December Newsletter

DC Police Union Newsletter Volume 1, Number 8

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CONTENTS

1. AHOD Update 2. DC Police Union and FOP Lodge #1

Moving Forward Together to Represent a Shared Membership

3. The Manpower Crisis Explained 4. Fact Check on Your Benefits 5. First Annual Coat Drive

DECEMBER 11, 2015

VOLUME 1, NUMBER 8

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AHOD Update

2007: The first of a series of group grievance was advanced to arbitration in July after efforts to resolve the matters with the MPD failed. The arbitrator ruled in the DC Police Union's favor and the Union is negotiating with MPD on what the penalty amount will be. 2008: An arbitrator was recently assigned after efforts to resolve the matter with the MPD failed. The arbitration hearing is being scheduled. 2009: The DC Police Union filed a Class Grievance and prevailed in arbitration. The MPD did not appeal the Arbitrator's decision. The MPD and the Union are scheduled to return to the Public Employees Review Board (PERB), so the PERB can determine what type of payments should be ordered for the Enforcement Order in DC Superior Court. 2010: The DC Police Union filed a Class Grievance and prevailed in Arbitration and was upheld by the PERB Board. The MPD did not appeal the decision, but refuses to pay the award and the matter is currently before the PERB in an enforcement proceeding.

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2011: The DC Police Union filed a Class Grievance and prevailed in Arbitration and was upheld by the PERB Board. However, MPD appealed PERB's decision to DC Superior Court. The Superior Court recently denied the appeal and the MPD filed a notice of Appeal to the Court of Appeals where the matter is pending. 2012: The DC Police Union filed a Class Grievance and is scheduled for arbitration on January 8, 2016. 2013: The DC Police Union filed a Class Grievance and was heard by an arbitrator on December 4, 2015. 2014: The DC Police Union filed a Class Grievance and was heard by an arbitrator on November 18, 2015. 2015: The DC Police Union filed a Class Grievance and is awaiting a date for arbitration. DC Police Union and FOP Lodge #1 Moving Forward Together

to Represent a Shared Membership

By: Marinos Marinos, Secretary

On November 18, 2015 DC FOP Lodge #1 held its general election for their Board of Directors for the 2016-2018 term. Members of the DC Police Union Executive Committee were present. After the votes were casted, tallied, and announced the DC Police Union congratulated a new leadership team that wants to improve the lodge’s relationship with the Union and get more involved with all the affiliated labor committees. … CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 …

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… CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 … A major highlight from the election was the announcement that Andy Maybo will become the new President the Lodge. Incoming President Maybo is a former Chairman of the United States Capitol Police Labor Committee and understands the importance of helping the affiliated unions. When speaking with President Maybo, he said, “I look forward to working with all the labor committees and will be assisting with any bills that may be presented by D.C. City Council or the Mayor that will affect the membership of the lodge and labor committees.” The lodge will also have a brand new Vice President, Michael Murphy. Vice President Murphy is an active MPD detective and a Shop Steward for the DC Police Union. Ronald “Keith” Reid is returning to his position as a Trustee at Large, Trustee Reid is a retired MPD Detective Sergeant and is a proponent of working with the DC Police Union.

After the results were announced Chairman Delroy Burton met with President Maybo and they are actively working together to improve the way members are represented by both the DC FOP Lodge #1 and the DC Police Union. Chairman Burton stated, “I am excited to work with the new leadership team and I believe our relationship between our two organizations will only grow stronger.”

The Manpower Crisis Explained

Gregg Pemberton, Treasurer

Since January 1st, 2014, the Metropolitan Police Department has lost nearly 800 officers to retirement and resignations. That’s over 22% of the rank and file. We are quickly approaching a 14% attrition rate for police officers in DC, which is causing innumerable problems and complications in our ability to keep the streets safe. The DC Police Union took a closer look at how, and why, this is happening. There are two groups leaving the force the fastest, the first group is those eligible to retire. It might seem par-for-the-course to have officers eligible for retirement separating from the department, but it is not. In just the past five years, the department has seen a huge drop in the number of years worked beyond eligibility for retirement. It wasn’t uncommon, until recently, to see officers working an extra 3, 5, 10,

