Philly FOP seeks to restore secrecy around police shootings and disciplinary records in upcoming contract
The police union, in its opening contract proposals, wants to clamp down on what the public knows about how the department operates. It may have leverage, due to a shortage of cops.
When Philadelphia’s police union was negotiating its last contract in 2021, calls to “abolish” and “defund” the police still echoed across the city.
The national reckoning over police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder had not yet stalled. City Council voted 16-1 in May of that year to create a new civilian watchdog group to investigate police misconduct.
Even so, the resulting police contract that summer included significant raises for Philly cops — with only modest changes to the officer disciplinary process.
Now, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 is returning to the negotiating table with a new wish list for 2025:
More money, less oversight.
In addition to standard contract requests — such as pay raises and a more favorable vacation policy — the police union is seeking to roll back transparency and accountability measures that predate the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest of 2020.
The FOP, for instance, wants to end the police department’s nearly 10-year-old policy of releasing the names of most officers involved in shootings. It also wants to prevent the Citizens Police Oversight Commission (CPOC) from investigating police misconduct. And it wants to restrict outside access to currently available records ― such as those detailing how fired officers return to the force through the once-secretive grievance arbitration process.
Roosevelt Poplar, president of the FOP in Philadelphia, told his members last month that the package of proposals “fairly compensates you for your stellar job performance and accurately reflects the sacrifices that you and your families make on a daily basis,” according to a statement posted on the union’s website.
» READ MORE: Citizens Police Oversight Commission pushes for more investigative power as Philly prepares to negotiate FOP contract
The FOP also wants officers to be able to live in New Jersey and Delaware, and for the city to provide a 10-year, $100,000 interest-free loan to any officer who purchases a home in Philadelphia. For each year of service, the city would forgive $10,000 of the loan, the union has proposed.
For its part, city officials want all new officers to live in Philadelphia; give CPOC the power to conduct independent investigations of officers; and make changes to the Heart and Lung disability program that has been widely abused by police officers and was the subject of an Inquirer investigation.
Police are now working under a one-year extension to the 2021 contract. The extension included a 5% raise and runs through June 2025. Both the FOP and city officials declined to comment on negotiations.
The FOP will likely have more leverage this year than in 2021 because the department remains understaffed and cannot afford to lose more officers: It is funded for about 6,380 officers but only employs about 5,000.
The local and national political environment is also more favorable to police today, with the 2023 election of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, who ran on a law-and-order platform, and police reform initiatives around the country having largely fallen short.
Advocates for stronger police oversight in Philadelphia are concerned that the FOP is seeking to push its advantage to chip away at public transparency requirements.
“On the one hand, they got to represent their membership and push as far as they can. But at the expense of what?” asked Michael Mellon, colead of the Police Accountability Unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. “It’s at the expense of transparency and the public knowing what’s going on with the police department and its officers.”
Keeping records in the dark
Under the “privacy and family safety” section of the FOP proposals, the union is seeking to prevent the city from releasing police personnel records that are “otherwise covered by an exemption in the Right-to-Know Law.”
In 2019, The Inquirer obtained 170 previously confidential police arbitration opinions and settlements through that state public-records law. The newspaper’s “Fired, then rehired” investigation showed that the FOP had been successful in overturning or reducing police discipline about 70% of the time since 2011.
City lawyers stated then that such records are “exempt from disclosure” under the Right-to-Know Law, but that then-Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration agreed to waive the exemption because there was a strong “public interest in disclosure.”
» READ MORE: Inside the once-secret misconduct files of 27 Philadelphia police officers
Today, the city routinely releases those arbitration records. But the FOP is seeking to stop the city from waiving those exemptions. If successful, Mellon said, that could mean a return to the days when problem cops fired by the police commissioner — sometimes repeatedly — were quietly reinstated with no explanation.
“No one knew what was happening or the reasoning,” Mellon recalled.
The FOP also wants to stop the police department from providing officer disciplinary records to “any outside entity,” including the District Attorney’s Office and “any civilian review board or commission” without new standards approved by the union.
The identities of police officers involved in shootings would remain confidential unless they are charged criminally, under the FOP’s contract proposals. That would reverse a policy that then-Commissioner Charles Ramsey instituted in 2015 under which the names are typically released within 72 hours.
Devontae Torriente, a legal fellow at the National Police Accountability Project who has researched Philadelphia police reform efforts, said some of the union’s proposed restrictions around public records would amount to “setting us back decades.”
“The public can’t effectively oversee and provide accountability to the police department if it doesn’t know what’s going on,” he said. “It’s a critical part of the understanding to know what offenses and patterns exist.”
Fear of losing more police
Last week, 10 City Council members sent a letter to Parker urging her administration to enshrine CPOC’s investigatory power in the new FOP contract. The letter called the citizen commission “essential to addressing generations of eroding trust” around the police department.
But Joseph Giacalone, a retired New York Police Department sergeant and adjunct criminal justice professor at Penn State Lehigh Valley, said Council members need to acknowledge that the FOP has the upper hand.
“If they didn’t watch the last presidential election closely, where blue cities turned purple, I think they’re in for a rude awakening,” Giacalone said.
» READ MORE: The Philly Police Department is short 1,300 officers. Here’s why the situation is about to get worse.
Giacalone said the next FOP contract needs to be generous enough to prevent more officers from leaving. He also questioned the effectiveness of citizen oversight boards, which have a mixed record around the country. Many members, he argued, don’t have the law enforcement or tactical experience to effectively investigate police officers.
“They’ll ask why you had to shoot him in the chest, and why didn’t you shoot him in the leg,” Giacalone said. “They watch too many episodes of CSI: Miami.”
Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr., who authored the CPOC legislation and signed the letter last week to Parker, said he was open to compromise.
Jones said he considered the current FOP leadership under Poplar to be more flexible than in the past. It was not unreasonable, Jones argued, for the union to want to shield the identities of officers involved in shootings while they are under investigation.
“They have a job to do to defend their members,” Jones said. “We can’t be overly harsh, but we can’t live in a society that does not have consequences.”
As for giving CPOC the power to investigate cops, Jones told a Parker administration official at a Council hearing in November that it is nonnegotiable and needs to be included in the FOP contract. “Don’t come back here without that,” he said.
CPOC now has a seat at the contract negotiating table, said agency executive director Tonya McClary.
While negotiations have just begun, McClary said the FOP’s s initial proposals represent a “significant step back” for police reform initiatives, some of which had already been litigated years ago.
“It really does undermine transparency,” she said. “To be honest with you, it’s a little alarming.”