THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE IS NOT A UNION!

IT IS A FRATERNAL ORDER 

 LIKE THE KU KLUX KLAN IT ORIGINATED AS A  WHITE COP ONLY INITIATORY SECRET SOCIETY TO PURSUE ITS CAMPAIGNS AGAINST BLACKS, ANARCHISTS, HOMOSEXUALS, MIGRANTS, CHINESE, PUERTO RICANS ETC., ETC. 

 IT IS THE SOURCE OF POLICE BRUTALITY AND VIOLENCE, WHICH IT USES LIKE THE KLAN BUT WITH THE PROTECTION OF A COP BADGE. 


FOP NEEDS TO BE ABOLISHED IT IS PART OF THE PROBLEM!!!!

HISTORICALLY IT IS ALIGNED WITH THE REPUBLICANS AND THE FAR RIGHT 


Perhaps the biggest gift was delivered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in person at the FOP’s annual convention in August. Sessions was the event’s keynote speaker and announced there that Trump would sign an executive order restoring the 1033 program, which gives local police departments surplus military equipment including bayonets, tanks, and grenade launchers. "We have your back and you have our thanks," Sessions told the crowd. According to news reports, the audience reacted “with roaring cheers.” (2017)

COMMENTARY
Why the Fraternal
Order of Police Must Go
The nation’s largest police organization
does more harm to public safety than good.

PAUL BUTLER

“A PACK OF RABID ANIMALS.” That’s how John McNesby, president of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, described local Black Lives Matter activists who picketed outside the home of a Philly cop who shot black suspects in the back on two separate occasions. After the officer was suspended, the local FOP had a fundraiser for him, with proceeds from the $40-per-ticket event going toward the officer’s living expenses.
This commentary was published in collaboration with The Nation.

McNesby made the remarks at a Back the Blue rally in August and caught heat for his choice of words. It wasn’t the first time. Another Philly cop made headlines last year for having a tattoo of a spread-winged eagle under the word “Fatherland.” McNesby defended the cop’s apparent shout out to the official emblem of the Nazi Party, saying the tattoo was “not a big deal.”

In my book “Chokehold: Policing Black Men,” I argue that the U.S. criminal justice system is premised on the control of black men and that this fact explains some of its most problematic features—mass incarceration, the erosion of civil liberties, brutal policing, and draconian sentences. The behavior of McNesby, and FOP leadership more broadly, further supports my claim.

Even as law enforcement has become more racially diverse, the FOP seems committed to putting white men in charge. Those leaders consistently take stances against the safety and rights of black Americans. As a result, the organization serves as a union cum fraternity for white cops and has a retrograde effect on policing, especially as it relates to civil rights.

The FOP is the nation’s largest police association, boasting more than 300,000 members belonging to its 2,000 or so local chapters—some of which are unions and others which are simply fraternal organizations. There’s also a national FOP that lobbies on various issues pertaining to law enforcement and labor.

The FOP’s national leadership consists of seven white men. Such a lack of diversity is striking in an organization that claims 30 percent of its members are officers of color. And many local chapters appear to be run by white cops—even in cities with police forces that are predominantly of color.

Baltimore’s police department, for example, is 44 percent black, but its FOP has never had a black leader. The D.C. FOP chapter board is mainly white, even though the Metropolitan Police Department is predominately black. The Chicago FOP has no black officers on the executive leadership team. Neither does the nine-member executive leadership board of the California state group.

Time and time again, those who are empowered to speak on behalf of the FOP have made it a point to support police officers involved in questionable shootings of black Americans and other alleged abuses.

One local chapter in Maryland raised money for Darren Wilson, the white officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson. After Chicago officer Jason Van Dyke was fired for shooting 16 bullets into Laquan McDonald, he was hired as a janitor by his local FOP.

After 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a Cleveland officer, the president of the Miami FOP tweeted “act like a thug, you’ll be treated like a thug.” Jay McDonald, president of the Ohio FOP and the current vice president of the national FOP, started an online “Stand with Cops” petition asking for support for officers in the midst of the backlash to Tamir’s killing.

Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, the FOP has an outsized impact on criminal justice policy, especially in the Trump administration.

The organization endorsed Donald Trump for president during the 2016 race and soon after the election issued an "advisory" for the new administration’s first 100 days. The document reads like a wishlist of everything a fan of violent and undemocratic policing could hope for, and the FOP got most of it.

They got the deprioritization of the Obama administration’s policing commission recommendations, reversal of the DOJ’s ban on private prisons, the return of civil asset forfeiture, the end of DACA and a crackdown on sanctuary cities—all of which aimed to reduce the harm done to communities of color by the criminal justice system.

Perhaps the biggest gift was delivered by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in person at the FOP’s annual convention in August. Sessions was the event’s keynote speaker and announced there that Trump would sign an executive order restoring the 1033 program, which gives local police departments surplus military equipment including bayonets, tanks, and grenade launchers. "We have your back and you have our thanks," Sessions told the crowd. According to news reports, the audience reacted “with roaring cheers.”

Some might believe that the FOP’s behavior and agenda are functions of its role as an organization that advocates for police, but the example of other police organizations suggests that’s not the case.

The Major Cities Police Chief’s organization supported the Obama policing commission’s recommendations while the FOP advisory included "de-prioritizing" "some or all" of them. The FOP is known for defending just about any officer involved in the high-profile killing of a black man while the leadership of NOBLE, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, continually calls for police reform in response to such events.

Perhaps most striking: when the president urged police officers to not be “too nice” with suspects, his remarks were condemned by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Police Foundation, the acting director of the DEA, and police chiefs across the country. The president of the national FOP’s response? "The president's off the cuff comments on policing are sometimes taken all too literally by the media and professional police critics.”

To be sure, the FOP’s agenda is probably most informed by a warped sense of what it means to protect its membership and the law enforcement community more broadly. The result, however, is an organization that is regressive and anti-accountability with deadly consequences for communities of color, black communities in particular.

Something must be done.

Congress as well as state and local lawmakers should convene hearings on racial bias in the FOP to better understand an organization that operates with little transparency but is so heavily embedded in our system of policing. Additionally, civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU should target the FOP as a barrier to police accountability. Community organizations and activists should make it clear to their local police departments that citizens will never have confidence in cops who belong to a group so hostile to civil rights.

