Will new police contract include citizen-driven changes?

We believe in our city. We believe we can do better, and we believe this is the time.”

Stacey Gurian-Sherman

It is simply not effective or sustainable to keep making payments for workers comp and lawsuits that are preventable. We have to do better for our city. We have to do better for our city officers, and that’s what our recommendations do.”

Stacey Gurian-Sherman

The long-awaited and public negotiations between the city of Minneapolis and the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis formally began on Sept. 6, 2023. Three sets of contract amendments have been released: one from the city, one from the federation and a third from a local coalition, called the Minneapolis for a Better Police Contract (MFBPC).
New this time is that the federation and the city are holding negotiation sessions in public because of a lawsuit filed by MFBPC and the subsequent settlement agreement. The first two were in September with a third coming up on Oct. 13, at 9 a.m. in the Public Service Building, Room 100, 505 4th Ave. S.
The current contract ended on Dec 31, 2022. The summer before that, the city held a number of community meetings to gather public input focused on three issues: recruitment and retention, mental health, and accountability.
Those are the same issues that Mayor Jacob Frey and Ward 4 Council Member and chair of the council’s public health and safety committee meeting, LaTrisha Vetaw, said would be the city’s priorities in the upcoming negotiations.
They also said they did not want to include the disciplinary details, with a matrix that appears in the police policy manual, in the contact. “If we were to put it into the contract then we’re suddenly opening something to a negotiation that doesn’t need to be negotiated,” said Frey. “That’s handing over leverage. It’s handing over authority.”
In a report about last year’s community meetings the city highlighted three specific ideas that emerged: a preference for two separate bargaining units, one for patrol officers and another for the sergeants and lieutenants; increases in compensation to attract quality candidates; and ongoing mental health evaluations with increased mental health benefits. In July, the state’s Bureau of Mediation Services sided with the federation and ruled that the city could not exclude sergeants and lieutenants from the existing unit.
Almost all the federation’s recommendations are focused on economic issues. One, however, addresses coaching. They want it to be clear that “anything that is determined to constitute discipline and, therefore, public upon final disposition should be grievable.” Coaching is not mentioned in the current contract, and the city is not proposing to add it as a form of discipline. The city is proposing a clarification that discipline only includes a written reprimand, suspension, demotion, and discharge – not coaching.
At the second negotiation meeting, the federation proposed just a one-year contract, rather than the normal two-year. That proposal included across-the-board retroactive pay raises of 5.25, effective last January and 8% effective last July 1.
The city also wants a new pilot program that would offer premium pay for employees who are fluent in certain languages other than English.
The MFBPC coalition drafted 22 recommendations for the new contract. Five coalition members presented them to the city council’s policy and oversight committee on Sept. 18.

Another $1.4 million to former officers
Just prior to the coalition’s presentation, the committee also voted to authorize payments for several workers compensation claims of former officers totaling roughly $1.4 million dollars.
Stacey Gurian-Sherman, a member of the coalitions and the Ward 9 appointed representative on the city’s Community Commission on Police Oversight, led the presentation to the committee.
“It is simply not effective or sustainable to keep making payments for workers comp and lawsuits that are preventable,” said Gurian-Sherman. “We have to do better for our city. We have to do better for our city officers, and that’s what our recommendations do.”

Use of unarmed staff
The coalition’s recommendations do not include anything about pay and benefits, but focus instead on harm reduction and transformational change. “We want to reduce harm for people who have bad interactions with police and reduce harm to officers,” said Gurian-Sherman. Officer harm reduction and wellness proposals include requiring annual mental health screenings, as well as limiting the hours worked each day and the days worked each week.
There were some areas where the city and the coalition made similar proposals. Both want to ensure that staffing levels are a management right consistent with other city labor contracts, and remove requirements for a certain percentage of sergeants (23.25%) and lieutenants (4.5%). They also agree that unarmed non-law enforcement staff could be used more often.
Gurian-Sherman said that using unarmed staff is a chance to “use the stubborn low staffing levels to start realizing the promises” made in recent years and “look at safety beyond police.” They listed 28 non-emergency calls for service that would no longer be responded to by sworn or armed licensed law enforcement staff unless an emergency arises after initial deployment of unarmed nonpolice responders.
The city is proposing to use non-sworn personnel to conduct background, misconduct and criminal investigations under the supervision of sworn personnel. In exchange, the city is willing to commit to not lay off any sworn employees and establish a three-year hiring and retention incentive program.
“It doesn’t make sense to have them doing work that we don’t actually need police officers to do,” said coalition member Kim Millard, “that other professionals with other training and specific skill sets could actually do a much better job of.”
The coalition also calls for making sure all training must be approved by the city, even if it is completed outside of work hours, as well as prohibiting indemnification for things that happen on personal time, and the development of a new race and gender equity plan for the department.
It also calls for contract language to comply with the City Charter to return the responsibility for hiring, misconduct decisions, discipline, and declaring emergencies back to the mayor. Currently the contract contradicts the charter and stipulates that the chief of police has those responsibilities.

Additional recommendations would:
• Eliminate the language added to the last contract that requires MPD to notify officers of people who request their personnel data.
• Require officers to be interviewed within six hours of critical incidents, rather than after 48 hours.
• Clarify that discipline will be consistent through use of the disciplinary matrix in the policy manual and that coaching shall not be used for any offense greater than an A-level offense.
• Require officers to affirm they understand the standard of conduct expected every year.
• Clearly define what is required to be eligible to serve as a Field Training Officer.
• Allow psychologists to determine if off-duty work is appropriate for officers returning from critical or traumatic incidents.
• Add anabolic steroids abuse as harmful to the health of officers and test for it annually.

‘We believe in our city’
“If the city is serious about implementing the consent decree and MDHR settlement, we have to maximize these negotiations to change how MPD functions,” said Ward 2 Council member Robin Wonsley after the meeting. “The 22 recommendations are incredibly helpful for understanding the specifics of how we do that. Several MFBPC recommendations are common sense policies that are already in place at police forces around the country.”
The coalition provided a 33-page report detailing their recommendations that includes specific wording that could be used in the contract and over 70 footnotes with links to additional information. https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/File/2023-00895.
They encouraged council members to follow the negotiations carefully, set criteria for themselves, read the next proposed contract agreement when it is finished, and to conduct public hearings before any vote is taken to approve it. The contract, the report stressed, “must deliver what the last contract did not.”
“We believe in our city,” said Gurian-Sherman. “We believe we can do better, and we believe this is the time.”