
Despite Misdeeds of Rogue Cops, Arbitrators Revive Tainted Careers
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Grimmcol: 10/21/18
The Teflon cop is back on the job. Of course, he’s back. Thanks to a ludicrously permissive police arbitration system, Sgt. German Bosque has always managed to resurrect his tainted career.
Six times, the Opa-locka Police Department has fired Sgt. Bosque, citing misdeeds including the use of excessive force, misuse of police firearms, stealing from suspects, unauthorized police chases. There were accusations of domestic violence and stalking. His bosses wrote him up for defying direct orders, lying and falsifying police reports. At various times, the department has discovered a baggie of cocaine, a crack pipe, an empty vodka bottle, a counterfeit $20 bill and a stash of confiscated drivers licenses in Bosque’s squad car.
Opa-locka’s internal affairs office investigated Bosque 40 times, including 16 allegations of battery on a suspect. And there was that time the officer was accused of calling in sick while he was actually on vacation in Mexico.
Bosque, 54, has earned the ignominious distinction as the most disciplined, fined and suspended cop in Florida. Not to mention his three arrests. (None of which resulted in convictions.) Back in 2011, in a statewide investigation of controversial police arbitration cases, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune picked Bosque as Exhibit One, suggesting that his resume read like a rap sheet.
But his police union has always provided Bosque lawyers with formidable expertise exploiting the arbitration clauses written into union contracts. All six terminations were reversed. Six times Opa-locka was forced to reinstate its most infamous cop, the latest order effective Oct. 2. (Of course, Opa-locka, a town long managed with astonishing ineptitude, might have avoided this recurring embarrassment (replete with heaps of back pay) if its PD had bothered with a background check before hiring Bosque 25 years ago. Most employers would have passed on a job candidate who had been kicked out of the police academy and fired from two other police departments.)
However outrageous, Bosque’s career is only another opprobrium born of a system that, according to a 2016 U.S. News and World Report national investigation, reverses or eases discipline for police misconduct in 60 percent of the cases. A similar report two years earlier in The Atlantic warned that the police arbitration system was “geared to protect labor rights rather than public safety.” And that “cops deemed unqualified by their own bosses are put back on the streets. Their colleagues get the message” that police are “all but impervious to termination.”
Forbes cited a study out of Philadelphia that looked at 26 cases of police firings because of domestic violence, excessive force, retail theft or on-duty intoxication. Nineteen of those officers were put back to work. The San Jose Mercury News investigated 15 disciplinary cases in Oakland. Arbitrators rescinded punishment in seven cases, and reduced punishment in five others, including giving one Oakland cop his badge back, never mind that he had twice shot unarmed men in questionable circumstances in seven months.
Cop firings are even more tenuous in South Florida. Last year, the Miami Herald reported that arbitrators upheld the termination of a Miami police officer only once in the previous three years. Meanwhile, eight other cops were reinstated, including officers who had been zapped for shooting an unarmed motorist, sleeping on duty and refusing to cooperate in a murder investigation. One had shot up his own house in a drunken rage.
In 2014, an arbitrator granted a Miami Beach police officer another chance after he had quaffed six vodka-and-cranberry cocktails at a South Beach nightclub, on duty and in uniform, and was captured on surveillance video as he danced drunkenly around a nightclub with his hand on his half-holstered pistol. The Arbitrator decided the Miami Beach PD, rather than fire the police sergeant, should have helped him with his drinking problem.
South Florida arbitrators, guided by contracts negotiated by politically powerful police unions, have decided that napping on the job, lying on sworn court documents, refusing to cooperate in a homicide investigation or shooting an unarmed motorist weren’t grounds for dismissal.
Florida International University twice tried to fire a campus cop after a series of transgressions, including three arrests for domestic violence and another for child abuse. Arbitrators kept him on duty until 2005, when he was given a ten-year prison sentence for sexually assaulting a teenage girl while on duty.
My favorite arbitration absurdity was the reinstatement of a Miami Beach detective who claimed, with a straight face, that he had failed a random drug test because of a mysterious cream — obtained from an “old Cuban guy” — that he had rubbed on his genitals as a kind of erectile dysfunction folk cure. “Having never knowingly used cocaine, I was baffled, perplexed and confused,” the cop explained.
Of course, nobody would believe such an outlandish excuse. Nobody except the arbitrator.
Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter and columnist in South Florida since 1976.
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Photo Credit: Photo by Pixabay from Pexels
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