Finally, individual officers of conscience, and departments with a will to police democratically, should divest from the FOP. A mass resignation from the FOP by officers of color and their white allies would send the strongest message that an old boy network of Trump supporters does not represent the modern face of law enforcement.

The last part is maybe easier said than done. As unions, some local FOP chapters are entrenched in police departments around the country. They negotiate compensation and protect the labor rights of officers. Many provide life insurance, disability benefits, counseling services and legal representation for members. Still, they’re not the only game in town.

There are other police organizations, some with more diverse leadership and better track records on civil rights, poised to displace the FOP. It’s time that happens for all our sake.

The FOP, as currently constituted, should be relegated to the same historical dustbin as organizations like the Sons of the Confederacy and the White Citizens Council. Were it to go out of business, and more diverse voices in law enforcement lifted up, the streets would be safer and policing would be more transparent and accountable.

Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor, is the Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University. He is the author of “Chokehold: Policing Black Men.”

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/10/11/why-the-fraternal-order-of-police-must-go  

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SEE
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/06/police-rioted-this-weekend-justifying.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/06/not-real-trade-union-head-of.html

 Here's how to improve packaged foods nutrition

News from the Journal of Marketing

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Research News

 

Researchers from Illinois State University, North Carolina State University, University of South Carolina, and University of Maryland published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the impact of moving nutrition labels, typically placed on the back of product packages, to the front.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Competitive Effects of Front-of-Package Nutrition Labeling Adoption on Nutritional Quality: Evidence from Facts Up Front Style Labels" and is authored by Joon Ho Lim, Rishika Rishika, Ramkumar Janakiraman, and P.K. Kannan.

Can changing food packaging improve product nutrition quality? While this change may be simple, there's a lot at stake.

Diet-related chronic diseases impose a growing burden on the United States economy by increasing costs of health care and widening diet-related health disparities. Since the 1970s, the American diet has shifted considerably towards foods higher in calories and lower in nutritional quality. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, more than one-third of American adults are obese. Childhood and adolescent obesity rates have also skyrocketed in the last 30 years with one in five school-aged children considered obese. To combat this disconcerting trend, public policy makers, food manufacturers, and grocery retailers have made efforts over time to design nutrition labels that can educate consumers about the nutritional value of the foods they purchase and help consumers make healthier choices. The World Health Organization (WHO) also considers nutrition labeling to be a key policy option for promoting healthier diets.

The packaged food industry has voluntarily taken steps to inform consumers about the nutritional value of food products so that consumers can make better choices. One such initiative undertaken by is the Front-of-Package (FOP) nutrition label. FOP nutrition labels are voluntarily adopted by food manufacturers and provide nutrient information on the front of food packaging in a clear, simple, and easy-to-read format. The FOP labels present the key information listed on the Nutrition Facts Panel (NFP; displayed on the back or side of food packages) more concisely and often include calorie content and the amounts of key nutrients to limit (e.g., saturated fat, sugar, and sodium per serving). In an innovative study, our research team assessed the effect of the introduction of a FOP nutrition label in a product category on the nutritional quality of food products in the category.

The study reports four sets of findings. First, the adoption of FOP nutrition labeling in a product category results in a significant improvement in the nutritional quality of food products in that category. Second, the effect of FOP is stronger for premium (high-priced) brands and brands with a narrower product line breadth. Third, the FOP adoption effect is stronger for unhealthy categories and categories with a higher competitive intensity. Fourth, manufacturers increase the nutritional quality of products by reducing the calorie content and limiting nutrients such as sugar, sodium, and saturated fat.

Lim explains that "This implies that policy makers, in partnership with food manufacturers and retailers, should encourage adoption of voluntary, standardized, and transparent labeling programs and consider options for broadening the information presented in FOP labels. We believe that policy makers should also invest in educational campaigns that inform consumers about the value of FOP labels and that would further incentivize food manufacturers to offer nutritionally better products."

For food manufacturers, the results suggest that they must devote significant resources to product innovation to stay competitive. Specifically, manufacturers in unhealthy and more competitive categories can be more strategic and invest in innovation so they are ready to provide better products following FOP adoption. Rishika adds that "Food retailers should partner with manufacturers and give them incentives to adopt FOP because this can lead to better-quality products for their consumers and help build a positive brand image. Retailers can also promote products with FOP labels, especially in more competitive and unhealthy product categories, which can spur manufacturers toward more innovation and lead to an increase in the nutritional quality of foods over time." The researchers encourage retailers to invest in measures that help monitor and track sales of products with FOP labels and provide this feedback to their manufacturers regularly to speed up the competitive effect of FOP labels. For consumers, the study finds that the brands that adopted FOP labeling offer nutritionally superior products than those that did not adopt the labeling. This result is particularly helpful for time-starved consumers looking to purchase relatively healthier products.

###

Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0022242920942563

About the Journal of Marketing

The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Christine Moorman (T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) serves as the current Editor in Chief.

https://www.ama.org/jm

About the American Marketing Association (AMA)

As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what's coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM® professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences.

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The Capitol Rioters Attacked Police. Why Isn't the FOP Outraged?

Police unions aren’t usually bashful about defending officers, but they’ve been conspicuously subdued in discussing the January 6 attacks.
By Adam Serwer

ALEX BRANDON / POOL / AFP via Getty
AUGUST 5, 2021
About the author: Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.

On Tuesday, the National Fraternal Order of Police decided to “clear up confusion” about its position on the January 6 assault on the Capitol by enraged Donald Trump supporters. “Those who participated in the assaults, looting, and trespassing must be arrested and held to account,” it said in a statement. “We continue to offer our support, gratitude, and love to our brothers and sisters in law enforcement who successfully fought off the rioters, and we will be with them as they grieve and recover, however long that may take.”

The FOP does not often have to clarify its position on matters of public concern; the organization is usually rather strident in expressing its views. For example, in 2016, the FOP demanded that Walmart cease selling black lives matter T-shirts. It denounced Nike for its ad campaign involving Colin Kaepernick, who was purged from the NFL for protesting police misconduct. If you go to the FOP’s Twitter feed, you can find a steady stream of clips from conservative outlets such as Newsmax and Fox News showing FOP representatives attacking policies like bail reform, slamming Democratic elected officials, and blaming Black-rights activists for the recent rise in homicides. These posts are interspersed with tributes to homicide victims, attacking “rogue prosecutors,” “activist judges,” and “progressive policies” for their deaths.

