Locked Cabinets
Guild fights city over access to police-misconduct files

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

The police are headed for a showdown with the citizens of Seattle. But this time around, it won’t be on the streets of Seattle. It will be in a state labor court.

That’s where the Seattle Police Officers Guild and the City Attorney’s Office will face off April 24 in a case that will decide what rights the police department’s civilian review board has and what information it gets to see — a far-reaching dispute that pits a worker’s right to bargain against the citizenry’s right to hold police accountable.

The hearing will be held by the Public Employment Relations Commission, the state labor agency that examines unfair labor complaints made by government workers. In May and October, the police union filed complaints challenging the activities of the three-member citizen panel that reviews the work of the Office of Professional Accountability, the police unit that processes citizen complaints of misconduct.

The first complaint alleges that the OPA Review Board stepped over the line by filing a complaint of its own against police and conducting its own investigation — activities, the union argues, that violate what’s allowed under its contract. The second and central charge is that the Seattle City Council had no right last May to pass an ordinance that will allow the panel to get unredacted police files showing officers’ names starting in March, when the law is set to take effect.

Guild President Rich O’Neill says the board doesn’t need the names because its job is merely to report on the OPA’s investigatory process, not individual officers’ actions. Regardless, he says both matters are covered by the union’s contract, which expired Dec. 31 and is currently being renegotiated with the city. As a result, he says, the city is obligated to bring the issues to the bargaining table.

In its complaints to PERC, which combined the two charges in November, the guild is calling on a hearing examiner to order the city to negotiate the items. As it is, O’Neill says, the city is bargaining in bad faith — something city attorneys deny. If the ruling doesn’t go the union’s way, he says the guild will seek a court injunction to stop the ordinance from taking effect.

“I think it should send a chill through all the labor unions,” he says. “If the city can write legislation [that undoes contract clauses], then what good is your contract? For a city that prides itself on being pro-Democrat and pro-labor union, that seems a little two-faced to me.”

Peter Holmes, a member of the OPA Review Board since its creation in 2002, says it’s the union that’s being disingenuous. The board has tried for two years to get the guild to discuss the issues, but it always says no. The City Council ordinance passed last May was an attempt to resolve the problem, which came up in the wake of an uproar over the review board’s first major report.

Despite redrafting the report three times, Holmes says, the City Attorney’s Office — which is now caught in the middle of the battle — insisted that including case details, even without names, violated the board members’ non-disclosure agreement, leaving panel members open to lawsuits from officers, he says.

But, without officers’ names, Holmes says the panel can’t perform its duties, which include monitoring “frequent flyers” — officers with multiple complaints. And given the time it takes for the police department to copy and black out officers’ and witnesses’ names, he says, the panel is seeing a mere 10 percent of the complaint investigation files it’s supposed to.

“When they say [the names are] not needed, that’s incorrect,” Holmes says. “They haven’t read the ordinance” that created the review board.

In a response filed with PERC earlier this month, city attorneys say the union’s claims have no merit: The OPA Review Board has made no material changes to its activities, they argue, and seeing officers’ names would have no tangible effect on police working conditions.

If the OPA Review Board can’t get the unredacted files, says City Council President Nick Licata, it could have a dramatic impact on civilian oversight of police.

“That will be a hurdle,” Licata says, “to see if the OPA Review Board can remain relevant.”