to eliminate some police protections here.
At issue are clauses that allow officers to delay giving statements after shooting people, prevent the city from rewarding cops who blow the whistle on misconduct, and discourage people from filing complaints by generally requiring them to give their names.

The existing collective bargaining agreement with the union which represents most Chicago police officers, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), gives a police officer who has shot someone 24 hours before s/he must speak with internal investigators.  And that is not all:

... another rule allows officers to amend their statements after viewing video of an incident, though the wording of the provision is murky. Reform groups summed up their argument against this protection in a 2019 paper.
“This provision, in effect, allows officers to lie as long as they have not reviewed the video or audio recordings, by giving them a consequence-free opportunity to change their statements after being confronted with contrary evidence,” said the Coalition for Police Contracts Accountability, a Chicago-based group of activist organizations and lawyers.
FOP officials say police uses of force often unfold quickly under chaotic, traumatizing circumstances, and the union has defended cops who made statements contradicted by video.

Meanwhile, in Chicago and, I believe, elsewhere, police unions are in no mood to bow to public pressure:

Chicago Fraternal Order of Police leaders vow not to give up disciplinary protections they won over the decades. The union’s president told the Tribune he hopes to expand officers’ rights.

At ProPublica, Eric Umansky doesn't single out unions but looks at other factors in one large urban police department, the New York Police Department, which seem to inhibit justice.  The lessons he learned began with an incident his family witnessed while out trick or treating in his Brooklyn neighborhood this past Halloween:

The police said a group of teenage boys that night had punched and kicked another teenager at a nearby playground and stolen his cellphone. The teen flagged down an officer and was driven around the neighborhood looking for the boys. He pointed out a group, and police descended from different directions. One car sped against traffic until it hit a kid; the boy slid over the hood, hit the ground, and then popped up and ran away along with the others.
The police then turned their attention to a different group of boys. My wife and others said they were younger and didn’t seem to have any connection to the ones who had been running. Except that in both groups, the boys were Black ...
The police lined five of the younger boys against the wall of our neighborhood movie theater and questioned them, shining bright lights that made them wince and turn their heads. The smallest of the boys was crying, saying, “I didn’t do anything.”
My daughter took in the scene. “What did the boys do wrong?” she asked. The family members of a couple of the boys were there. They had all been trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.
The police eventually let the two boys with relatives go and arrested the three others: a 15-year-old, a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old.

Umansky, who has experience as an investigative reporter, took his family home and then went to the local precinct to see what he could learn.  He found the parents of the arrested teens waiting outside the precinct, filled with worry.  After four hours during which the parents weren't permitted to speak with their children, the teens were released.  Umansky notes, "They weren’t given any paperwork or records about what had happened or told the arresting officers’ names."

Foremost in Umansky's mind was the teen who had been hit by a police car.  What would the repercussions be for the driver?  Here is how Umansky describes his efforts:

I felt a sense of kinship with the NYPD’s spokesman, Al Baker. He’s a former journalist. We followed each other on Twitter. Surely, he’d tell me the real deal.
Baker soon called me back. He had looked into it. The boys were being charged with something called “obstructing government administration,” which basically amounts to resisting arrest.
The police hadn’t done anything wrong, Baker said. I don’t know what your wife saw, he explained, but a police car did not hit a kid.
So I went back to my wife and asked her, “Are you sure?” She was sure. It happened right in front of her. Still, memories are fallible. So I went into nearby storefronts and asked if anyone had seen anything the night of Halloween.
“Yeah, I saw a cop car hit a kid,” a waiter told me. He said he had a clear view of it: A handful of kids were running. One of them jumped out into the street and got hit by the police car, “probably going faster than he should have been.” He saw the boy roll over the hood and fall to the ground: “It sounded like when people hit concrete. It made a horrible sound.”
I spoke to four witnesses, including my wife. All of them said they saw the same thing. When I called Baker back, he told me that my wife and the three others were mistaken. The car hadn’t hit the kid. The kid had hit the car.
As his statement put it: “One unknown male fled the scene and ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”

Umansky puts this disturbing instance of revisionist history in the larger context of complaints against NYPD officers, how they are handled, and the outcomes.  He provides an in-depth look at the problems and limitations surrounding the agency which is supposed to be hold police accountable, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB).   Here is his summation:

So that’s how the system works. And this is what comes out of it: In 2018, the CCRB looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days, according to CCRB records.(An additional five officers got a lower level of discipline left to the discretion of their commanding officer.) The most an officer lost was 30 vacation days, for a prohibited chokehold. Another officer wrongly pepper-sprayed someone. He lost one vacation day.

As I say, Umansky doesn't finger the police union as the chief culprit.  In his view, the problems are broadly structural in nature, and go all the way to the top.  He is skeptical about the role of the police commissioner, in the same way that advocates for minors sexually abused by priests are skeptical about the role of the bishop.

Umansky doesn't explain why a police commissioner might favor his own cops over the citizens he is supposed to serve and protect, but some possible reasons spring to mind.  Near the top of the list is that police brass, by and large, come up through the ranks and are immersed in the same culture that forms all police.  In fact, it's possible that the culture is responsible for his rise to the top.

A commissioner who is responsible for negotiating labor peace with the union also has a vested interest in placating the union; labor unrest is a bad look for any government leader.  Also, a police commissioner typically serves at the pleasure of the mayor, who may also have a vested interest in keeping rank and file police voters happy and motivated.

What all these factors have in common, it seems to me, is that they all illustrate that the police themselves are key stakeholders to police reform.  In this, public school teacher unions are a point of reference.  School reform has been tried many times during my lifetime.  Surely the chief lesson from those many attempts is: if the teachers don't support it, it will fail.  It seems tolerably clear that the police are taking a page from the teachers' lesson plan.

The police are very unpopular with protesters these days, and perhaps increasingly with the general public.  But scapegoating all police for George Floyd's death may well turn out to be counterproductive.  It may be that attempts at police reform, to be successful, will require that the police be engaged as partners, rather than as objects of reform.