Page 20 - November 2018

Timing in life (and in litigation) is everything
As many of you who read this column know, the Lodge has been fighting an uphill battle with
the City over the destruction of disciplinary
files for the past several years.
On Oct. 18, Cook County Circuit Court
Judge Sanjay Tailor vacated the arbitra-
tion award issued by Arbitrator George T. Roumell, Jr., in which Roumell had upheld
the requirement set forth in Section 8.4 of the collective bargaining agreement: namely, that dis-
cipline investigatory files are to be destroyed, unless an excep- tion applies, within five years of the date of the incident. Judge Tailor ruled, incorrectly in our opinion, that there now exists a dominant public policy within the state of Illinois to main- tain public documents and, in particular, documents related to police disciplinary histories, in perpetuity. But how did we get to this point?
Section 8.4 has been in the contract since the parties en- tered into the first agreement, back in the early 1980s. In 2011, the Lodge first suspected that the City had abdicated its obli-
gation and chosen not to destroy such records, as required by Section 8.4, and filed a grievance. In early 2012, the Lodge obtained additional proof of the City’s noncompliance and filed a second grievance. However, despite clear proof of the contract violations, the Lodge attorneys at that time never presented the 2011 and 2012 griev-
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ances for arbitration.
Fast-forward to late summer and early fall of 2014.
During negotiations of the current collective bargaining agreement, the City openly acknowledged its long-standing disregard for Section 8.4 but claimed that its failure to destroy files was “well known” and “accepted” by the prior Lodge ad- ministrations dating back to the mid-1990s. The City then sought language changes to Section 8.4 to allow the City to re- tain all disciplinary files. Such changes were not incorporated into the current collective bargaining agreement and instead, the Lodge scheduled the 2011 and 2012 pending grievances to go to arbitration as quickly as possible.
Shortly after the Lodge demanded arbitration, the Sun- Times and Chicago Tribune filed separate Freedom of Informa-
20 CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ NOVEMBER 2017