aking an oath and putting on a uniform doesn’t mean surrendering your rights. Since the Lynch administration took over at the PBA in 1999, one of its goals has been to ensure that the NYPD, the city and any person or agency that impacts the union or its police officers respect police officers’ and the union’s rights. This is true whether those rights come from the Constitution, federal or state statute, the collective bargaining agreement or departmental rule or procedure. The PBA has sought to achieve this goal in part through the creation of an on-site General Counsel’s office that interacts daily with the PBA board, its delegates and members to advise as to when there has been a violation of your rights and to coordinate the legal strategy with which to respond.

We began with a virtually blank slate — a collective bargaining agreement that contained few rights and case law developed over the years — to the extent it existed — that was largely unfavorable to the union and New York City police officers. The administration’s goal was to invest time, effort and resources into a comprehensive long-term effort to ensure that police officers’ rights are protected on a daily basis and to establish favorable precedent to protect officers long into the future. Notwithstanding the long-term nature of the plan, significant results already have been achieved, some of which we intend to outline in a series of articles beginning in this issue of The PBA Magazine.

In the beginning…

The new administration had to address multiple challenges almost from the outset. First, there was the case to confirm the constitutionality of the PERB law in Albany. In that one, the PBA prevailed all the way up to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest tribunal, emerging victorious after a ten-year battle. Then, the PBA succeeded in nullifying, through court challenges, the department’s efforts to divide the union by making 2,000 uniformed patrol officers members of the detective’s union.

At about the same time, the federal government tried to impose a federal monitor on the NYPD, ostensibly as a result of a few high-profile cases. Since the city and department refused to test the federal government’s case and since such a monitor would have impugned the reputation of each and every police officer in the city and seriously curtailed their rights in the process, we drafted court papers and directly petitioned the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., with the help of former Justice Department officials. There, too, we ultimately prevailed, persuading Justice to withdraw its announced plan to impose an outside monitor — a plan that would have dramatically and negatively impacted the day-to-day lives of police officers.

Shortly after being installed in office, the PBA leadership proactively intervened in a privately-funded lawsuit concerning whether former Transit and Housing officers were required to pay the 1127 levy for out-of-city residents. The PBA’s intervention resulted in thousands of officers receiving millions of dollars without having to pay attorney fees. Later, the PBA joined other unions in challenging the City’s right to impose the 1127 levy on any New York City police officer. That case is now pending in federal court.

In other litigation, we have prevented the department from excluding effective union officials from representing our members in departmental investigations and have had the courts enjoin the department from transferring and retaliating against union officials for just doing their jobs.

In future articles, I will discuss how the PBA has protected police officers’ pension rights, their rights when confronted with CCRB complaints, their interests in matters of prescription drug costs, their rights under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, their personal health and safety, and many other crucial concerns. Look for this column in the next issue of The PBA Magazine.