freyasman
Senator
Because if they do, you're a lot more likely to be hurt, robbed, raped, or killed by them.
https://crim.jotwell.com/the-power-of-police-unions/
From the link;
"Rushin found that the strong majority of these 656 contracts have a similar disciplinary appeals process. Around 73% provide for appeal to an arbitrator or comparable procedure and nearly 70% provide that an arbitrator or comparable third party makes a final binding decision. About 54% of the contracts give officers or unions the power to select that arbitrator. About 70% of the jurisdictions give these arbitrators extensive review power, including the ability to revisit disciplinary matters with little or no deference to the decisions made by supervisors, civilian review boards or politically accountable officials. Together, Rushin’s findings reveal that “arbitrators are the true adjudicators of internal discipline in the majority of police departments” in the study’s extensive dataset. Rushin observes that the police union contracts setting forth these protections are typically negotiated outside of public view or participation. He proposes reforms that would give the public more oversight power and democratic actors more of a role in the disciplinary appeals process.
Rushin’s wide-angle lens view of how police union contract provisions can pose potential hurdles to police accountability is illuminating. For a scientist, the arguments also raise hypotheses that call out for testing via an innovative research design. Dharmapala, McAdams and Rappaport’s new quasi-experimental study rises to the challenge, offering important and disturbing evidence of an association between conferral of collective bargaining rights and an increase in violent incidents in Florida sheriff’s offices.
An innovation of the trio’s study is exploitation of a change in law—a 2003 Florida Supreme Court case Coastal Florida Police Benevolent Ass’n v. Williams that gave Florida sheriffs’ deputies the right to engage in collective bargaining. Collective bargaining proceeded in such earnest that 76% of sheriffs’ deputies in Florida spread in 28 offices were under a collective bargaining agreement by 2008. In contrast, Florida police officers had collective bargaining rights much earlier, beginning in 1968. Because of the contrast, the researchers could examine violent-incident complaints before and after the conferral of collective bargaining rights on sheriffs in 2003 using a difference-in-difference approach. Changes in trends in violent incidents in the treatment group of Florida sheriff’s offices receiving collective bargaining rights could be compared to trends in violent incidents in the control group of Florida police departments unaffected by this legal change (the treatment). This approach allows us to focus on changes attributable to the intervention of conferring collective bargaining rights and control for other factors occurring in the state that might have affected rates of violent incidents.
The investigators found that before Williams the treatment (sheriffs) and control (police) groups had similar parallel trends, an important assumption that must be met for the difference-in-differences approach. After Williams, the number of incidents of violent misconduct rose in the treatment group but not the control group. Moreover, the increase in violent incidents appeared to be sustained more than a decade after Williams (2011-2016 compared to 2003-2010). Interestingly, violent incident also rose in sheriff’s offices that did not enter into collective bargaining agreements (to a smaller magnitude and with borderline statistical significance)."
Police unions protect bad cops, and leave them out there for the rest of us to deal with.
https://crim.jotwell.com/the-power-of-police-unions/
From the link;
"Rushin found that the strong majority of these 656 contracts have a similar disciplinary appeals process. Around 73% provide for appeal to an arbitrator or comparable procedure and nearly 70% provide that an arbitrator or comparable third party makes a final binding decision. About 54% of the contracts give officers or unions the power to select that arbitrator. About 70% of the jurisdictions give these arbitrators extensive review power, including the ability to revisit disciplinary matters with little or no deference to the decisions made by supervisors, civilian review boards or politically accountable officials. Together, Rushin’s findings reveal that “arbitrators are the true adjudicators of internal discipline in the majority of police departments” in the study’s extensive dataset. Rushin observes that the police union contracts setting forth these protections are typically negotiated outside of public view or participation. He proposes reforms that would give the public more oversight power and democratic actors more of a role in the disciplinary appeals process.
Rushin’s wide-angle lens view of how police union contract provisions can pose potential hurdles to police accountability is illuminating. For a scientist, the arguments also raise hypotheses that call out for testing via an innovative research design. Dharmapala, McAdams and Rappaport’s new quasi-experimental study rises to the challenge, offering important and disturbing evidence of an association between conferral of collective bargaining rights and an increase in violent incidents in Florida sheriff’s offices.
An innovation of the trio’s study is exploitation of a change in law—a 2003 Florida Supreme Court case Coastal Florida Police Benevolent Ass’n v. Williams that gave Florida sheriffs’ deputies the right to engage in collective bargaining. Collective bargaining proceeded in such earnest that 76% of sheriffs’ deputies in Florida spread in 28 offices were under a collective bargaining agreement by 2008. In contrast, Florida police officers had collective bargaining rights much earlier, beginning in 1968. Because of the contrast, the researchers could examine violent-incident complaints before and after the conferral of collective bargaining rights on sheriffs in 2003 using a difference-in-difference approach. Changes in trends in violent incidents in the treatment group of Florida sheriff’s offices receiving collective bargaining rights could be compared to trends in violent incidents in the control group of Florida police departments unaffected by this legal change (the treatment). This approach allows us to focus on changes attributable to the intervention of conferring collective bargaining rights and control for other factors occurring in the state that might have affected rates of violent incidents.
The investigators found that before Williams the treatment (sheriffs) and control (police) groups had similar parallel trends, an important assumption that must be met for the difference-in-differences approach. After Williams, the number of incidents of violent misconduct rose in the treatment group but not the control group. Moreover, the increase in violent incidents appeared to be sustained more than a decade after Williams (2011-2016 compared to 2003-2010). Interestingly, violent incident also rose in sheriff’s offices that did not enter into collective bargaining agreements (to a smaller magnitude and with borderline statistical significance)."
Police unions protect bad cops, and leave them out there for the rest of us to deal with.
