By Paul Kiefer

On Wednesday, Mayor Jenny Durkan and City Council member Lisa Herbold announced a pair of adjustments to the make-up of the bodies responsible for negotiating collective bargaining agreements with Seattle’s police unions. For the first time, all three of the city’s accountability partners—the Office of Police Accountability, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and the Community Policing Commission (CPC)—will formally advise the city in preparation for, and during, negotiations with the police unions, and they will be able to attend bargaining sessions when police accountability is on the agenda.

Previously, only the OPA advised the city. This will be the first time the CPC, which represents the interests of the public rather than any branch of city government, will have an official role in police contract negotiations.

Second, a member of the City Council’s central staff will now sit at the bargaining table itself; in the past, the bargaining team was composed entirely of the mayor’s staff and staff from departments indirectly under the mayor’s direction. The move was foreshadowed in a January 2020 council resolution “affirming the city’s good faith intent” to consider addressing community and oversight groups’ concerns about the police union collective bargaining process, but that resolution did not name any specific changes to the city’s bargaining strategy.

In comparison to the last round of contract negotiations, these changes mark some notable shift in Durkan’s approach to negotiations. During the end of the last bargaining process in 2018, both the council and the accountability partners relied on second-hand information provided by the mayor’s office to monitor negotiations and assess proposed contracts. This year, accountability advocates hope that these shake-ups will ensure that longstanding recommendations for improving accountability within SPD are finally enshrined within the police union contracts.

In the press release that accompanied the announcement, OPA director Andrew Myerberg cast the move as a step toward “ensuring public trust and confidence” in the city’s bargaining process with the police unions; he was echoed by Inspector General Lisa Judge, as well as by CPC co-chairs Rev. Harriet Walden and Prachi Dave, who wrote that the inclusion of the CPC in the negotiating process will be “an opportunity to help ensure the reforms in the landmark 2017 Police Accountability Ordinance are fully implemented.”

The 2018 Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) contract—and Durkan’s approach to negotiations—drew widespread criticism from accountability experts, including retired judge and former OPA auditor Anne Levinson and the CPC,  who said that the contract undercut major improvements to accountability that were enacted in the historic 2017 accountability ordinance.

A key problem, Levinson told PubliCola, was that — as she understands — the Mayor’s Office’s goal during the negotiations was not to ensure that the reforms they promised to the public were fully realized. “At a minimum [the Mayor’s Office] should have been saying, ‘here is how a proposed provision is different than what the community was promised and what was adopted in the accountability ordinance,’ or, ‘here is how the proposal would lessen, rather than strengthen, accountability and not serve the public as well,” said Levinson. “There was an obvious lack of an independent voice for accountability reform and community perspective.”

Peter Nguyen, who represented the LR at the bargaining table with SPOG in 2018 (and worked as a legislative aide to council member Dan Strauss) but no longer works for the city, shares Levinson’s view. He was one of only five people on the city’s negotiating team that year, sitting beside then-counsel to the mayor Ian Warner, private attorney Otto Klein, and representatives from SPD’s Human Resources unit and SPD’s command staff.

Nguyen’s interview with PubliCola was the first time he’s gone on record to speak about the city’s labor negotiations strategies; it’s rare for labor negotiation professionals to give interviews on the subject. “The major failure of transparency when it comes to police bargaining in its current form in Seattle,” Nguyen told PubliCola before the mayor’s announcement, “is that negotiations can and essentially are driven by a single individual [the mayor] who cannot possibly reflect the collective interest of our entire city when it comes to public safety, and who is not subject to the proper checks and balances which would safeguard the public good.” Continue reading “Officials Announce Changes to Police Union Negotiation Strategy, But Accountability and Bargaining Experts Say More Should Be Done” →