The new labor contract reached between Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration and Boston’s largest police union includes unprecedented reforms that will allow the city to fire officers accused of serious offenses, such as murder and rape, and bar them from appealing those dismissals through arbitration.
Details of the new five-year pact released Tuesday show that 30 crimes would now not be eligible for arbitration, if an officer is indicted for them or if they feature in a sustained internal department finding. They include murder, rape, kidnapping, drug trafficking, human trafficking, armed robbery, and hate crimes. Disciplinary measures related to other allegations of misconduct, such as use of excessive force, would still be subject to arbitration.
Currently, a police officer facing any disciplinary matter can seek arbitration, a process sometimes used to overturn disciplinary orders. Earlier this year, city officials said five members of the department’s current sworn officers were fired only to be rehired through arbitration.
“There should be no loophole for those who commit grave criminal acts to wear a badge,” said Wu at a Tuesday news conference.
The contract includes a 21-percent increase in costs over the five-year period, retroactive to the summer of 2020 when the union’s last contract expired. Cost of living increases in the contract means the current average base salary for a patrol officer would increase to nearly $90,000 by the summer of 2025, from the current average of $82,278. That is before overtime and additional income from police detail work.
The total cost of the contract to the city is $82 million, adding in benefits and incentives for the patrolmen’s association. The City Council must approve funding for the agreement to become final.
Wu, Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association president Larry Calderone, and Police Commissioner Michael Cox highlighted details of the proposed pact at the news conference. Officials from both sides said they were not aware of another police contract that includes such an arbitration exclusion for egregious misconduct. Wu called the pact “groundbreaking” and “historic.”
Cox said the contract represents an “exceptional start” to ensuring that officers who are fired stay fired. The history of the arbitration process, he said, is hit or miss.
“More often than not, unfortunately, the arbitrators, have, for whatever reasons, overturned some of these cases,” said Cox. “The fact is . . . that won’t be the case. That’s something that not a lot of police departments can say right now regarding arbitration.”
Calderone said the union, by approving the contract, is helping bring “policing into the future.”
“At the end of the day, this is a contract that is fair and equitable to the men and women in uniform,” he said. “At the same time, we helped policing evolve.”
Outside City Hall, reaction to the proposal was mixed. Howard Friedman, a civil rights attorney, said police officers are rarely charged with crimes and internal affairs investigators don’t often sustain complaints, particularly those alleging excessive force.
“My sense is that it’s not going to change much,” he said.
In a statement Tuesday, Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts thanked Wu for “following through on one of her campaign promises to use contract negotiations to ensure greater police accountability,” calling the reforms long overdue.
“Notably, the new contract ensures that officers who are charged with egregious misconduct will be terminated without arbitration — an achievement for police accountability and community safety for all,” she said.
Christine Cole, a Boston-based public safety consultant, said the contract contains “high level advantages for everyone.” She applauded the union for recognizing that if internal affairs investigations support allegations “of these types of offenses, then that is sufficient for termination and not protracted litigation.”
The fact that an indictment and not a conviction is included in the contract’s discipline criteria, said Cole, shows the union “understands the seriousness of these kinds of allegations and the high bar of a jury conviction, and that the probable cause asserted by the prosecution and a grand jury is sufficient to warrant dismissal as a police officer.”
“Good officers should only want to work with good officers,” she said.
Wu, when asked about the difference between the discipline reforms in the new contract and current protocols, pointed to the Patrick Rose case. Last year, Rose, a longtime Boston police officer and former president of the patrolmen’s union, pleaded guilty to molesting six children over several decades.
In April 2021, the Globe reported that Rose was allowed to keep his badge for 20 years after top police officials determined he more than likely sexually abused a child in 1995. Yet, police officials never recommended that he be fired, records show.
Wu said “there unfortunately have been examples, multiple” examples of officers who were determined to have previously violated one of the offenses that is ineligible for arbitration under the contract proposal.
The handful of officers who were fired and rehired through arbitration were accused of a variety of offenses, including a drunken driving charge, using a racial slur, and sexually harassing a Police Department employee.
David C. Williams was fired twice from the department: The first time was in 1999, in connection with the 1995 beating of Cox, the current commissioner who was then a fellow police officer he mistook for a fleeing suspect; and the second time in 2012 after an internal investigation found he used unreasonable force while arresting a man in the North End three years prior.
Baltazar DaRosa was fired in 2010 for violating department rules in connection with a 2005 slaying. He was rehired in 2012 after being acquitted of charges of being an accessory to the killing. An arbitrator ruled DaRosa was unjustly fired.
The Wu administration acknowledged it did not get everything it wanted in the negotiations. However, Wu’s office said some officers who were rehired following arbitration likely would have stayed fired under the provisions of the new contract.
The contract also changes the paid detail system. Under the new deal, which was ratified by the 1,550-plus-member union Monday, if details go unfilled by police officers, they may be offered first to Boston police retirees, Boston Housing Authority officers, and university or college officers, then municipal officers and civilian contract personnel. About 40 percent of details go unfilled in the city, according to the Wu administration.
The deal also ends the practice of allowing officers who finish a detail early to start a second one, preventing officers from collecting double pay for the same period of time. It will also aim to streamline the administration of the detail system.
At the start of contract negotiations, about 10 percent of the union’s members were on medical leave for more than one year, which is more than 150 police officers. In an attempt to simplify the process, the contract calls for an independent medical examiner to settle disagreements between an officer’s doctor and the department’s doctor regarding an individual’s ability to return to work.
Contract talks are ongoing with the other three police unions in Boston, according to Wu’s office, and she acknowledged that some of the terms and conditions in the patrolmen’s union deal could be used in the discussions with the other law enforcement labor groups.
In September, the City Council unanimously approved a three-year collective bargaining agreement between the city and firefighters union, Local 718, that results in a pay hike of about 10.6 percent.
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald.