Federal appellate judges rejected the D.C. police union’s challenge of a law that gives the Metropolitan Police Department more power over police disciplinary processes. The law, originally passed in 2020, strips police discipline from collective bargaining processes and makes it easier for the department to fire police officers accused of misconduct or criminal activity.

In 2020, the D.C. Council passed police reform legislation that exempted police disciplinary policies from collective bargaining, meaning decisions about how officers should be disciplined would be decided solely by MPD management and the union would not be able to negotiate over them. The D.C. police union sued the city in response, arguing that the legislation “targets and discriminates against DC police officers” by denying them the same labor protections as other government employees. In its legal filings, the union argued that D.C.’s police reform laws were “designed to punish the police,” and came from a place of anti-police bias.

A federal judge dismissed the case, and the police union appealed. On Friday, three judges with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the law and rejected the union’s claims against it.

The decision comes weeks after the D.C. police union and the city agreed on a new contract, the first where disciplinary processes were not on the table for the union to weigh in on. The new contract — which still needs to be approved by the D.C. Council — would make it so that officers would no longer be able to appeal disciplinary rulings to independent arbitrators, according to the Washington Post. Current and previous police chiefs say arbitration has routinely stymied their efforts to fire officers accused of serious misconduct.

The opinion of the appeals court judges also opens the door for MPD leadership to further change its disciplinary policies, but it’s currently unclear what D.C. Police Chief Contee will do. A department spokesperson did not respond to WAMU/DCist’s request for comment on the decision. MPD spokesperson Dustin Sternbeck told the Washington Post that Contee was not yet ready to talk about changes he would make to officer discipline.

Typically, an appeals court decision is the final matter in a case, but the union could appeal the matter further to a larger group of judges in the appeals circuit as a next step. Gregg Pemberton, the president of the D.C. police union, did not respond to DCist/WAMU’s request for comment about next steps by deadline.

The news from the appeals court comes less than a year after an investigation from Reveal and DCist found that D.C. police officers accused of serious crimes routinely had disciplinary recommendations lessened by adverse action panels — powerful tribunals of high-ranking officers that have the authority to overrule the recommendations of the department’s disciplinary review division. The investigation found that officers accused of domestic violence, DUIs, incident exposure, sexual solicitation, stalking, and more remained on the force despite being initially recommended for termination.

MPD declined Reveal/DCist’s requests for comment on the investigation, but when Contee was asked about it at a D.C. Council hearing in February, he expressed frustration with the role arbitrators played in police discipline. In the District, as in many departments across the country, police contracts allow officers being threatened with termination the opportunity to take their case to an arbitrator who is empowered to look at the case and make a final decision.

Contee testified that since he became police chief in 2021, he had personally dealt with situations where he wanted to fire officers, but due to the decision of arbitrators, he was forced to keep them on the job.. He also said that the threat of arbitration looms over adverse action panels and might affect their decision-making processes.

“In many instances, those persons end up back on our rolls… even when we’ve tried to … fire them,” said Contee. “It’s a crazy system, but it’s the one that we operate in until we reach a new collective bargaining agreement where the discipline process … changes.”

A 2017 investigation by the Washington Post found that arbitrators demanded the District rehire 39 officers that MPD attempted to fire between 2006 and 2017. Half of those reinstatements happened because arbitrators said MPD missed a deadline for completing internal investigations, the Post found.