Police union contract advances to Minneapolis council for possible vote Thursday

Minneapolis City Council members will meet again Thursday to discuss a tentative contract agreement with the city's police union — but without a recommendation from their colleagues on whether they should approve or deny the deal.

The deal with the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis incudes raises and $7,000 "incentive payments" for officers who remain on duty until the end of the year, but it lacks many of the disciplinary changes a growing number of local activists are seeking.

The police contract has gained new scrutiny in recent years following the murder of George Floyd and other high-profile police killings. Many of the city's elected leaders repeatedly have pegged the contract as an obstacle to enacting much-needed reforms, and local activists say they now have a chance to fix it.

Now, some elected leaders are saying they believe those changes are better made in policy manuals that don't have to be negotiated with the union, a position echoed Tuesday by the city's director of labor relations.

"I think there's a large misconception that by somehow adding these things to the agreement that's how we gain authority to take action. That's just simply not the case," Holland Atkinson, the labor relations director, told members of the council's Policy & Government Oversight Committee Tuesday.

He added that Mayor Jacob Frey and MPD officials had made changes to the police policy manual since Floyd's death. City officials, for example, have announced efforts to limit the use of no-knock warrants and which officers can use "less lethal" munitions, plus tightening requirements for intervening in excessive force cases.

Local activists continue to urge officials to go further.

Had those types of policies been included in the contract, Atkinson said, they would have needed to negotiate the changes with the union. "That is why we intentionally keep the labor agreements a lot slimmer than what people might understand them to be."

For roughly two hours, members of the council's Policy & Government Oversight Committee peppered Atkinson with questions about how various sections had changed, what role discipline should play in the contract and how they evaluated the financial impacts of the contract, among other topics.

The deal costs roughly $9 million, an amount the city said was included in the department's roughly $191 million budget for this year. It includes raises and "market adjustments" for police officers. By year's end, an officer who has graduated from the academy would be set to make about $74,000 per year, with the ability to earn more if they work certain shifts that come with bonus pay or stay on the force for more than seven years.

The police federation is encouraging council members to approve the deal, saying it would help recruit new employees for a department that is down roughly 300 officers since George Floyd's murder. "This contract would be the beginnings of being able to recruit and retain the best candidates in a limited job pool and recognizing the employees that have remained with the city," union president Sgt. Sherral Schmidt said in a statement earlier this month.

The deal makes two changes to the discipline section. One revision aims to clarify what happens to police supervisors who are demoted, then rejoin the union ranks. Another e-mails officers when someone requests public records about them and tells them who made the request.

Another change elsewhere in the document aims to give the police chief wider latitude to decide where officers should be assigned when they return from a "critical incident" — one in which they are seriously harmed or seriously harm or kill someone else. It also increases the mental health screening requirements for officers involved in critical incidents.

The Policy & Government Oversight Committee voted unanimously to send the matter to the full council for consideration Thursday — but without a recommendation on how to handle it. The council could approve the deal, reject it or postpone action.

Atkinson told council members that if they wait too long they risk going to binding arbitration and losing some provisions, such as statements that the union supports efforts to promote race and gender equity and statements that they're committed to providing the highest level of services. He said there's also a chance an arbitrator, citing the competitive market for hiring officers across the country, could order the city to provide larger financial increases, creating an "extremely dangerous environment for our finance partners."

Most local activists who have spoken out against the contract aren't taking issue with the financial incentives, but instead say they want to see more robust disciplinary changes.

"There is not one thing that fixes a very broken disciplinary system," Stacey Gurian-Sherman, an attorney for Minneapolis for a Better Police Contract, said in a news conference last week.