Post by Odysseus on Jun 27, 2020 22:23:08 GMT
Shortly after four Minneapolis police officers were fired over the death of George Floyd, the president of the city's police union wrote a letter to his members signaling that he was working to restore the officers' jobs. "They were fired without due process," wrote Lt. Bob Kroll, of the Minneapolis Police Federation.
Kroll's union has had great success in getting police officer terminations reversed — by appealing them to arbitrators. Since 2006, eight Minneapolis police firings have been decided by arbitrators and all but two resulted in the officers getting their jobs back, according to an NBC News review of records from the Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services....
Experts say arbitration plays an outsized, and often overlooked, role in saving the jobs of officers accused of serious misconduct. "I would say this is one of the most important accountability issues," said Stephen Rushin, a Loyola University Chicago law professor who published a study on arbitration in 2018. "If you can't remove bad officers, it's going to be really hard to improve a police organization."...
Some experts say the selection of arbitrators incentivizes them to rule half the time in favor of the unions and the employee and half the time in favor of the employers in order to keep getting chosen. Studies done on the Minnesota arbitration system back up part of the claim: The rulings on police firings since 2006 split just about down the middle.
