Why has Philly stopped publishing police arbitration decisions? It’s been nearly 16 months.

For five years, Philadelphians were able to look behind the curtain and see exactly how police officers accused of crimes and serious misconduct got their jobs back.

It’s pretty straightforward: The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 5 files a grievance contesting an officer’s termination, demotion, or suspension. Then, an arbitrator issues a binding decision.

More often than not, the FOP gets its way, either through a favorable decision from the arbitrator or in a settlement with the city. This process, which has infuriated one police commissioner after another, was for decades largely cloaked in secrecy.

In 2019, then-Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration decided that the public should see for itself what’s going on.

The city released the details of 170 previously confidential arbitration cases requested by The Inquirer, then began posting new cases online.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration has quietly stopped doing that.

Last year, the city removed certain FOP arbitration cases from its website, saying it needed to review its redaction policy. Those cases were not reposted, nor have any new cases involving the FOP or other labor unions been added to the site since March 2024.

Catherine Twigg, general counsel for the Citizens Police Oversight Commission, which was created by City Council in 2021, said her organization has not been able to obtain the records, either.

“These are the police commissioners’ disciplinary decisions being reversed or reduced by arbitrators. This is a matter of public importance,” Twigg said. “This is data we think is really important for the public to have, and to see what the trends are.”

» READ MORE: Four Philly police officers fired for misconduct got their jobs back. Here’s what they were accused of.

Ava Schwemler, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Law Department, said in response to questions from The Inquirer in February that the city had not reversed course on the publication of arbitration decisions, also known as awards.

“The City’s policy has not changed,” Schwemler said in an email. “Awards are redacted to ensure the privacy of witnesses, and we discovered that there were redaction errors with certain published awards. We are reviewing those and will republish those awards, as well as new awards, when our review is complete.”

Last month, Schwemler said the review was still ongoing.

Michael Mellon, an attorney in the Police Accountability Unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said he has not been able to determine why the city is no longer releasing arbitration information, even as he has seen officers charged with assault and perjury reappearing on the city payroll.

“Hopefully, this is just some sort of administrative issue that they can clear up,” Mellon said. “But it’s been a long time.”

Mike Neilon, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia FOP, said the union was not aware that the city has not published arbitration decisions since March 2024 and was not involved in the discussion to pull any information off the city’s website.

The FOP, however, has previously sought to prevent those records from becoming public in the first place. In 2009, the union obtained a court injunction to block then-Mayor Michael Nutter’s administration from releasing 187 arbitration decisions requested by the Philadelphia Daily News.

The FOP, which had argued releasing the records could jeopardize officers’ safety, lost that case on appeal, and the records were released.

But subsequent attempts to obtain the same documents through public records requests had been less successful, with the city releasing heavily redacted versions — in some cases, entire pages were blacked out — prior to the Kenney administration’s 2019 move to make the process more transparent.

» READ MORE: Inside the once-secret misconduct files of 27 Philadelphia police officers

In December, when the FOP began contract negotiations with the city, it proposed new language that could limit outside access to certain police personnel records, including arbitration decisions.

A 2019 Inquirer investigation — “Fired, then Rehired” — found that over the previous decade, the FOP had successfully fought to have police discipline reduced or overturned about 70% of the time.

The arbitration decisions and settlements with the FOP in those cases cost Philadelphia taxpayers at least $5 million, mostly in officers’ back pay. That number is likely a low estimate, because the city at the time said it had been unable to locate financial records in dozens of cases.

The FOP has filed grievances on behalf of officers accused of lying under oath, stalking, sexual assault, steroid use, domestic violence, and other crimes, in addition to all sorts of minor departmental violations.

In January, CPOC published an analysis showing that between 2022 and early 2024, 85% of fired officers were reinstated by an arbitrator after the FOP contested their terminations.

Critics of the system say that in some cases, an arbitrator’s rationale for siding with the union is unreasonable.

“You’ll have an arbitrator basically saying, ‘Don’t believe what you’ve seen with your own two eyes,’” said Jonathan Feinberg, a Philadelphia civil rights attorney and president of the National Police Accountability Project.

An officer who was fired for hiring a prostitute, for instance, was reinstated in 2018 after an arbitrator called him an “impressive young man who is quite articulate” and noted that the incident had not harmed the Philadelphia Police Department’s reputation because it hadn’t made the news.

Some officers accused of violent and inappropriate behavior, both on and off duty, have returned to the force with the FOP’s help — only to offend again years later.

Sgt. James Graber was fired in 2011 for allegedly punching his estranged wife in the face in a Northeast Philadelphia bar. He was reinstated through arbitration, then arrested again in 2023 for starting a wild bar brawl in Roxborough and using racial and homophobic slurs after someone changed the country music on the jukebox to R&B or rap. (Graber was fired again and pleaded guilty last year to simple assault).

“There is a long-standing history of the arbitration system making sanctions challenging to impose,” Feinberg said. “In view of that history, public scrutiny of the system is critical.”

Staff writer Barbara Laker contributed to this article.