From the July/August 2021 issue: The authoritarian instincts of police unions

Local FOP chapters, meanwhile, are also not exactly known for being demure. The former head of the Houston FOP, now the vice president of the national FOP, dismissed a woman and a disabled Navy veteran who were killed in a botched drug raid by officers seeking heroin as “dirtbags.” (No heroin was found.) The Miami FOP boycotted a Beyoncé concert, charging that she had used her Super Bowl halftime show in 2016 “to divide Americans by promoting the Black Panthers.” In Chicago, the local FOP president defended the rioters who stormed the Capitol. “You’re not going to convince me that that many people voted for Joe Biden,” he said. “Never for the rest of my life will you ever convince me of that. But, again, it still comes down to proof.” He later apologized.

What you won’t find on the national FOP Twitter feed, however, are condemnations of the Capitol rioters who attacked police officers on January 6 deploying this sort of unrestrained bombast. You won’t find any clips of FOP members on Fox News confronting its prime-time hosts for mocking the testimony of police officers who faced the mob that day. You won’t even find the FOP highlighting the compelling testimony of those officers, whose recollections paint a vivid picture of the rioters and their motives. You will find only the FOP’s careful statement seeking to clear up “confusion” about its position, a deeply unusual situation for the FOP to be in.

Officer Harry Dunn, who is Black, testified that he was called the N-word by rioters who were infuriated that he had mentioned voting for Joe Biden. Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, an Army veteran and immigrant, testified that he was called a “traitor” and said that, “for the first time, I was more afraid to work at the Capitol than during my entire Army deployment to Iraq.” By contrast, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, who is white and who can be seen on video bloodied and being crushed by rioters, said that some of them tried to “recruit” him, with one asking, “Are you my brother?”

The catalyst for the Capitol riot was the fact that Trump, the sitting president of the United States, had engaged in a months-long propaganda campaign to convince his supporters that Biden had been illegitimately elected, and indulged a series of hare-brained schemes to cling to power even after being defeated including pressuring Republican legislators to void the results in their states, imposing on the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, demanding the Supreme Court declare him winner by fiat, and telling state election officials to “find” fraudulent votes as pretext for him to contest the outcome. The behavior of the mob on January 6, however, is difficult to comprehend without grasping how Trump and the rioters understand the role of police.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed formal segregation, police in Jim Crow states enforced the color line. Even where the law didn’t explicitly mandate discrimination, police were tacitly, if not explicitly, expected to enforce a de facto color line by local and state political leadership. “I feel just as strongly about what has happened to law and order in this country as does George Wallace,” Richard Nixon told an interviewer while running for president in 1968.

The laws have changed, but many Americans have never abandoned the belief that police are obligated to enforce America’s racial hierarchies. The role of American policing, in their view, is less to uphold the law than to act as a kind of sectarian militia for “real Americans,” which is to say, Trumpist Republicans. Trump encouraged police to abuse people of color, but when he and those around him came under investigation, he turned his anger on law enforcement. As Chris Hayes wrote in 2018, “If a young black man grabs a white woman by the crotch, he’s a thug and deserves to be roughed up by police officers. But if Donald Trump grabs a white woman by the crotch in a nightclub (as he’s accused of doing, and denies), it’s locker-room high jinks.” On January 6, Hodges testified, a rioter shouted, “‘Do not attack us. We’re not Black Lives Matter’ as if political affiliation is how we determine when to use force.” Well, yes. That’s exactly what they think.

The officers at the Capitol who fulfilled their oath by protecting lawmakers from a mob in thrall to a dangerous fantasy—that they could change the outcome of the 2020 election through violence—are now being attacked as traitors. “To my perpetual confusion,” Hodges testified, “I saw the ‘thin blue line flag,’ a symbol of support for law enforcement, more than once being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us.” One Trump supporter accused of assaulting officers during the riot was photographed that day wearing a patch with a symbol of the murderous Marvel Comics vigilante the Punisher, decorated with the colors of the “thin blue line” flag.

The apparent discrepancy is simple to explain. The officers were seen as treasonous by the rioters because they were supposed to join the mob in overthrowing the constitutional order and casting down the liberal usurpers, as well as the illegitimate multiracial coalition that brought Democrats to power. They viewed the officers holding to their vow to defend the Constitution as betraying their true obligations, as Trump and the mob understood them.

Because the right hold the police in such high regard, the Fraternal Order of Police is uniquely positioned to disabuse conservatives of the idea that the rioters were heroic or that the riot itself was carried out by leftists, and any other manner of conspiracy theories deployed to obfuscate what happened on January 6. The organization is ideally suited to pressure Republican lawmakers to support the commission examining the incident, and to criticize those who seek to turn that process into a circus or rewrite the events of the day. The union could use its stature to attack the legitimacy of right-wing political violence, and to reject the harmful notion that the role of American police is to act as a partisan militia, rather than to impartially enforce the law.

The FOP has chosen instead to remain meekly silent on the Capitol riot, in effect reserving harsher language for protesters against police brutality than for a mob that brutalized police. When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why the FOP was not more forcefully defending the Capitol Police officers, FOP President Patrick Yoes offered a tame paraphrase of the group’s press release, and insisted that he had not seen Fox News hosts maligning these officers as emotionally weak cowards on the network that he and his subordinates frequently appear on for friendly interviews. (The FOP did not respond to a detailed list of queries from The Atlantic.)

Police Group Says Biden's FCC Nominee Is Too Dangerous Because, Uh, Encryption

Tom McKay 

GIZMONDO

© Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images) Gigi Sohn, Biden's nominee for the fifth slot on the Federal Communications Commission, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee on March 12, 2019.

The National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), an organization that represents hundreds of thousands of cops across the country, is hopping mad about President Joe Biden’s nominee to the governing board of the Federal Communications Commission. And no, their stated reasons don’t make a lot of sense.

Earlier this year, Biden nominated Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy and co-founder of the nonprofit Public Knowledge, to sit as the third Democrat on the FCC’s five-member commission. Sohn also happens to sit on the board of digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is why the FOP authored a letter last week opposing her confirmation by the Senate and claiming she poses a threat to the public.

