City Council should use its influence over police contracts to end MPD ‘coaching’ secrecy • Minnesota Reformer

As reports from the reformer Deena Winterthe proposed MPD contract would make the Minneapolis Police Department among the highest-paying in the country. But the raises alone won’t solve a major challenge to bolstering the MPD’s ranks.

Recruiting and retaining new officers requires moving away from a history of failed police disciplinary systems. As a prosecutor, I worked with many suburban officers and supervisors, and they told me that the MPD’s tarnished image was a deciding factor in their decision to work elsewhere.

Minneapolis residents and critics often express cynicism about the police department. In fact, a relatively small number of officers are tarnishing the reputations of their colleagues. No PR campaign or expensive police patrols can change that. Minneapolis residents need to know that serious misconduct will be made public and will result in consequences.

Voters should know they can hold their mayor and city council accountable for the actions of the MPD. Currently, the system allows police misconduct to be hidden from voters – and also from elected officials. I’m referring to the use of “coaching.” This is when the MPD finds misconduct for “just cause” but claims to address the misconduct with additional training or meetings with a supervisor. The city claims this is not a disciplinary action, so no publicly available records are kept.

In other words, we are all left in the dark. You can imagine the problem.

This obsession with protecting officers with numerous serious violations from exposure has led to a culture that forces good officers to work with and be discredited by bad cops. Who wants to be forced to work with or be trained by Derek Chauvin?

Chef Brian O’Hara told WCCO he was responsible for reforming the department.

“It is my job to reform the Minneapolis police force, and the mayor, city council and residents can hold me accountable for that,” he said.

The problem is that voters can’t vote him out of office. Relying entirely on the boss – no matter who the boss is, no matter how reform-minded he is – will fail.

As for the coaching debacle, neither the boss nor the rank-and-file officials can be expected to reform this system. The mayor and the city council must demand this.

And there are good reasons to demand this.

As part of a lawsuit filed by the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information, large quantities of documents Approved Recent research has shown that, despite repeated claims to the contrary, “coaching” is regularly used as a method to cover up serious misconduct.

As a former Commission for the Monitoring of Police Conduct Chair Abigail Cerra and I have previously written and as before reports from the reformer, that should not have surprised anyone. During the debate on the last police contract, we tried unsuccessfully to get the mayor and city council to address this issue in the contract. The response at the time was that it was too late in the process and they could do it “maybe next time.”

Remarkably, the proposed contract actually deals with coaching – through cementing the approval of the City Council and Mayor for this practice as a method of hiding misconduct from the public. The existing contract states that officers will only be disciplined for “just cause” and does not limit the definition of disciplinary action. The new language in Section 12.01 — now renamed “Disciplinary Actions, Personnel Records and Investigations” — excludes verbal warnings, i.e., coaching, from the list of disciplinary actions. If the contract is approved as proposed, publicly available disciplinary records will be specifically limited to misconduct that results in “written reprimands, suspensions, demotions or dismissals.”

This sleight of hand mirrors the change made to the MPD policies and procedures manual in December 2021 after the widespread use of coaching was first revealed. The manual was quietly amended to conform to the city’s position in the MNCOGI coaching lawsuit by removing language that previously mandated disciplinary action for any ongoing violation and adding language that defined coaching as “non-disciplinary.” Even the settlement resolution with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights failed to allow the continued use of coaching, avoiding the very transparency the settlement was supposedly intended to promote.

The Mayor and Police Chief claim that the collective bargaining agreement is not the right place to implement reforms to the disciplinary process. If so, why did the definition of discipline need to be changed in the proposed contract?

It certainly appears that the city’s negotiating team attempted to include language in the union contract that would be consistent with the city’s legal position in the MNCOGI coaching lawsuit. However, continuing coaching as an attempt to avoid transparency and accountability is not, at its core, a legal issue – it is a political issue that goes to the root causes of George Floyd’s murder. The public has a right to know whether the mayor or select council members directed the negotiating team to legally protect this untenable system.

The City Council would send a strong message by requiring the removal of the proposed changes to Section 12.01 of the contract and making approval of the police contract contingent on ending the coaching abuse.

This can be easily fixed.

First, the contract should provide that “if the MPD or the Chief of Police imposes training for a Level B or higher misconduct, such training shall be considered disciplinary action under the Data Practices Act.”

Second, evidence uncovered in the MNCOGI trial revealed that MPD officers were permitted to challenge coaching through the formal grievance process. This is an unnecessary and excessive restriction on a supervisor or boss’s right to issue a verbal warning and goes beyond the requirements of the Public Employee Labor Relations Act. The contract should explicitly state that “whether a disciplinary action is subject to the grievance process is governed solely by PELRA.”

The City Council is being asked to approve this agreement. O’Hara, however well-intentioned, believes reform is possible by giving him more authority, but without fixing the broken systems that got us here. Mayor Jacob Frey says this is a good contract. He is wrong.

The City Council should refuse to ratify contracts that contain the ruse of portraying coaching as non-disciplinary and non-public.

The WashingtonPost famously proclaimed: “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Unfortunately, police reform is also dying in the dark.