• PA Act 111 created a parallel legal system that adjudicates any disciplinary actions or dismissals of police officers through binding arbitration. The process is supposed to be fair, but over decades has accumulated bad precedents to become a firewall to firing cops. It's become essentially impossible to fire a Philly cop who isn't convicted of a crime. As recently as 2020 there were bipartisan efforts to fix this law, but pro-cop Republicans and some Democrats defeated it.

• The Heart & Lung Benefit - a state law that lets the police union pick doctors who can then 'diagnose' long-term disabilities - has been abused to the point where 11% of our police force is out sick for months at a time. Not only that, they get paid more while out sick.

• The Uniformity Clause in the state constitution prohibits Philadelphia from raising property tax rates on commercial properties, unlike many other cities. This means that Philly either has to raise taxes on poor residents (who can't afford it), or forgo lucrative revenues from high-dollar commercial properties in center city. There have been large coalitions of businesses and politicians trying to fix this for years, to no avail.

• The School Reform Commission (SRC) was created to 'responsibly manage' the city's schools by taking control away from Philadelphians and putting it in the hands of republican legislators from the middle of nowhere for nearly two decades. That experiment ended a few years ago with no serious improvement in school outcomes, but with 1/3rd of our school seats closed and handed over to unaccountable charters that do things like teach abstinence only sex ed and steal district money.

• The Philadelphia Parking Authority is a state agency with no local governance - ostensibly it exists to collect parking revenue and hand it over to the schools. In reality it's a local republican patronage mill that fails to effectively enforce parking restrictions (see: south broad, sidewalk parkers, etc.), somehow manages to make very little profit, and spends suspiciously large sums on "consultants" who are friends of the board. PPA has never hit its revenue targets for sending money to the schools. Last year they even tried to claw money back from the school district.

In each of these cases, Philadelphia politicians are powerless to fix the problems created by state laws because state laws supersede local laws. Kenney may be a no-show at this point, but frankly there's not a lot he can do about the police.

Act 111 arbitration for police

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