In the letter, the FOP claims that Sohn’s nomination to the FCC causes “serious public safety considerations” due to her ties with EFF, which among many other things has defended the use of end-to-end (E2E) encryption. True E2E encryption is designed to protect communications against interception by ensuring only the true sender and recipient (the ends) can access the contents of the communications. To accomplish this, a message is encoded using a cryptographic key on the sender’s device; that key, when provided to a recipient, is the only way to unscramble the sent data into a readable format.

The FOP wrote in the letter that the EFF’s “continued advocacy of this technology and support for additional barriers and restrictions to prevent law enforcement from obtaining historically accessible information makes it extraordinarily more difficult for law enforcement to apprehend dangerous criminals and protect the public.”

“Despite the efforts of the FOP and other law enforcement organizations, neither Federal law nor the FCC has any kind of requirement for carriers to comply with law enforcement requests, even when lives are in imminent danger,” the FOP letter continued. “We are apprehensive of Ms. Sohn’s stance on this issue based on her leadership role at EFF and because she has never moderated her extreme views on this subject.” The FOP added it would be “irresponsible” for them not to weigh in on Sohn’s nomination.

Generally speaking, end-to-end encryption is highly regarded in data security and is commonly used to protect everything from journalistic sources and corporate secrets to mundane communications between privacy-minded individuals—for example, anyone who uses Signal as their default messaging app. Like literally any method of hiding knowledge from others, criminals can use it too.

A truly flawless E2E encryption method is uncrackable short of computationally expensive methods like a brute force attack, an automated method of guessing countless keys in sequence until the right one is stumbled upon. Even the most powerful classic supercomputers in existence today couldn’t break methods like 128-bit or 256-bit encryption on timelines far longer than humans have ever been around, and even quantum computers will eventually run into the problem of quantum cryptography.

However, any implementation flaws in the encryption method might make it far easier to gain access to the data via a brute-force method. Or, for example, the key might be weak in computational terms (such as the 4-5 digit codes used to unlock many mobile devices) and instead be protected by methods like locking out a user after a limited number of attempts. Whenever police come around demanding access to encrypted communications, major tech firms have historically declined to actively help police root around for and exploit such flaws. This is at least officially what the FOP claims to be so concerned about, with the letter stating such encryption is what police refer to as “going dark.”

The FOP’s opposition to Sohn’s nomination follows a years-long scaremongering campaign by federal authorities who have attacked encryption as a godsend to criminals, saying its use foils investigators and forces authorities to let everyone from run-of-the-mill cartel members to hardcore terrorists run free. The FBI and Department of Justice have been particularly outspoken on the issue, waging both legal battles and pressure campaigns against tech firms Apple and Facebook to help them get access to encrypted data. The FBI infamously sued Apple in 2016 trying to force the company to help them crack the encryption on an iPhone owned by one of the shooters in a 2015 massacre in San Bernardino, California, specifically by helping them sideload a hacked version of iOS that would allow an unlimited number of tries.

While the FBI insisted that it could not get the data otherwise, it eventually did by partnering with a third-party firm that was able to build an exploit with the assistance of an iOS-cracking specialist. The feds and other regional authorities have repeatedly demonstrated they can get into many (if not all) devices when they really need to, such as by licensing tools from cyber-intelligence companies that often solicit insider knowledge of potential security flaws in common products. The feds have insisted that they don’t want to force tech firms to build surveillance backdoors into their products—something security experts are virtually unanimous would create potentially catastrophic risks for all users. But an internal DOJ inspector general’s report made clear in 2018 that the FBI didn’t really try very hard to get into the phone before its suit against Apple, showing the court case was more a pretext to win legal precedent on strong-arming tech firms.

The FOP letter cites FBI Director Christopher Wray giving a now-familiar argument on the subject to Congress in 2021:

What we mean when we talk about lawful access is putting providers who manage encrypted data in a position to decrypt it and provide it to us in response to legal process. We are not asking for, and do not want, any “backdoor,” that is, for encryption to be weakened or compromised so that it can be defeated from the outside by law enforcement or anyone else.

But the FOP letter doesn’t actually bother to explain what the alternative to building in such backdoors is, other than mentioning something about tech firms amending their terms of service to “provide them authority to protect the public and to comply with lawful court orders.” More importantly, this has almost nothing to do with the FCC. While the FCC does sometimes deal with encryption as it relates to service providers and networks under their regulatory purview—such as encryption of cable TV broadcasts for anti-theft purposes—it doesn’t have any kind of jurisdiction over how Apple encrypts its phones. It also has basically nothing to do with overseeing encrypted communications, except in edge cases like radio broadcasts.

The FOP did not yet respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, told Gizmodo in a phone interview that targeting Sohn over her affiliation with the pro-encryption EFF was “pretty weak tea.”

“It’s not even something the FCC does,” Feld told Gizmodo, “...except actually in circumstances where we actually care about that, like vehicle-to-vehicle communications, where, you know, one of the elements of security is that it’s supposed to be encrypted. ... I find it difficult to believe that the Fraternal Order of Police are upset if, you know, people have difficulty hacking vehicle-to-vehicle communication.”

Here’s where some additional context might come in handy to understand why the FOP is suddenly so interested in the FCC. During Donald Trump’s administration, former FCC Chair Ajit Pai ran wild pursuing policies friendly to the telecom industry, including nuking Obama-era net neutrality rules and regulations on media ownership; while Pai is long gone, the normally five-member FCC commission is now split 2-2 between Democrats Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks and Republicans Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington.

The latter two are Trump partisans who support some of the ex-president’s wilder ambitions, such as turning the FCC into a watchdog for claims of anti-conservative bias on social media sites; the 2-2 split also helps forestall any effort to undo the industry handouts given out during Pai’s tenure. Sohn’s nomination has also come under fire from conservatives, particularly through outlets like the Wall Street Journal or Fox News, who have branded her a hyper-partisan fire-breather who will use her power to censor MAGA types. The FOP has made no secret of its allegiance with “tough-on-crime” conservatives like Trump, so coming out against Sohn fits right in with a partisan playbook with concerns well beyond encryption.

