The term of the latest contract between the city of Chicago and the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, the union that represents some 12,000 rank-and-file officers in the Chicago Police Department, expired on June 30. The city and the union are now supposed to be negotiating the next contract, but because the process is confidential it’s impossible to say where these negotiations currently stand. Until a new contract is agreed upon and ratified, first by the FOP membership and then by the City Council, the terms of the previous contract remain in force.
There are also more financially oriented recommendations from the city’s inspector general, which include reconsidering whether cops should still be allowed to cash in overtime collected over the course of their service upon retirement, and at their retirement pay rate instead of the pay rate when they worked the overtime—a practice that has created a nearly $260 million liability for the city. OIG also recommended that cops be required to disclose secondary employment, like all other city workers and even civilian employees of the police department. As recently reported by the Chicago Reporter, cops have exposed the city to litigation for alleged conduct while moonlighting on at least four occasions since 2011, costing taxpayers more than $100,000. Moonlighting can also negatively impact police officers’ performance while on duty and further put the city at legal and financial risk and citizens in harm’s way.
“This process is designed to make people not want to use it,” Briggs says. “It’s a substitute for the strike.” And as with a strike, there are significant drawbacks to interest arbitration, as well as significant benefits.
The arbitrator’s decision making on disputed contract provisions with public safety employees is guided by the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act, which states that an arbitrator has to consider seven basic criteria as he or she evaluates the union’s and city’s proposals. These include the city’s ability to pay for any given contract obligation, the contract terms of similarly employed people within the city and outside of it, and what is ultimately in the public’s best interest.
“The record is replete with other examples of very visible public sentiment in support of police disciplinary reform,” Briggs wrote. But he then went on to say that “retaining ‘not sustained’ complaints and using them to make future discipline decisions seems fundamentally unfair in some if not the majority of cases. After all, and as the Lodge persuasively argued, such a finding means there was not sufficient evidence to prove the officer did anything wrong.”
