At Cato @ Liberty , Walter Olson posts about a little appreciated aspect of cleaning up the mess left behind by dirty, abusive cops.  Rank and file police officers, or as they’re thought of in labor relations terms, a public employee collective bargaining unit, operate under a collective bargaining agreement.  It provides for many things, from new shoes to days off to salary. 

It prevents them from being questioned about their criminal conduct, whether driving drunk or shooting unarmed people for the hell of it, within a certain period of time following their seizure to having their union representative at their side.  It makes the social compact, the “agreement” under which the rest of society operates, look downright tepid.

But what it does, much to the chagrin of those of us who wonder why it is that when we shoot and kill someone, we face the life in prison at best while they get a two week paid vacation, is require that the decision to terminate a police officer because of misconduct be put to binding arbitration or some civil service panel.  In other words, it’s not the police chief or the public that gets to dictate the outcome. 

Rather, it’s a person on a negotiated list who hangs a shingle calling herself arbitrator, or some amorphous appointed board no one has ever heard of, who decides whether a bad cop stays or goes.  We don’t know who this person is, or have a vote in his election.  She doesn’t have to please us or run for re-election.  And after it’s all over, we live with the consequences of his decision, both financially and physically, as he has the authority to put a gun back in the hands of a killer and set him loose on the streets to use it.

Can this possibly be true?  Listen to Walter.

Why are public-sector managers often reluctant to fire errant employees, even when the stakes of misbehavior are high? One reason is fear of outcomes like that in Aurora, CO, where a civil service commission has just ordered reinstatement and back pay for an officer terminated from the police force after he “allegedly kneed a female suspect in the face while she was handcuffed and on the ground,” to quote the Denver Post, and then failed to report her injuries even though she was bleeding profusely. The police chief said he considered the incident an “egregious” use of excessive force, and the woman, whose orbital (eye-socket) bone was broken, won $85,000 in a settlement with the city.

That was not good enough for the civil service panel considering the officer’s firing, which said excessive force had not been proved to its satisfaction. It did find that the officer had violated a number of department policies — he should have reported the woman’s injuries, for example — but said termination was too severe a penalty; instead, it said, he should be docked 160 hours of pay and made to undergo training. The docking of pay seems to be of a somewhat notional variety, however, given that the commission ordered him awarded back pay for the salary he would have earned had he not been dismissed in June 2010 (the underlying incident took place in February 2009).

What distinguishes the decision maker from us is that they lack our focus on cleaning up the mess of abuse and misconduct, saving human beings from the harm, maybe even death, and instead focusing on this as a labor relations issue, a question of comparative discipline between employees. 

The stakes are huge.

When reinstatement is ordered, it means that the police department, a budget driven enterprise like any other in government, has to pay twice for a very expensive employee.  When the officer is fired or suspended, another officer has to take his place.  Someone has to be on the shift patrolling, and that someone gets paid for it.  Sometimes it’s a new cop. Sometimes it’s a cop on overtime. 

Should the officer be given his job back, and the termination be deemed too extreme a punishment for the conduct, he gets back pay, meaning that the police department now has to pay the full freight, salary and benefits, to an officer who didn’t work as well as the one who did to take his place.  For the “wrongfully” discharged officer, it’s a huge windfall, a paid vacation on top of getting away with, well, murder, maybe.  In Denver, granted it was only kneeing a handcuffed woman in the face.  Imagine a place where such conduct isn’t worthy of termination.  That place would be Aurora, Colorado.

Consider the rarity of a cop being fired for engaging in misconduct.  Only in the most egregious cases is anything done, any consequences at all for abuse.  And then consider that it’s subject to reversal by someone who couldn’t care less about Carla Meza, the handcuffed woman, but instead considers only whether the severity of the punishment, the firing of Police Officer James Waselkow, the he-man law enforcer who kneed her in the face, was comparable to the treatment of other abusive cops.

Normally, discussion about cops harming people is defended on the issues of right and wrong, giving cops a break, making snap decisions in the midst of dynamic situations.  None of these typical issues play a role in this decision.  It’s merely a labor relations issue, sanitized from the nasty details that we entrusted this cop with a gun and shield, and he abused that trust and engaged in conduct that would have meant some serious prison time for anyone else.  No, labor arbitrators don’t concern themselves that way.  It’s only about what’s fair to the public sector employee.  Ultimately, that’s the only issue that matters to this higher authority.

Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates never fired a cop before Waselkow.  Want to bet how long it will be before he first another for misconduct and abuse?  Forget about the harm done to the public, and consider what the true power behind the shield will do.