Feld described the letter as “barely coherent” and said that it was “very clear” that attacks on Sohn from conservative media have little to do with encryption. Instead, he pointed to common ownership by the Murdoch family of Wall Street Journal parent company News Corp and Fox Corporation (both of which were involved in a legal battle over the loosened ownership rules). In the event a Democrat-controlled FCC wanted to revisit Pai-era policies, those interests would “have the most to lose from any kind of revitalized media ownership rules,” he said.

“I will also point out that if you want proof of why media ownership matters, one only has to look at the coordination between Fox News and the Wall Street Journal to imagine that maybe there is something to this, you know, theory of media ownership has something to do with a point of view,” Feld told Gizmodo.

Feld said he wasn’t worried that the FOP letter would have much impact on Sohn’s nomination. There isn’t “any sign that something from the Fraternal Order of Police or any of this is going to matter to the committee Democrats,” he said.

BLUE BLOODS: AMERICA’S BROTHERHOOD OF POLICE OFFICERS

To understand the citadel of law enforcement, we must reckon with its unions—which resemble fraternities more than labor unions.


BY EVE L. EWING

ILLUSTRATION BY SHAWN MARTINBROUGHAugust 25, 2020

Illustration by Shawn Martinbrough. Colorist Christopher Sotomayor.

The man stands before them, head slightly bowed. He is gangly, awkward, against the backdrop of the officers’ firm march. They are hurried and he is not. Everything about them is fast, crisp, matte.

We watch the push. We watch him fall.

We watch them pass his body. Swirling around him, an eddy of thick black fabric. When the blood comes, it drifts languidly across the concrete.

When night falls, this is the story they tell: “During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.” But when the video appears, the world will see the police shove Martin Gugino to the ground, fracturing his skull.

The email from John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, came the next day. Evans forcefully defended the police officers implicated in the assault. “After witnessing first hand how these 2 officers were treated,” Evans wrote, “I can tell you, they tried to fuck over these guys like I have never seen in my 54 years.” He signed off the email by writing, “Fraternally, John Evans – PBA.”

There are people who will tell you that people like John Evans lead a union. But this is not a union. This is something else.

This is a brotherhood. It abides no law but its own. It scorns the personhood of all but its own brethren. It derides all creatures outside its own clan. And for that reason, the brotherhood is not only a hurdle impeding reform. It is the architecture of an alternate reality, one that seethes and bubbles just beneath the surface of our own. And it’s a reality in which none of us are human.

In May, the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police elected John Catanzara as president. According to a 2017 report by the United States Department of Justice, the police department in Chicago “engages in a pattern or practice of using force that is in violation of the Constitution,” where “officers’ force practices unnecessarily endanger themselves,” “a pattern...[which] results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.”

And yet, even given the city’s abysmal standard of police conduct, in his 25 years on the force Catanzara has managed to distinguish himself from his peers by being especially awful. According to the Citizens Police Data Project (a database of police misconduct records made public after a lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests), Catanzara has been the subject of 50 complaints, putting him in the 96th percentile for allegations. At the time he was elected to lead the FOP, Catanzara was assigned to administrative duty; according to the Chicago Sun-Times, he is the first president to take on the role while stripped of his official police powers.

In June, when asked about the killing of George Floyd, Catanzara referred to Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions as an “improper police tactic.” “Explain to me how race had anything to do with it,” he went on. “There’s no proof or evidence that race had anything to do with it.” Catanzara has said that any lodge members showing support for protesters could face disciplinary action from the FOP, and perhaps expulsion.

Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is a local chapter of the larger national organization of the same name. The national FOP boasts more than 2,100 such lodges, representing more than 330,000 members, which makes it, according to its website, “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.”

IT ABIDES NO LAW BUT ITS OWN. IT SCORNS THE PERSONHOOD OF ALL BUT ITS OWN BRETHREN. IT DERIDES ALL CREATURES OUTSIDE ITS OWN CLAN.

When Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones—a young man having a mental health episode and his neighbor, who answered the door—Rialmo was fired. The vice president of the Chicago FOP called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which recommended the firing, “a political witch hunt on police officers. The investigations are unfair and politically motivated.”

When Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the FOP defended him. When four of the officers accused of aiding in the cover-up were fired, a different FOP vice president used the decision as an occasion to impress upon police board members that they should not “fall to the pressure of the media or the radical police haters.”


These men were sworn officers of the law. But they did not look at Van Dyke as a convicted murderer who had broken that law. They did not look at him and see police—a social category, a profession, a uniform one puts on and can take off. They looked at him and saw their brother. They saw a different type of being, bound by an oath that transcends civilian understanding. And by virtue of Van Dyke’s being, in their eyes, he could do no wrong.

The same logic underlies the phrase “blue lives matter,” which semantically equates the color of a uniform with the nonnegotiable, unshakable fact of Blackness. It’s a phenomenon not unlike the transfiguration that took place behind the eyes of Darren Wilson. “It looks like a demon,” he told the grand jury in describing Michael Brown. Michael Brown: not man, but beast. Jason Van Dyke: not man, but kin. A brother in the pantheon. A demigod among demigods, his actions deemed necessary and virtuous because they were wrought by his hand, and his hand was necessary and virtuous.

Of course, as Catanzara’s comment about support for protesters demonstrates, it’s not that it’s impossible to be cast out from the brotherhood. The unforgivable sin within the brotherhood is to cast aspersions against the only people whom the brotherhood recognizes as human—its own kind. Shoot a boy in the back, and you can still be in the brotherhood. Side with the people who are asking questions, or raise a fist with them, or kneel before them, or talk to them, and you are out.

Maya Angelou had a thing she used to say—When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Perhaps it’s time for America to heed Angelou’s advice. The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them.

History would suggest that unionism and policing are, at their foundation, incompatible. For one thing, the officers who founded the FOP made it very clear that it was not a union. In the volume The Fraternal Order of Police 1915-1976: A History, a work commissioned by the FOP itself, cofounder Martin L. Toole is quoted as saying, “We are banded together for our own enjoyment!” Founding officers rejected the name “United Association of Police because ‘that name sounded too much like Union, and Union sounded too antagonistic.’ ” These officers sought a way to bargain collectively over issues like wages and hours, without affiliating themselves with labor organizations.

