Abstract: This Article empirically analyzes an important and underappreciated barrier to police reform: state labor law. Policymakers have long relied on a handful of external legal mechanisms like the exclusionary rule, civil litigation, and criminal prosecution to incentivize reform in American police departments. In theory, these external legal mechanisms should increase the cost borne by police departments in cases of officer misconduct, forcing rational police supervisors to enact rigorous disciplinary procedures. Unfortunately, scholars have lamented the failure of these external mechanisms to bring about organizational change in local police departments. This Article argues that state labor law partially explains this failure. The majority of states permit police officers to bargain collectively the terms of their employment, including the content of internal disciplinary procedures. This means that police union contracts — largely negotiated outside of public view — shape the content of disciplinary procedures used by American police departments. By collecting and analyzing an original dataset of 178 union contracts from many of the nation’s largest police departments, this Article offers the first comprehensive evaluation of how labor law can frustrate police accountability efforts. A substantial number of these agreements limit officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, mandate the destruction of disciplinary records, ban civilian oversight, prevent anonymous civilian complaints, indemnify officers in the event of civil suits, and limit the length of internal investigations. In light of these findings, this Article considers how states could amend labor laws to increase transparency and community participation in the development of internal police disciplinary procedures.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-08-31
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 31
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