Tulsa police major: Police shoot black people less than we probably should.
Hey, remember way back when Breonna Taylor was shot in her sleep? The Louisville police have released the incident report and… it’s almost completely blank. It does have the ‘no’ box checked for forced entry even though the police used a battering ram to enter the apartment, and lists her injuries as ‘none’ even though she was shot eight times and died in a pool of blood. The sheer gall of police in this country is truly astounding - or maybe they don’t count eight gunshots as an injury, or using a battering ram as forced entry.
I don’t understand Fired Atlanta Officers File Suit Against Mayor, Police Chief
Quote from the article: “The lawsuit alleges that the officers were fired in violation of the city’s code, without investigation, proper notice or a pre-disciplinary hearing”
I’m a cybersecurity guy. I don’t get this protection. Why should cops, who hold the lives of everyone they stop in their hands, get that protection?
You actually do have protection for unlawful termination, but it’s a bit more difficult for you to avail yourself of that. The police generally (always?) have a collective bargaining agreement in place and, yes, the city/county/whatever jurisdiction had damn well better follow that agreement to the letter or the jurisdiction’s taxpayers will be on the hook.
Actually, I don’t. If I assaulted someone and my assault was posted on the Internet, I would be fired. I can be fired for any reason that is not a protected class.
This white woman was repeatedly pulled over by police who mistook her black poodle for a black man.
The police union gets to vote on what these agreements are. If they vote for “protect cops who beat people” it is my absolute right as a citizen of this country to think the police are no better than a gang of thugs who demand the legal right to fuck up anyone they want without reprisal.
And that literally is a protection. Among others. And if you had a negotiated contract that provided more protections, like this individual does, you’d have more. Just like I have salary and benefits above and beyond what the law stipulates.
“Why should?” isn’t a terribly useful contribution, regardless.
Actually, after looking at the linked news story, I went and read the complaint (PDF) in the lawsuit, and the police union’s Collective Bargaining Agreement is not the basis for the suit. It is based on the City Code of the City of Atlanta, which appears to contain a number of provisions regarding how employee discipline and termination are supposed to be handled.
From the suit:
All the “emphasis” stuff is in the original lawsuit.
These assholes need to be off the force, in my opinion, but if they were fired as a result of action by the Mayor and Police Chief, without going through the procedures required by the city code, they might have a case here. It’s probably going to depend, at least in part, on competing claims about what constitutes an “emergency situation,” and whether this case applies, but even then it appears that the Mayor and Police Chief might have jumped the gun a bit.
There is no Collective Bargaining Agreement mentioned in the lawsuit. This isn’t too surprising, because terminations and other actions that violate a CBA are usually handled by negotiation and arbitration before they proceed to a lawsuit. I’m a member of a public sector union, and I’m also a member of my union’s Faculty Rights Committee on my college campus, and if we believe that someone has been disciplined or fired in violation of our CBA, there are appeals processes and arbitration that we go through before any lawsuits get filed.
Actually, as my citation from the lawsuit shows, if you were employed as a cybersecurity guy by the City of Atlanta you would, in fact, have this protection. It does not appear that these city code sections apply only to law enforcement; they apply to all city employees.
Thanks for digging that up. I suppose then the question of whether or not this is good policy remains.
Sounds like the mayor and chief needed to say something like:
Still going to piss folks off, but if they can show that they are actually getting rid of the ‘bad apples’, then some trust may eventually be reestablished.
Yeah, it’s a tough issue.
On the one hand, I look at an incident like this, and my immediate response is that there should be a mechanism by which these cops can be fired immediately, and with no recourse. Some things are bad enough that we shouldn’t need suspensions with pay and weeks-long investigations to determine that bad actors should lose their jobs.
On the other hand, if you don’t have any mechanisms like this in place, you leave open the possibility that workers (not just cops, but other government workers) could be fired based on personality conflicts, or because their supervisor wants to hire a buddy in their place, or because they have the wrong politics. We tend to accept that this sort of thing can happen in private companies, but we also generally require a little more of our government agencies and employers, in terms of due process.
As I said previously, I’m in a public sector union, and there are procedures that have to be followed before a faculty member at my university can be fired. And I know of a range of incidents in which this has happened, all of which involved going through the appropriate investigations and procedures. But while I’ve seen some pretty bad faculty behavior, none of it ever involved violating a person’s basic constitutional rights, and none of it ever involved using a weapon like a taser or a gun or a baton.
Police have more immediate and potentially violent authority over the public, as part of their jobs, than the vast majority of public employees, and I think that it’s appropriate to have special rules in place that allow them to be summarily suspended without pay or dismissed if they violate the public trust in using their authority.
I could live with a system that suspends an officer WITH pay, but that requires repayment of any salary paid out during the suspension if the officer is found guilty of an offense that warrants suspension without pay, or termination.
I live in Louisville. Folks are not happy with the police right now.
I never met Breonna Taylor, but I feel a kind of kinship with her. She was an EMT, a job I did for several years. And my fiancée is a black woman, and at the moment, she’s afraid for the both of us to go out in public together.
But I digress. There’s a lot of outrage concerning Breonna Taylor, and all of it deserved.
Violating the CBA or the city or country codes relating to employee termination is never a good idea. I’m sure many, if not most (Hell, probably all), of us have heard “It’s impossible to fire a federal civil servant”. Nope, it’s not. It’s actually rather easy provided the supervisor substantiates the case with the appropriate paper trail. Just because it’s a pain in the ass to write reports on problem employees does not make it okay to not do your job as a supervisor. Don’t want to do that? Then don’t take the promotion to supervisor.
In my last assignment in the Navy, there was one horrible civil servant. Evidently none of her previous supervisors ever made the appropriate reports regarding her. Then one officer-in-charge on her first day in the unit wrote up the civilian and continued with written disciplinary actions. The day the disciplinary board was set to fire the civilian, that civilian quit when she realized how bad “terminated” would look on her resume. From the new OIC’s write-up of the civilian to the quitting it was only about six weeks total.
The key is to substantiate (“If it isn’t written, it didn’t happen”), and do not do anything at all that is not covered under the CBA/laws relating to employee discipline.
I am a little surprised that US public sector employees seem to be impossible to fire on the spot - summarily dismissed - is that genuinely the case? Seems to me there would be certain instances where summary dismissal can be awarded.
In the UK, the procedure is pretty much the same as Monty outlines, and I would expect there would be an appeals procedure too.
However some actions of public sector employees are so beyond bounds that instant dismissal without pay is the only option - assaulting people, racism, or compromising national security or confidence.
These matters would be classed as ‘gross misconduct’ but pretty much at the extreme end of that standard.
In those extreme cases appeal is possible however events leading to the dismissal a likely to be such that there would not be any grounds for such an appeal.
You know, I don’t really care if a terrible person gets a few extra weeks pay while something is investigated. It’s a problem if it’s not a few weeks, it’s months and months.
Absolutely. The time is more important than the money. For me, that proposal was mainly a compromise, to head off possible concerns about unpaid suspensions leaving people without a paycheck while their cases are adjudicated.
Chicago police union threatens to kick any officer out of the union if they kneel with protesters.