And as labor historian Rosemary Feurer told me in an interview, until the 1970s “there was a feeling that police didn’t belong in the union movement. And now I think we have to realize that that is part of our history, from the stark reality that people were confronted with police brutality whenever they tried to assert their rights as union members.” Indeed, the most formative days of the labor movement were marked by police violence against workers. During the 1886 Haymarket Affair, police fired on the crowd during a dispute with striking workers. During the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest labor uprising in American history—thousands of West Virginians led by the United Mine Workers were in armed struggle against thousands of police and National Guardsmen. The local sheriff, Don Chafin, was paid by mine operators to beat, arrest, or intimidate suspected union organizers, a job which each year earned him more than 10 times his annual salary in bribes and helped him maintain a well-funded department. By 1921, his net worth was about $350,000. In the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, police fired on a demonstration of steelworkers, killing 10 and seriously wounding many others, including a baby and an 11-year-old boy. A worker on the scene said that as the injured fell under the hail of bullets, it looked “as though they were being mowed down with a scythe.”

And the institution of policing as a means of violently controlling working persons’ right to economic freedom has deeper roots than even the labor movement itself. The need to attack workers in the name of private interests is historically intertwined, like a double helix, with the need to control, limit, and sanction Black autonomy.

“You will find that this question of the control of labor underlies every other question of state interest,” South Carolinian William H. Trescott told the governor of South Carolina in 1865. The end of the Civil War meant that millions of Black people were transformed from items of property, from which labor could be forcibly and freely extracted, to independent humans with, at least nominally, the agency to do with their labor what they pleased, for their own benefit. “Virtually from the moment the Civil War ended,” writes historian Eric Foner, “the search began for legal means of subordinating a volatile black population that regarded economic independence as a corollary of freedom and the old labor discipline as a badge of slavery.” In the absence of slavery as the means by which Black people could be made to stay in one place and work when and how White people needed them to work, the plantation class looked to the law to ensure that they would. Hence, the Reconstruction-era legislation known as the Black Codes was born. In Mississippi, being Black and not having written proof that you were employed was now illegal. In South Carolina, being Black and having a job other than servant or farmer was illegal unless you paid an annual tax of up to $100. Being in a traveling circus or an acting troupe? Illegal. In Virginia, asking for pay beyond the “usual and common wages given to other laborers” was illegal. In Florida, disrespecting or disobeying your employer was illegal. In some areas, fishing and hunting, or even owning guns, were now banned, as these activities could lessen Black dependence on White people for employment.

And who would enforce these new laws? The police. In some cases, Foner writes, these newly deputized men wore their old Confederate uniforms as they patrolled Black homesteads, seizing weapons and arresting people for labor violations.

Despite this history, those who lead America’s police unions raise a cautionary alarm—that teachers and other public sector workers should be wary of any attempts to curtail police power, lest they find themselves at the center of the next effort to limit union rights. In June, Patrick J. Lynch, who heads the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News drawing a direct connection between efforts to defund the police and a broader labor struggle. “Our brothers and sisters in the labor movement should be very careful. If they support a successful campaign to strip police officers of our union rights, they will see those same tactics repeated against teachers, bus drivers, nurses and other public sector workers across this country.”

But there’s a crucial difference. “How many unions are there where you’re assigned a gun and told you can shoot people?” Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner asked me during a phone interview. “I mean, they have superpowers. They are given superpowers over the lives and freedom of other people. Over the integrity of their bodies.” Krasner told me of two instances in his legal career when he defended women who, after finding their police officer husbands cheating and trying to divorce them, had been arrested by those same husbands. One was arrested twice. The other was arrested alongside her brother, who had tried to defend her. Both women were found not guilty despite police officers testifying against them on the stand. Krasner attempted to sue on their behalf, for monetary damages but also injunctive relief—for the police department to change its policies to require an arrest of a relative or spouse to be overseen by a supervisor.

“The answer that I got from the city is nope. We’re not going to do any of that. Dealing with the police department, contract negotiations…we’re not even going to get into it. So we’ll just pay you more money,” Krasner recalls. “So you know, that kind of told me everything I needed to know. It was an overwhelming imbalance of power. It’s a city I think that in many ways is so politically compromised by its relationship with police unions that they have for a very long time pretty much given them anything they wanted.” Krasner believes that the situation is exacerbated by the fact that in Philadelphia, the FOP allows retired officers to be voting members. “The police union is the voice of the past,” says Krasner, “and in Philly the past is Frank Rizzo,” the 1970s-era Philadelphia mayor who openly told his supporters to “Vote White.” Before becoming mayor, Rizzo was police commissioner. During his campaign, Rizzo promised his supporters that after he was elected, he would “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”

Rachael Rollins, district attorney of Suffolk County (which includes Boston as well as nearby Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop) agrees with Krasner, telling me that police are “the only section of our municipal local, state, or federal government that has the lethal and legal authority to kill you with no oversight.” For this reason, she dismisses Lynch’s comparison between police unions and teachers unions. “If a teacher strangled George Floyd as an 11-year-old,” Rollins said, “no D.A. would even wait a nanosecond to charge that teacher with a homicide. We would be shocked and appalled. But when police do it, we have been so triggered to believe law enforcement, right? To not question them…. When you have the authority to do something as final as death without oversight, you are different than any other union we are talking about.”

Beyond this point—police carry guns and are permitted by the state to kill people—is a deeper distinction: the task of policing itself as intrinsically counter to the ideology of a union. “A union is supposed to protect the rights, and the labor movement is supposed to protect the rights, of all working people,” said Sheri Davis-Faulkner, a program director at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. “The point is to be lifting up all working people. That is the work. Collective bargaining and having bargaining units, that is a part of it. But it’s also pushing an ideology that people should not be exploited.” Police unions do not and cannot promote this ideology, because doing so would require them to confront “the infrastructure that has been built for them to be policing Black bodies and protecting White communities,” Davis-Faulkner told me.

“In its best formulation, the labor movement has been about the concept of solidarity,” says Feurer, who studies political conflict and the labor history of the late 19th and 20th centuries at Northern Illinois University. “And so that is the key conundrum here. Is that if you’re an entity that’s sworn against solidarity, you can put your foot on the neck of a working-class person. It is the cardinal issue that we’re facing right now…what do you do with a group of workers that are in your movement whose purpose is a state purpose? Whose purpose is to deny protest rights, and to deny solidarity?”


