MORGAN ZALOT
AFTER A REVIEW of more than two
dozen cases of fired Philadelphia Police officers that showed the majority of
them were reinstated, the Police Advisory Commission yesterday called on the
city to examine the police arbitration process.
In its inquiry into 26 cases of
police officers fired between 2008 and last year for offenses ranging from
domestic incidents and retail theft to excessive force and on-duty
intoxication, the commission found that 19 of the cops were reinstated by
arbitrators, PAC executive director Kelvyn Anderson said during a news
conference last night at which the commission released its 2012-13 annual
report and announced its recommendation.
"Commissioner [Charles]
Ramsey, since he's been here in 2008, has fired on average probably 20 to 23
people every year," Anderson said. "A good number of those folks are
brought back to the department through the arbitration process, and what we've
tried to find out is why that occurs and what remedies there would be to that
process."
Anderson said the commission
extensively reviewed the controversial case of reinstated Lt. Jonathan Josey,
who was fired after he was captured on video striking a woman during a Puerto
Rican Day Parade after-party in North Philadelphia in September 2012.
They chose that case, Anderson
said, "primarily because it involved that elephant in the room for all of
us now, which is video."
The commission said it plans to
explore Pennsylvania's police-officer-certification system as a potential tool
to improve the disciplinary process for officers across the state.
Anderson blamed the issues with
the arbitration process partially on a lack of consistency in the way the
Police Department has meted out discipline.
"They'll hand out one type
of discipline to one officer, something else to another officer in a similar
situation. When an arbitrator sees that type of discrepancy, it's likely that
they're going to overturn that piece of discipline."
He added that when officers are
fired without a full investigation into the action in question - as he said the
commission believes happened in Josey's case - it paves the way for an
arbitrator to reinstate the officer.
"In any case . . . No. 1,
you need to be fair to the officers involved because the disciplinary process
depends upon fairness on all ends of the spectrum, to citizens certainly, and
absolutely to officers," Anderson said. "Clearly, if we're going to
take the step of taking an officer's job away, we need to do as thorough an
investigation as possible . . . so the outcome is appropriate."
The commission also touched on
a number of other issues in its annual report, including:
* Its ongoing attempts to
obtain full reports on police-involved shootings, which Anderson said the Police
Department has declined to provide citing an ongoing investigation by the
Department of Justice into the department's police discharges.
* A proactive review of
court-ordered custody exchanges of children that occur at police districts.
"If we take the right steps, we can prevent tragedy from occurring,"
Anderson said of the review.
* Data-driven oversight:
Anderson said the commission is working to combine data released by the Police
Department, including crime statistics, with complaints of officer misconduct
to analyze how the data sets relate.
The commission also included in
its annual report a comparison of its budget to those of police-oversight
agencies in other cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago and New York -
all of which have budgets well above $1 million annually. Philadelphia's
current PAC budget is $282,387.
Commissioners said they support
a bill introduced by Councilman Curtis Jones that would establish a permanent
commission with an initial budget of $1 million, allowing more staffers and
investigators.
