Guest Opinion | City Manager Caves Into Police Union, Giving Pasadena a Bad Bodycamera Policy

Pasadena City Manager Steve Mermell knows better, but he’s about to foist on the City a bad police bodycamera policy that discriminates in favor of police officers by allowing them alone to view video of their killing civilians before they give their statements about the incident. By allowing officers to tailor their testimony to the evidence, Mermell’s policy facilities lying by those bad officers who are predisposed to being untruthful when they kill civilians. Police and prosecutors, of course, do not follow the same bad practice with civilian witnesses because they recognize that it is a bad investigative policy to pollute a witnesses’ pure recollection by giving him evidence to which he can tailor his testimony.

Mermell knows what’s the best practice

Steve Mermell knows what the best practice is because his initial draft of the City’s bodycamera policy had the right practice, and Mermell was proud of it then. In February of this year, Mermell provided us a draft bodycamera policy and discussed it in a meeting we arranged for Chief Phillip Sanchez and him to get feedback on it from us and about 20 other Pasadenans interested in good police practices. We were pleased that the City Manager and the Chief embraced the best practice in that draft – i.e., it did not allow officers to review video of critical incidents until after they gave their statements to the criminal investigator. We praised Mermell and Chief Sanchez for it then, not anticipating that they would backtrack and adopt a bad policy.

Mermell’s ill-advised decision to collectively bargain on management prerogatives

Public employers in California must go through the collective bargaining meet-and-confer process with its employees’ unions on bread-and-butter issues. But thanks to the City of Pasadena, California law is clear that policing best practices are management prerogatives to which the statutory meet-and-confer obligation does not apply. In the 1990s, Pasadena’s City Council, City Attorney, and City Manager decided they would not cave into the police union and implemented a policy that an officer accused of misconduct could not tailor his testimony to other witnesses’ testimony by seeing their statements before giving his. The Pasadena Police Officers Association sued Pasadena trying to force it to meet-and-confer on that bad practice; they lost big time when the California Supreme Court in PPOA v. Pasadena (1990), 51 Cal. 3rd 564, ruled that such policing best practices are management prerogatives unlike the bread-and-butter issues on which public employers must meet-and-confer with their unions.

After meeting with us in February, Mermell ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling and submitted the City to the meet-and-confer process. We urged at the time that the City administration should meet with the police union for feedback just as it met with us but it should not do so within the formalized statutory meet-and-confer process. Those negotiations led to eight months of secret negotiations with the police union in which the City administration caved into its demand for bad practices.

Mermell’s 11th hour undemocratic power play

It appears Mermell feared his capitulation to the police union would not fare well in the Court of public opinion, so last Thursday night he tried to quietly pull off an undemocratic power play. In his Thursday night letter to the City Council, he unobtrusively stated that the PD would deploy bodycameras on Monday and concurrently post the new bodycamera policy on the website. Mermell was unobtrusively signaling that he was going to thumb his nose at the request of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee Chair John Kennedy that the City administration submit the bodycamera policy to that oversight body before implementing it. Pasadena Now publisher James Macpherson was diligent in reading Mermell’s unobtrusive announcement and published information about Mermell’s actions Friday morning. Both Black Councilmembers – John Kennedy and Tyron Hampton – expressed their anger that Mermell’s power play was bypassing the democratically elected City’s policymakers.

Will Mermell’s sticking his thumb in the eye of Black Pasadena’s leadership be the beginning of his end?

The history of the tenure of Pasadena City Managers has been that, more often than not, their demise has occurred because they failed to progressively manage issues related to Northwest Pasadena. Steve Mermell deservedly won the good-will of Pasadena’s progressives by some excellently-supportive staff work on the fight for the path to $15/hour minimum wage ordinance and wage theft enforcement. He is now squandering that good-will by his undemocratic power play trying to slip through his caving in to the police union’s worst practices. For a Black community dismayed by the macho-cops overreaction that possibly led to another death of a Northwest Pasadena Black man, his decision is tone-deaf to their concerns. Is this the beginning of the end of his tenure as Pasadena City Manager? Hopefully, five members of the City Council will reverse his decision, restore democratic decision making, implement best policing practices, and save Mermell’s hide.

 

Skip Hickambottom and Dale Gronemeier are civil rights attorneys who successfully litigated the release of the OIR Group review of the Pasadena PD shooting of the unarmed African-American male Kendrec McDade.