or even 15 years after becoming eligible for retirement. There were a number of reasons why officers were willing to stay. In the past, maximizing pension benefits, job satisfaction, and a decent pay scale were all incentives for officers to elect to stay. However, after seven years without a cost of living adjustment, crippling schedules, toxic management, and horrible deployment strategies, our most senior officers have decided enough is enough, and are gladly leaving the day they are eligible. Many of our best and most experienced members have countdown apps on their phones and are quick to tout the time they have left, down to the minute. The second largest group that is leaving is those with between 2 and 10 years of service. These are our newest officers and represent the future of the department, but when they arrive here and discover the brutal reality of the non-competitive pay, onerous scheduling, the complete absence of real policing, toxic and inept management, and the elimination of nearly every specialized unit, the decision to move to another agency quickly becomes easily made. The effects these personnel losses have had on the department have been devastating. • Patrol division has been decimated, leaving

fewer officers on the street to answer calls for service and patrol neighborhoods.

• Patrol officers are discouraged from ‘self-initiated’ investigations by management in fear that an arrest would take them away from ‘high-visibility’ assignments.

• Criminal Investigations Division has shrunk drastically, meaning there are fewer detectives for follow up investigations and case closures.

• Our Motor Unit, which provides our world famous presidential and dignitary motorcycle escorts, is down from 50 members, to 26. Recently, the President had to be escorted with just two motor units—the policy is no less than three.

• Special Operations Division has also taken a hit. Special events like Caps’ and Wizards’ games have had to be staffed with skeleton crews due to lack of manpower.

• Crime scene technicians can take hours to respond. The city is down to 35 technicians, there may be only one or two working the whole city at any given time.

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• The Emergency Response Team responsible for active shooters, high risk entry, and barricades was even several members short on a barricade situation a few months ago.

• Harbor Division, which is responsible for patrolling the waterways for everything from boating violations to life saving rescues and even threats to the city, is often so short on certain shifts, that protocol prevents them from taking the boats out to patrol, or even for emergency calls.

These examples are just a snapshot of what’s going on all over the city. Nearly every unit across the District is hurting for more workers. The ability for the Metropolitan Police Department to provide top notch service to the city has been seriously diminished. The workload on the officers that are left has now become even more burdensome, severely straining critical resources. So what is management doing about this crisis? They will tell you that the answer is easy. They’re just hiring more officers and shuffling the ones we have to fill gaps. So let’s take a look at what this means for the city and for efficiency. Hiring more officers may seem easy enough, but the ramifications to this are more than concerning. • The MPD reports that it costs $95,000 to

recruit, train, and equip each officer. This means the cost to replace these officers is $76,000,000 tax dollars.

• Whether an officer has 5 years or 25 years of service, the amount of experience they have in understanding the dynamics and stakeholders of the neighborhood they patrol is invaluable. Having a new group of officers every year or so means no historical knowledge of the problems and less effective community policing.

• Because of the demand, MPD is now hiring people within four months of application. In an environment where most agencies take 9-12 months to hire, our new officers are taking jobs here, but leaving when the other agencies come through with a better offer of employment, meaning many recruits don’t even make it out of the academy before being snatched up.

• To accept that our experienced officers can be so easily replaced is shortsighted. With such a high turnover rate, the most highly skilled field trainers won’t have time to train

all the new officers, leaving many without the proper instruction on how to best do the job.

• Critical knowledge of the most intricate police tactics and policies is walking out the door. In a month like October, where we lost 64 officers, the overall skill and knowledge of the department took a major hit.

The other half of management’s response is that the department is ‘managing resources’ or ‘shuffling manpower’. This solution may be just as bad as the first.

