After negotiations away from the public eye, Houston has a new contract with the police union

In June 2020, in the weeks after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, more than 200 Houstonians signed up to speak at a city council meeting on police reform. They gave hours of testimony, many criticizing the police department’s nearly $1 billion budget and the way the city handles police misconduct.

But most of the changes they asked for can only happen during the time when the city renegotiates its contract with the police officers union, and the city and the union chose not to renegotiate the contract when it expired at the end of 2020.

Now both sides have agreed to a new contract, after four months of closed-door negotiations. Around 70% of union members voted in favor, though the city hasn’t yet made the document available to the public. Houston and San Antonio announced new police union contracts just days apart, though San Antonio negotiations were done for the public to see, while Houstonians didn’t know negotiations were taking place.

“We are explicitly choosing to hide this process that not only controls how we respond when people are killed in Houston, but also controls hundreds of millions of dollars of our city spending,” said Jaison Oliver, a community organizer with the ImagiNoir/BLMHTX Collective and one of those who spoke at the 2020 meeting. “Hundreds of millions of dollars, that is just kind of taken out of the normal budget process when these types of contracts are approved in secret. So not only is City Council left out of the loop, but the public is left out of the loop.”

Read more: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/in-depth/2022/03/15/421037/after-closed-door-negotiations-away-from-the-public-eye-houston-has-a-new-contract-with-the-police-officers-union/