CHICAGO (CN) — The Fraternal Order of Police scored a victory in Chicago on Thursday, though maybe not a complete one.
During a three-hour meeting, the city's committee on workforce development voted to approve a tentative labor deal that would double planned raises for most Chicago cops in 2024 and 2025 from 2.5% to 5%. It would also extend the police union's current contract with the city out to 2027, with planned cost-of-living raises in 2026 and 2027. The agreement, along with additional police funding outlined in the recently-approved 2024 city budget, will push the city's annual police spending to over a record $2 billion and enjoys Mayor Brandon Johnson's endorsement, despite his prior support for defunding the police.
That win for the order was tarnished by the committee members' other decision on Thursday: In a 10 - 5 vote, they rejected a proposed change to the police union's collective bargaining agreement that would have sent the most serious police misconduct cases to arbitration. Those cases, involving officers whose alleged misconduct warrants a yearlong suspension or termination, are currently decided by Chicago's civilian police board with the case details made publicly available.
But this past October, independent Illinois labor arbitrator Edwin Benn issued a ruling which argued those cases ought to go before arbitration. Less severe police disciplinary cases already do, he noted, while also arguing that unionized police officers had a right to arbitration under the 1984 Illinois Public Labor Relation Act.
"The city ... cannot rely upon any ordinances it has that provide for this class of cases to be decided by the Police Board. The requirement for final and binding arbitration of disputes found in Section 8 of the IPLRA takes precedence,” Benn argued.
Progressive factions in city, along with Mayor Johnson, rejected Benn's decision soon after the arbitrator issued it and urged the workforce development committee to do likewise. Moving the most heinous allegations behind private arbitration hearings, the argument went, would diminish both the accountability and transparency of the Chicago Police Department. The CPD is currently in the process of enacting court-ordered reforms amid a history of officers committing crimes ranging from racial profiling and witness intimidation to torture and outright murder.
The committee's decision reflects agreement with that argument, but it is not final. At least 30 members of the 50-member city council still need to approve it, with a full council vote on the issue possibly coming next Wednesday. If the council accepts the committee's ruling to reject Benn's own, the matter could eventually end up in state court — a development Benn said would "prove futile" in his October ruling.
In the city council chambers on Thursday, tempers flared between those who supported Benn's ruling and those who wanted the committee to reject it regardless of the potential legal fallout.
Local resident Anjanette Young, who won a $2.9 million settlement from the city in 2021 over a botched police raid on her home in 2019, and has since become an outspoken critic of the Chicago Police Department, appeared during the meeting's public comment period to argue that supporting the change would obscure police misconduct like she suffered.
"All of you know my story very well. If arbitration was an issue, my story would have been swept under the rug," Young said.
Current Chicago Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 president John Catanzara, who also spoke at the meeting, rebutted that shooting down this portion of a collective bargaining agreement was demeaning to the order and reinforced the idea that it was a "second-class union." Repeating Benn's October admonitions, Catanzara also threatened that the order would be willing to fight the city if it did not approve the arbitration change and warned it was a court battle Chicago wouldn't win.
"If you reject this proposal and the council then rejects it on Wednesday, all you are doing is postponing the inevitable. This is protected in labor law. And I'm just telling you, it is a fight you will not end up winning," Catanzara said.
In a phone interview, the city's Inspector General Deborah Witzburg rejected the police board / arbitration dichotomy in the issue. She argued the mechanism for how the city resolved severe police discipline cases was secondary to the "north star" of ensuring the process was transparent.
"If all those [police board] cases go to arbitration, that just raises the stakes to promote transparency," she said.
She also expressed doubt over the argument that, given arbitration proceedings are private and litigants can privately hire arbitrators, while police board members are public servants appointed by the mayor, arbitration is inherently less transparent than police board hearings.
"That conclusion is a little hard to swallow when the city hasn't taken the steps to improve the arbitration process," Witzburg said.
The Inspector General pointed to a 2021 report from her office which found that the police grievance process was opaque generally, as well as the city's failure to implement reforms suggested by that report. Those reforms include publishing anonymized arbitration awards on city platforms, indexed by topic and searchable by citizens. The report also suggests
publishing "aggregate statistics" on the annual number of discipline cases, the rate at which discipline is meted out and in what form, and the number of cases each given arbitrator hears.
"The city could render it all publicly visible," Witzburg said.
But rhetoric from more progressive city council members on Thursday showed they disagreed with Witzburg's moderate conclusions. 40th Ward Alderman Andre Vasquez even agreed Catanzara's claim that the order is treated differently from other unions — but only to argue that as an armed group with license to kill and arrest people, they should be.
"I think there needs to be a change in the state law," Vasquez said, referencing the Illinois Public Labor Relation Act that Benn cited to support his October ruling. "Because there is a clear difference between ... the FOP and other unions. Other unions don't have the right to kill or imprison anyone."
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