• The department is relying on “Redeployment”,

where the department forces officers, detectives, and sergeants from the most technical and specialized units to go back out to patrol to supplement staffing. The officers have to leave their assignments and workload to go back to uniformed patrol on the street once every six weeks. Like AHODs, officers are taken away from important and necessary work. Crime scene technicians, K-9 officers, Financial Crimes and Missing Persons Detectives, Centralized Auto Theft, Domestic Violence Investigators, Emergency Response Officers, Harbor Patrol, Motormen, and even MPD’s Internal Affairs Agents. While these units are out on the street on assignments they’re not familiar with, none of their important duties or investigations are being fulfilled.

• Redeployment is one of the most divisive strategies on the department. It causes officers to be pulled away from their regular assigned tasks. The work piles up and they return to mountains of paperwork, investigations that have gone stale and other duties to catch up on.

• Officers are usually denied leave when they’re scheduled for these assignments, and when they actually are permitted to take leave, the redeployment week must be made up, severely disrupting their schedules.

• Again the department is being thoughtless in assuming ‘temporary’ officers on the street solve the problem. It may appear to solve the problem to the citizen, who is worried about the lack of police visibility, but the functioning of the department grinds to a halt when many of these important units shut down for a week every month.

• This is just a shell game tactic that robs one unit to replace another. And current management will defer to ‘high visibility’ over effective, productive strategy every time. … CONTINUED ON PAGE 4 …


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The only way to stop the hemorrhaging of personnel on this department is to fundamentally change the way it is managed. The onerous and erratic scheduling changes, non-competitive pay, years-long battles for fair contracts, micromanagement of the most basic level decision making, ineffective deployment strategies that frustrate and hamstring our members, blanket policies to not resolve grievances in good faith, drawn out legal battles, and a complete lack of understanding that high morale begets high productivity: all need a complete overhaul—from the top down. Even the mere suggestion that the department would consider a retooling and renewed approach would give our members pause before turning in their shields for greener pastures. Imagine the difference actual changes could make in our skyrocketing attrition.

Fact Check on Your Benefits

By: Gregg Pemberton, Treasurer There’s quite a bit of misinformation about how dental and vision benefits are implemented for members. It seems there is some confusion about how we got where we are, and why some people are having issues. It’s important that everyone understands their benefits and how they work, or why they don’t. One of the biggest misconceptions is that your Union dues pay for your dental and vision coverage. They absolutely do not. The Union does not pay for dental or vision insurance, and the costs are NOT deducted from your paycheck. In fact, members do not contribute at all for this coverage. Both dental and vision are Employer Paid Benefits. These benefits are paid for solely by DC Government and the amount the department contributes is negotiated through the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in Article 31 (Dental Insurance) and Article 32 (Vision Insurance). The CBA states that although the government will pay for the benefits, the Union will have to administer them. The Union agrees to administer the benefits to minimize expenses to increase the buying power. Here is Section 1 of the Article:

ARTICLE 31 DENTAL INSURANCE

Section 1. As of Fiscal Year 2004, the Employer agrees to contribute no more than $13.84 per month as the premium for self coverage and $29.67 per month for the premium for family

coverage in an approved dental plan; and increase the contributions on October 1 of each successive year of the agreement by the same percentage as the CPI-W for the Washington Metropolitan Area published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, for the preceding year.

In order to increase the amount that is paid by MPD, it must be negotiated and agreed upon through collective bargaining. The only exception is that members who elect to have the dental PPO over the DHMO pay an additional $6.67 for single coverage, on top of MPD’s coverage. When our last contract expired in 2007, the Union began to negotiate a new contract. Both Article 31 and 32 were on the table for bargaining and the DC Police Union pushed for increased coverage as insurance costs were becoming more expensive. The Union stated that $13.84 was not enough for both Vision and Dental. MPD’s position was that the members did not need any increase in coverage and the 2007 amount was more than adequate. As you’re all aware, those negotiations broke down over several issues and the contract went to arbitration. The DC Police Union cited that MPD’s contribution had not gone up in years, and was only within industry standards in 2007. The Union used the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Labor’s CPI-W (Consumer Price Index) for insurance in the DC area to argue to the arbitrator that MPD’s contribution was inadequate. Here is the exact language the Union provided:

“FOP points out that MPD has not increased its contributions to Dental, Optical, and Employee Assistance program premiums since the last CBA expired.