In Minneapolis, after the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests, Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, wrote a letter to membership in which he said: “I commend you for the excellent police work you are doing in keeping your coworkers and others safe during what everyone except us refuses to call a riot…. What has been very evident throughout this process is you have lacked support from the top. This terrorist movement that is currently occurring was a long time build up which dates back years.”

In August 2019, when Daniel Pantaleo—the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner—lost his job, Lynch, the PBA president, condemned the decision. “The police commissioner needs to know he’s lost his police department,” he said at a press conference. Lynch declared that if Pantaleo could be labeled “reckless,” the condemnation could be applied to any police officer and warned that the commissioner would “wake up tomorrow to discover that the cop haters are still not satisfied, but it will be too late.”

After Tamir Rice was killed, Jeffrey Follmer, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, told MSNBC that “this shooting was justified. It was tragic that it was a 12-year-old. But it was justified.”

Indeed, for American policing to function, physical assault is an important tool, but as important is intimidation—the threat of physical assault and the psychological terror it engenders. And for those tools to work, they require the premise of impunity, elevating the police officer as a different kind of being, one unencumbered by the laws of civic comportment or even the basic laws of reality. It requires not only that Alabama state troopers beat John Lewis after he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, fracturing his skull—it requires a system that defines Lewis as the criminal in that scenario, and the trooper as the guardian of safety and order. It requires not only that a Chicago police officer, guarding a statue of Christopher Columbus this past July, be able to punch 18-year-old Miracle Boyd in the mouth, knocking out her front teeth—it requires us to see the video and know that the officer will go unnamed and unpunished. It requires not only that a New York City police officer crack 20-year-old Dounya Zayer’s head against the pavement, causing her to have a seizure—it requires a commanding officer to watch and do nothing. It requires Lynch to refer to the officer who shoved Zayer as someone “whose boss sent him out there to do a job, who was put in a bad situation during a chaotic time,” and to refer to the decision to charge him with assault as “dereliction of duty.” For the police to act as they do, and for the body politic to accept it, requires not only fear or force but a reconfiguration of the very fabric of reality as we know it.

“Part of what fascist politics does,” explains philosopher Jason Stanley, “is get people to disassociate from reality.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that such politics craft an alternate universe—an unreality. “It is not so much the barbed wire,” says Arendt, “as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure.”

When I was in college, I was a resident assistant, which meant that in some instances I was the first responder when someone had been sexually assaulted. I once confronted a young man who was the president of one of the fraternities where a resident of mine had recently…she thought, she wasn’t sure…she had woken up, in the attic, she told me. Alone. She didn’t know where he had gone, or….

I asked: How could you choose to call someone your brother when you know they are capable of something like that? He looked away.

This was the wrong question. The whole point of the brotherhood is that it enables a willful not knowing. The brotherhood swallows all other planes of reality that could pose an existential challenge. I had asked the wrong question, because the answer to how can you call someone your brother when he does something like that is: Because he is my brother. The brotherhood is a self-contained universe, with its own physics, its own gravity. Within a band of brothers, there is no law that supersedes the law of the brotherhood itself. To be part of a brotherhood is not to be a “member” of something—for membership is fleeting, and outside oneself. To be part of a brotherhood is not simply to be a workaday person who belongs to a collective corps, but to be reborn as a new type of thing, nestled in a selfhood intimately woven among other selfhoods, moving as one through a world in which you trust nothing but one another, because your self has become inextricable from all those other selves you call brother.

In the brotherhood, there is no such thing as wrongful police action. A member of the brotherhood cannot err any more than a dropped apple can fall toward the sky. The man who choked Eric Garner to death can never be “reckless.” All police work is “excellent police work.” The death of a 12-year-old boy is “justified.” You watch the video again. He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.

In the days after my city rose against the clouds, I woke to a news item that made me laugh out loud. When desperate and angry and tired people were breaking windows across the South Side, a group of police officers had broken into the campaign offices of Representative Bobby Rush. The surveillance footage is almost cartoonish. The officers ate popcorn. They made coffee. As Chicago burned, they napped on the couch.

When the incident became public, Catanzara told the press that Rush or his staff had asked the officers to come. He told local news that Rush was “an absolute liar, a piece of garbage” and that anyway, the coffee and popcorn were bought with taxpayer money, and the officers were taxpayers, were they not?

Of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s criticism of the officers, Catanzara said: “Shame on her for ever questioning their valor and the heroism and the officers of CPD to make it sound like they were letting other officers get the crap beat out of them while they sat there and slept. That is a disgusting accusation. She owes the men and women an apology for even implying that was.”

I read the statement. I looked again at the picture of the sleeping officer.

He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.

A union is a pact, wrought among the human. Among the fallible. And there can be no error in the brotherhood. And the brotherhood can never be reformed, because reform requires fidelity to something external, and the brotherhood has fidelity only for itself. This is the unreality of the brotherhood. And as long as police are endowed with near-absolute state-sanctioned power, it is our unreality. We live behind its gates.

Eve L. Ewing is a poet and sociologist whose 2019 collection, 1919, inspired this issue’s title. See more from V.F.’s THE GREAT FIRE project here.

CHICAGO

FOP and city reach tentative contract deal that provides 20% raises over four years

By Sam Charles and A.D. Quig
Chicago Tribune
•
Last Updated: Oct 20, 2023 


Chicago police recruits salute during a graduation and promotion ceremony at Navy Pier on June 5, 2023. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

The city of Chicago and the union representing rank-and-file police officers have reached a tentative agreement on a new four-year contract that would provide a roughly 20% raise for officers and allow those accused of serious misconduct to have their disciplinary cases decided behind closed doors.

Chicago Police Department officers and detectives would receive a 5% pay hike in both 2024 and 2025, and cost-of-living raises — likely between 3% and 5% — in 2026 and 2027. What’s more, each of the more than 10,000 active duty CPD officers in the FOP would receive a one-time $2,500 retention bonus, regardless of how long they’ve worked for the department, according to City Hall sources and an internal union email provided to the Tribune.

The deal marks Johnson’s first major union agreement since taking office five months ago. And it was reached with a group whose leader was one of Johnson’s loudest detractors during the mayoral campaign. In the spring, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 President John Catanzara predicted a rank-and-file exodus and “blood in the streets” if Johnson, a former labor organizer himself who publicly supported redirecting police funding to other public services to address violence, took office.

