Police Union Contracts: An Analysis of Large Cities

The impact of police union contracts on administrators' ability to hold their officers accountable is an understudied are of police accountability. While there is anecdotal evidence that some contracts contain provisions that could militate against accountability, and some scholarship has reviewed state Law Enforcement Officer's Bill of Rights and found troublesome provisions, whether or not municipal police contracts routinely contain similar provisions is unknown. The research conducted herein is designed to address this knowledge gap. We review 47 contracts from some of the largest cities in the USA with a view towards finding provisions which could impede misconduct investigations, along with describing the frequency and contours of those provisions. Using directed content analysis, we find provisions across several domains of interest-including citizen complaints, police interrogations, disciplinary hearings, and police disciplinary records-within union contracts that could shield officers from accountability, and discuss their implications.