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… CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4 … FOP represents that, despite the lack of any increase in these fringe benefit premium contributions, optical and EAP providers have continued the same benefits level, while the dental providers recently reduced their benefits somewhat. FOP argues its fringe benefits LBOs [Last Best Offers] are the more reasonable as well because it must plan 10 to 20 years ahead to maintain its reputation, to make its providers whole, to establish credibility in the market, to forge long-term relationships, and to ensure providers’ loyalty through times of no premium increase. FOP argues that MPD’s fringe benefit LBOs provide, by contrast, no cost-of-living adjustments, except prospectively, which FOP argues is unfair and unreasonable. It asserts that MPD offered no testimony in support of its LBOs and no explanation for ignoring the uncompensated FY09-FY12 premium increases. FOP contends that MPD’s LBO will short-change FOP and its well-meaning providers as a consequence of the drawn-out negotiations. For these reasons, FOP asserts that its LBO on dental, optical, and EAP benefits LBO should be adopted.”

MPD argued vehemently that our members did not need additional coverage and that the Union’s position of having MPD pay more to providers was a violation of DC Law. MPD’s argument was that the Union’s position on Articles 31 and 32 were just too expensive for the city. Here is the department’s posture to the arbitrator:

“MPD argues that FOP’s fringe benefits LBOs will cost $1,098,874 more than MPD’s fringe benefits LBOs.” “In addition, MPD argues that there is no documentation to support FOP’s claim that benefits were reduced for Dental benefits. MPD argues that FOP’s fringe benefit LBOs will result in MPD paying additional money to providers, but employees will receive no new (or retroactive) services or benefits. MPD maintains that, as a result, FOP’s LBOs advance the providers’ - but not the employees’ - interests.”

After a long battle for these benefits, the arbitrator favored MPD’s position. After a long battle for these benefits, the arbitrator favored MPD’s position. The ruling was that our members do not need or deserve the same benefits they had, since the policies had become more expensive. Here is the arbitrator’s decision on the matter:

“For all these reasons, I find that MPD’s fringe benefits LBOs are the more reasonable, under the applicable statutory standards, achieving a prompt and fair settlement of the dispute.”

Our last hope was that the D.C. Council would reject the contract when it was brought to them for ratification. The Union lobbied the D.C. Council members in an effort to convince them of the problems the arbitrator’s decision would create; however, only two of them agreed. Here is how they voted to ratify the contract as the arbitrator ruled:

So what does this mean? The amount that MPD had agreed to pay in the 2004-2008 contract was no longer enough to continue to pay for the same coverage. The Union argued that the contribution should go up so our members could be well covered and able to maintain their health and that of their families. The MPD argued that members did not need an increased contribution and it would be a burden to the city, suggesting we find new coverage that was cheaper. Ultimately the arbitrator, David Vaughn, sided with MPD and the government. The Union had to find the best policies we could. Shopping for insurance in 2014 with a 2007 budget is not easy, especially in the wake of new federal mandates for health coverage. The way we’ll have to fix this problem moving forward is through contract negotiations. We must insist that MPD contribute enough to cover adequate insurance for our members.



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The DC Police Union will continue to fight for better benefits and attempt to improve the services we now have. Please call or email us with specific questions or issues. We have already found solutions to problems for a large number of members. We are here to help and look forward to working with you.

First Annual Coat Drive

By: Marinos Marinos, Secretary

During the DC Police Union’s October Executive Council meeting, the Council approved a request to spend up to one thousand dollars in winter apparel for needy DC students on behalf of all Union members. OPC Representative Ucrania Paniagua, 3D Chief Steward Ben Fetting, and Youth Division Chief Steward Ron Palmer worked together and identified the best place to purchase the winter apparel and the students who needed the apparel the most. The DC Police Union is happy to announce that we donated twenty-five winter jackets to students at Moten Elementary School in Southeast on November 24, 2015. We hope to make this a yearly event and to continue building our relationships with the community. If you have any suggestions about how to improve community relations, please contact email [email protected].

Date post:	14-Apr-2017
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December Newsletter

Government & Nonprofit