Inside the 800-member union's labor contract with the city of Minneapolis, which forms a formidable roadblock to citizens seeking disciplinary action after aggressive encounters with police. Read the special report: by MJBerens1 readelev
In Minneapolis, officers have successfully used the qualified immunity doctrine to win civil lawsuits against them in federal courts. It is difficult to identify all excessive force lawsuits in federal court records, but Reuters found 28 such cases from 2006 through 2018 in which Minneapolis police officers raised a qualified immunity defense. Judges sided with the officers in 15 of those, ending the cases without a jury trial.
In a letter to union members on Monday, Federation president Kroll wrote that he was working with the union’s labor attorneys to get each of the officers reinstated.Since Floyd’s death, the usually outspoken Kroll has said little in public. He did not respond to interview requests from Reuters. In Monday’s letter, he criticized elected leaders for their handling of widespread protests in the wake of Floyd’s death.
“The culture is that when they’re coming into their jobs to police, it’s like they’re going to a war zone,” said Joshua Williams, a human rights attorney in Minneapolis. “That’s the mentality — this is not their community.”The long-running antagonism between the police union and the community has hamstrung efforts by Minneapolis elected officials and reform-minded department leaders to change that mentality, one former chief says.
Such “cooling off” periods are typical of police union contracts across the country, said Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy analyst, and they allow officers to “essentially get their facts right” before talking to the department’s internal investigators. In 2016, she fired Officer Blayne Lehner for violating the department’s use of force policy after video showed him repeatedly throwing a woman to the ground while responding to a domestic disturbance. Over his 18-year career, he had accumulated more than 30 complaints. An arbitrator, concluding that Lehner’s use of force was not “substantially inappropriate,” overturned the chief’s decision and reduced the sanction to a 40-hour suspension without pay.
Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest law enforcement union, said it’s easy to blame union contracts when clashes between police and civilians spark public outrage. But cities have a role in shaping those contracts, too. She said she met resistance “at just about every turn” from the police federation. She said Floyd’s death shows how the culture among Minneapolis rank-and-file discourages intervening when a colleague is out of line.
He also was mentioned in a 2007 discrimination lawsuit filed against the department by five black officers. Among the plaintiffs: Medaria Arradondo, who was then a lieutenant in the force and is now the chief, having succeeded Harteau.
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