“Defund the police! Defund the police!" New Yorkers made Defund the Police their battle cry during the summer of 2020 they reacted to the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis. That summer, protests against police brutality took place every single day in New York. New Yorkers are calling for serious reforms of policing including reductions in funding, transparency in contract negotiations becomes all the more important.
The Mayor of New York City and union representatives gather periodically to define a new contract for the NYPD. New York City taxpayers are noticeably absent when police contracts are negotiated despite the fact that the police budget is funded entirely through taxpayer dollars. What occurs during contract negotiations is undisclosed to the public, and only the final, ratified contract is available for New Yorkers to examine. Therefore, the public is left blind as to what or how their representatives are negotiating at these closed-door meetings as government representatives make and reject offers without public criticism.
New York State has an Open Public Meeting Law that was created expressly as a protection of democracy by ensuring that citizens can monitor their elected officials at public meetings. The law provides an in-depth description of all the ways that the meetings must be made available from disability access to the right to record and photograph these meetings. This Open Meeting Law seems to apply to many types of meetings involving elected officials; yet New Yorkers are denied access to police union contract negotiations. Indeed, closed-door police union contract negotiations were deemed lawful in the case Saratoga County v. Newman.
In 1983, Saratoga County passed a resolution that all collective bargaining occurs in the public eye. Contract negotiations were scheduled to occur between the Civil Service Employees Association for the Sheriff’s Department (CSEA) and county administrators. The CSEA halted collective bargaining and refused to negotiate because of the presence of press in the room during the meeting. The CSEA brought suit for improper practice against Saratoga County and an administrative law judge found in their favor. Saratoga County then appealed on the grounds that the Open Meetings Law should have been applied. The Newman court found that the Open Meetings Law do not apply to collective bargaining under the Taylor Law. The Taylor Law legalizes unions in New York and lays out their rights and restrictions. This decision was based on evidence that neither public employers nor public employees previously considered collective bargaining to be an open meeting as covered by the Open Meetings Law. The court claimed that where the parties affected have a long-standing belief about a statute—like the Open Meeting Law, it should be given substantial weight in interpreting the statute. It did even though neither the express language of the Open Meeting Law or the Taylor Law granted such an exception. The Newman court set the basis for denying the public access to police union collective bargaining.
The exemption to the Open Meetings Law granted to public employee collective bargaining leads to several serious harms to governance including: (1) fear and distrust in the government, (2) lack of accountability for elected public officials, and (3) unnecessary increased police spending per capita. These harms infringe upon the democratic process as they enable the spread of misinformation, allow elected officials to go unchecked, and prevent the public from having their needs met. Without access to the collective bargaining for police contracts, taxpayers are left to pay the bill without getting to place an order.
New York is one of many states that allows closed-door contract negotiations for unions. Only fifteen states mandate open-door contract negotiations—Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Tennessee, and Texas. Some take extra precautions to protect the right of the people to access union contract negotiations. For example, Missouri requires a public hearing before the collective bargaining agreements are officially signed where the public may ask questions and make comments.
A comparison of closed-door collective bargaining states to open-door collective bargaining shows that rates of public trust in government falter when the public is denied access to union negotiations. Additionally, police spending per capita is significantly higher in closed-door collective bargaining states creating an even bigger bill for taxpayers. Payouts for police misconduct are also higher in states with closed-door collective bargaining.
In order to curb these serious problems with privately conducted collective bargaining by police unions, New York must mirror the fifteen states listed above and include union collective bargaining in its current Open Meetings Law and even expand its requirements. New York’s Open Meetings Law must require police unions to allow members of the public to: (1) sit in on the contract negotiations both in-person and virtually, (2) have access to minute records of the negotiations, and (3) have an allotted time slot where the public can voice their opinion on the proceedings. We need to end closed-door collective bargaining in order for New York to operate as the democracy it was intended to be. The Defund the Police Movement is held back by a lack of transparency in New York governance.