Last week Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the killing of 17 year-old Laquan McDonald. He brutally murdered Laquan, shooting him 16 times, most after he had already fallen to the pavement.
This was not a victory, however, in the battle to make black lives matter. Rather, it was a small measure of justice, resulting from an unusual prosecution and guilty verdict for a police officer killing a black youth.
Such results are rare. According to The Guardian, unarmed blacks were killed at five times the rate of unarmed whites in 2015.
In that year police killed at least 102 unarmed black people and in only 10 of the 102 cases were officers charged with a crime, and in only two of the deaths were officers convicted. Van Dyke was the first Chicago officer to be convicted of murder for an on-duty shooting in 48 years.
It is unlikely that he would have been convicted if the dash-cam video could have been successfully withheld from the public. The Illinois Fraternal Order of Police blasted the jury verdict that found Jason Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder and aggravated battery. Incredulously they argued that the officer should not have been indicted or convicted, thus indicating key factors in the common failure to prosecute and convict police officers who kill unarmed black men—the police unions.
A committee of Black Lives Matter investigated police union contracts and statewide Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights laws and found them major reasons murderous police officers go free. Working with legal experts, advocates, and academics with expertise in this subject, they identified six major areas where these contracts and bills of rights contribute to making it harder to hold police accountable for misconduct:
1. Many police departments can disqualify misconduct complaints that are submitted a certain number of days after an incident occurs or if an investigation takes too long to complete.
2. Contract rules prevent police officers from being interrogated immediately after being involved in an incident, and they restrict how, when or where they can be questioned.
3. Rules help officers with their defenses by giving them access to information that civilians do not get before being questioned.
4. Rules require cities to pay costs related to police misconduct including providing officers paid leave while under investigation, paying legal fees, and the cost of settlements.
5. Rules prevent information on past misconduct investigations from being recorded or retained in an officer’s personnel file.
6. Significantly, rules limit disciplinary consequences for officers and they limit the capacity of civilian oversight structures to hold police accountable.
The team reviewed contracts in 81 cities and found that deals in 72 cities included at least one of these barriers to police accountability. Of 14 states with police bills of right 13 included one of these types of policy provisions.
Collective bargaining agreements (these contracts) are meant to make sure that workers are treated fairly. However, in the case of police union contracts, they have crossed the line and disadvantaged citizens.