But Catanzara’s public condemnations have softened. He supported Johnson’s pick of Larry Snelling as CPD superintendent and agreed to work with Johnson’s administration on broad solutions to the city’s pension woes.

It’s unclear what impact the agreement could have on the city’s bottom line. Johnson’s administration said in a statement that the agreement was “fair and in alignment with Chicago’s current policing needs, economic landscape, and budgetary capabilities” while acknowledging it had concerns about the stipulation dealing with disciplinary cases.

[ Chicago aldermen, activists call for city to keep police hearings public ]

Snelling is scheduled to appear Tuesday before the City Council to discuss the department’s budget. While head count is staying steady, the department’s overall budget for 2024 is rising $91 million to just under $2 billion. That figure has traditionally not included the cost of police pensions, overruns in overtime and legal settlements, or benefits.

In a statement Friday, the Police Department said the proposed agreement “mirror(s) other union bargaining agreements within the city,” but added, “the Department disagrees with the decision to allow disciplinary cases involving separation or suspension of more than one year to be closed to the public.”

When Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the FOP landed a deal on improved pay in 2021, it included $365 million in retroactive pay increases dating back to 2017. The union was entitled to a 2% raise in 2024 and 2% in 2025. The Lightfoot agreement also included a series of new accountability measures, but several issues were left unresolved for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration to pick up.

The latest agreement, which according to City Hall sources was approved Thursday by arbitrator Edwin Benn, is still subject to approval by the City Council’s Committee on Workforce Development. The proposal would then require passage by the full City Council before it takes effect. The contract would end June 30, 2027.

“We took a lot of slings and arrows over the last couple years and I got it … but we never took our eye off the prize about getting the best possible result at the end of this process, and that’s where we’re at now,” Catanzara said Friday in a video announcing the proposed agreement.

The most controversial element of the contract appears to be a provision that Benn awarded to the union allowing officers to opt to have disciplinary cases decided by an arbitrator out of public view instead of by the city’s Police Board.

Johnson’s office said in its statement that the city was “deeply disappointed in the arbitrator’s decision to claw back transparency,” and that the administration “remains committed to moving forward with any avenue available to keep the police disciplinary process transparent” and would focus “on implementing accountability measures within the Chicago Police Department, supporting police offices and a robust community safety agenda.”

The agreement also includes a paid parental leave policy, allows for the creation of a “Homicide Teams Pilot program” and “enshrines several accountability measures” that are part of the federal consent decree the department remains under.

The department entered into a court-ordered consent decree following the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.

To boost CPD’s transparency and accountability, the City Council also has altered and expanded agencies in charge of officer discipline, including transforming the Independent Police Review Authority into the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and creating a new elected civilian body to help shape CPD policy.

Some progressive aldermen, including workforce chairman Ald. Mike Rodriguez, 22nd, said they had yet to be briefed on any final contract language but would hesitate to support any deal that included the arbitrator provisions.

[ CPD consent decree in danger of failing, former city IG says ]

“Especially coming out of the Laquan McDonald case and everything that followed from that — including, but not limited to, the consent decree — we should be looking for every opportunity to strengthen transparency and accountability mechanisms,” said Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, who previously worked on drafting the consent decree in the Illinois attorney general’s office. “This flies in the face of that.”

The public has been clamoring for more accountability for years, argued Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th.

“In order to build trust, we need to build transparency,” she said, noting the public needs to know what happened in instances of alleged police wrongdoing.

The contract’s arbitration process was thrust into public view earlier this year after Benn ruled officers accused of serious misconduct can have their cases heard by an independent arbitrator behind closed doors if they so choose. Those cases have been decided in public by the Police Board for 60 years.

In August, shortly after Benn’s ruling was handed down, the FOP tried to move 22 pending cases from the Police Board’s docket to a third-party. However, attorneys for the city and CPD were quick to note Benn’s ruling was not binding and the board later shot down the union’s effort.

Catanzara told union members Friday the arbitration ruling was in line with “an option that this lodge had always had the ability to exercise.”

“That’s what every other collective bargaining agreement affords members, is arbitration for termination cases, and that’s all we are asking for here,” Catanzara said. “If members and our attorneys think our members will get a fairer shake at the Police Board on a certain case, then so be it. That will be the officer’s decision to go that route. But this is standard labor practice and I hope the City Council members can appreciate (that). If you are the party of labor you should be respectful of that provision, even if you are not 100% in agreement with it.”

In a budget hearing this week, outgoing Police Board President Ghian Foreman contrasted the arbitration process — in which charges are not publicly available and hearings are closed — to the board, which posts charges publicly, holds disciplinary hearings in public, and posts evidence and detailed explanations of findings. Allowing those cases to be decided privately would be a blow to the city’s goals of transparency and accountability, he said.


Foreman was hit with a police baton during a 2020 protest over the killing of George Floyd. He said that case went to arbitration and “I still don’t know what happened.”

“I think this would be a big mistake, not just for you guys to vote for this but even for the police to say this is what we want. I don’t think it advances our city,” he said.

Max Caproni, the board’s executive director, said in the past five years, 103 cases were filed that recommended an officer be terminated. Of those, 92 involved rank-and-file cops represented by the FOP.

“Our expectation would be that very few, if any, of those cases would come to the Police Board if this change takes effect,” Caproni said. “Bottom line, I think about 90% of our docket, we would lose that, if this change took effect.”

The board currently has 27 open cases. Of those, 25 involve FOP members — five deal with allegations of unjustified shootings, two are for shootings that involve false statements, three are excessive force cases and five involve gender-based violence or domestic altercations. Caproni said under the new system, “very serious cases” such as those “would likely go to arbitration.”

Though the union has argued it is entitled to the same private disciplinary hearings as other unionized workers, Hadden said the power officers hold calls for a higher standard of accountability.

“I do think arbitration is a good and proven process,” Hadden said, but “there are things, if you’ve killed someone on the job, there’s an action or something on duty that caused the death or severe injury of someone else, the types of things we see in lawsuits, there are higher levels of responsibility that our public servants, but especially police officers, take on. … There’s a higher authority you have to answer to. It’s the public.”

scharles@chicagotribune.com

aquig@chicagotribune.com
Originally Published: Oct 20, 2023 at 4:11 pm