B. Delays Before Interviewing Officers
A common LEOBOR provision institutes “waiting periods” between an incident or the beginning of an investigation into an incident and when a police officer can be questioned. Maryland's provision is the most odious. It gives any officer under investigation the right to counsel, and the officer may postpone interrogation for up to five business days to find counsel in the administrative investigation. In effect, officers under investigation can mandate a seven-day waiting period before they can even be questioned about an incident.
Five of the six officers indicted for the killing of Freddie Gray spoke to investigators shortly after Gray's death--a fact only made public because a lawyer representing some of the officers admonished them in a press conference for speaking to investigators. The lawyer's implication: had the officers taken the LEOBOR's protections, they would not be facing charges today.
A ten-day waiting period--or any mandated waiting period--before questioning an officer is indefensible. It is purely an opportunity to confer with fellow officers, find out what other witnesses know or are going to say, and get stories straight. If police officers are entitled to representation in the administrative setting, the union could make a representative available on call for such incidents, eliminating the need for a waiting period. Waiting periods generate the perverse situation where the loved ones of people killed or injured by police are notifying other loved ones and explaining the tragedy before police are ever questioned.
Neither Illinois's LEOBOR nor Chicago's CBA mandates a waiting period for investigators to speak with an officer after a shooting incident, but the Chicago CBA stipulates that if the officer is interviewed about the incident again in the future, the officer must be provided with a written summary of his previous remarks to investigators. Like transcript provisions below, this serves no legitimate labor purpose or truth-finding function; it is the FOP's transparent attempt to ensure an officer suspected of wrongdoing keeps his story straight. This was probably extremely useful for Van Dyke and the other Chicago cops who all reported that McDonald approached Van Dyke with a knife, swinging it at him and leaving Van Dyke no other choice but to shoot McDonald--a lie exposed by the dashcam footage in that case.
Cleveland's CBA has no mandatory waiting period after a shooting, but it seems to have done little to obtain accurate, candid, or fresh testimony from Timothy Loehmann. His first known statement was signed eight days after the killing, and contains an obviously coached and careful restatement of events, including clinical language such as calling the dead twelve-year-old “suspect” and “the male,” and the omnipresent post hoc justification for killing an unarmed person: the assertion that the “suspect” was reaching for his waistband.
