The Sunshine Project believes these items should not have been omitted from the POFG's recommendations:

1. Change rules to disallow incidents like the Ramirez case from recurring -- rules that let officers who the chief thinks committed "sexual assault" like Ramirez, or spousal abuse like some others, shouldn't be let back onto the force on a technicality.
1. End arbitration. Give the chief actual final say and allow only a district judge to overturn that decision. This can be legally done through a meet and confer agreement under the current civil service code, and would solve most of your problems about bad cops being returned to the force against the chief's will.
2. Rewrite rules which allow deadlines for paperwork to legally overturn the chief's decision. Judge Meurer overturned the Ramirez suspension on this basis and this agreement should ensure it can't happen again. The specific deadlines she relied upon to make her decision were in the Civil Service code, but your attorneys should agree that those rules may be overridden in a Meet and Confer Agreement. The APA representatives on the POFG from the beginning ruled out making recommendations that would change the appeals process after the chief's decision, so this major problem couldn't be addressed.
3. Create a higher standard for arbitrators or judges to overturn the chief's decision. State that the judge (or arbitrator if you can't get around having one) must find that the chief was unreasonable in determining that the officer posed a potential threat for disruption of the department's authority or activities, or that the officer's conduct had brought unreasonable disrepute to the police force.
2. Open disciplinary records at APD to the same extent they are open at the Travis County Sheriff's Department. Sheriff Frasier said this works just fine.
3. Create a Uniform Disciplinary Matrix, so that all officers who commit the same offences are punished the same. Many of the overturned firings have occurred because the APD is not consistent in its disciplinary process, and similar cases result in wildly differing disciplinary results, possibly based on race. Most notoriously, alleged perjurer Hector Polanco and at least two spousal abusers successfully arbitrated their way back onto the force by claiming that white officers were treated more leniently by the disciplinary process. A Uniform Disciplinary Matrix would keep punishments from being subjective and ensure that bad cops can't stay on the force against the best judgments of their superiors.
4. Find a way to make sustained and unresolved complaints (not the 20% which are groundless) against subordinates factor in to promotions and pay raise matrices for supervisors. That way supervisors whose subordinates control themselves and don't engender complaints from the public tangibly benefit from their leadership ability.