ST. LOUIS—The St. Louis police union is suing the city in an ongoing dispute over the city's claims that two major St. Louis police union contracts have been invalid since April.
The St. Louis Police Officers Association filed the lawsuit in St. Louis Circuit Court Thursday, naming the city along with St. Louis police Chief John Hayden, former Mayor Lyda Krewson and former Director of Personnel Richard Frank as parties.
At the center of the suit are contracts for both St. Louis police officers and sergeants — documents that for more than 10 years governed pay, discipline and many of the operations of the city's police force.
The most recent three-year contracts were put into place in 2017 and ran through June 2020, but remained active as long as negotiations continued.
But after more than a year of contract talks on April 2, the city declared an impasse. City officials argued that meant that the city would no longer have to abide by the previous contracts, St. Louis Deputy Director of Personnel Linda Thomas told the Post-Dispatch earlier this year.
"We're required to meet and confer with them, but we're not required to come to terms," Thomas said.
The union's lawsuit on Thursday argues the city was not negotiating in "good faith" and asks a judge to require the city to resume negotiations and follow the previous contracts until a new agreement is reached, reinstating a long list of protections for city police.
Hayden issued a statement Monday responding to the suit, arguing that he's met with representatives from the union "on a regular basis, and will continue to do so."
"Our negotiations concerning the collective bargaining agreement were absolutely done in good faith," the statement reads. "I believe that the description of the negotiations stated in the lawsuit are a mischaracterization of the truth. Due to the fact that this is pending litigation, we will refrain from commenting any further on this matter."
Among the claims in the suit are that Hayden and police negotiators refused to meet with the union's business manager, Jeff Roorda, an outspoken and often controversial figure in the union who had been the lead negotiator or chief adviser in all three previous city police contract negotiations. The suit claims Hayden began refusing to meet with Roorda starting in June 2019.
The suit also alleges that the city ignored or failed to properly respond to more than 20 grievances or complaints of contract violations from before the claims of an impasse and accuses Hayden of "weaponizing the police department's Internal Affairs apparatus" against union members.
In the negotiations, the suit claims, the city wanted to align city police rules more with general rules for city employees and wanted to reform large sections of the contract to give more authority to the chief.
The suit claims the department considered "any restraints on the chief's authority" in the contract too restrictive.
The police department and city were attempting for the first time to renegotiate the contracts as two pieces: one about pay and benefits the union was negotiating with the city department of personnel and the other focusing on department policies led by the police department.
Those at the negotiating table had included six police officers, Roorda and the union's labor attorney. The city was represented by staff from the police department, the city personnel office, Krewson's staff and the city counselor's office.
The lawsuit does not mention St. Louis' current mayor, Tishaura O. Jones, who came into office after the city declared an impasse.
Jones, however, had pledged in her campaign never to meet with the union if it was represented by Roorda, who was sharply critical of her in her 2017 bid for mayor, calling her a "cop-hater" and a "race-baiter" in posts to Facebook.
"We did inherit this impasse with the SLPOA," Jones' spokesman Nick Dunne said Monday. "And we will continue to work with our city counselor's office on the litigation."
Dunne said that the police union has not contacted the Jones administration in an attempt to reopen negotiations since she took office in April.
Roorda said in response that "Mayor Jones made very public statements, that violate state law, saying she wouldn't negotiate with our union unless I was fired leaving only police employees who she could retaliate against on our bargaining team."
Roorda added that Jones has made "her anti-union, anti-police position very clear."
In a statement released Monday, the union described the city's claims of an impasse a "gigantic double-cross" and said the right to collective-bargain through chosen representatives is a "fundamental right in the Missouri Constitution."
Police contracts are a point of contention for some St. Louis advocates for police reform.
In 2020, the St. Louis Area Violence Prevention Commission made a public push for more public feedback in the contract negotiations. The Ethical Society of Police, which represents a group of mostly minority officers in the department, has long pushed to have a say in the negotiations, though the group is not today considered a bargaining unit.
The St. Louis police officers have operated under a union contract since 2011, when the department was still under state control. The city reached two other previous three-year police contracts with the St. Louis Police Officers Association in 2014 and 2017.
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