Wichita City Council to vote on new police union contract. What’s in it, and what’s not?

The Wichita City Council is poised to vote on a new contract with the Fraternal Order of Police that gives officers hefty raises and eliminates one controversial provision that allowed officers to buy their way out of suspensions.

But the contract won’t include many of the police accountability recommendations put forward in a $214,000 report by national police consultant group Jensen Hughes in 2023, and in at least one instance directly conflicts with a Jensen Hughes recommendation.

Those proposals — including changes to officer discipline, promotion policies aimed at diversifying the department, excessive force policies and a requirement that officers immediately report misconduct to a supervisor — were removed from contract negotiations and would have to be negotiated separately to be implemented.

Members of the Wichita FOP have already voted to approve the new contract; the City Council will discuss it on Dec. 3 and vote on it Dec. 10. It would start in late December and run through 2026.

The FOP contract continues to prohibit the city from releasing the names of officers who shoot civilians or commit misconduct, a longtime ask of police reformers. It will also continue the policy of allowing officers accused of misconduct to review their investigative files before being interviewed by the Professional Standards Bureau, a practice that conflicts with the Jensen Hughes report.

It also gives officers eight weeks paid parental leave and 10 additional hours of vacation time in 2026.

The contract is expected to lock in annual raises for police officers ahead of an estimated budget shortfall of $55 million from 2026 to 2028. More than one-third of the city’s entire general fund budget pays for police salaries and benefits, according to this year’s adopted budget.

“Budget considerations were at the forefront of every meeting as negotiators sought to balance the need to maintain a competitive wage scale with future budget limitations,” Jim Jonas, director of strategic communications for Wichita, said in a written statement.

The new contract puts the police budget $3.2 million over the 2025 adopted budget and $1.8 million over the 2026 projected budget, according to the city’s agenda report on the contract, meaning the city will likely have to make cuts to other projects to make up the difference.

What’s in the contract?

The city says the new contract includes raises of 4.5% in 2025 and 2% in 2026 while eliminating a $2.25-an-hour bonus for officers who don’t violate city policies, which the Jensen Hughes report identified as sending the wrong message to officers. Instead, FOP leaders said, the $2.25-an-hour bonus will now be rolled into all officers’ base hourly pay, whether they violate policies or not.

After rolling the code of conduct pay into base salaries, officers will receive a nearly 13% hourly base pay raise next year and would be eligible for an additional 2% merit raise.

New officers will start out making $33.45 an hour under the new contract and would max out after 15 years at $47.27 an hour. Detectives will make hourly wages between $36.66 and $51.80, while sergeants make between $40.22 and $56.83 an hour.

The FOP says it hopes that the 2025 wage increase — which will make the Wichita Police Department the best-paid department in Kansas — will help attract and retain officers amid a staffing shortage of more than 95 officers.

The city reopened the FOP contract in 2023 to award $5,000 bonuses to all commissioned officers and to increase overtime pay from 1.5 times their standard rate of pay to 2.5 times their standard rate of pay — at a cost of $3.4 million — for any times they were called back to work by a supervisor or during an emergency. The hike in overtime pay was included in the new contract.

The city declined to answer questions about police staffing levels, employee rosters and how many officers left the department after accepting $5,000 bonuses last December. Instead, the city filed the questions as a request under the Kansas Open Records Act and charged The Eagle $120, which was paid Tuesday ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. The records had not been provided by Friday morning.

FOP President Jeremy Diaz said pay was a top priority for the FOP in the negotiations and that the union continues to work with Chief Joseph Sullivan and other police leaders to implement other Jensen Hughes recommendations.

“Ultimately, these changes are not just about making WPD a desirable place to work — they are about ensuring the safety and security of Wichita,” Diaz said. “Fully staffing the department is essential for maintaining response times, building community relationships, and keeping crime under control.”

Additionally, Diaz said, the City Council should fund a police staffing study “conducted by a neutral, professional third party.” He said he believes the department’s staffing level should be nearly 1,000 officers instead of the 700 positions the City Council has authorized.

“Previous leadership has created several specialized units to meet the department’s needs, but rather than growing the department to create these positions, it has come at the expense of patrol numbers — the backbone of policing,” Diaz said.

Jensen Hughes changes

In the aftermath of a 2022 SWAT team text-messaging scandal first reported by The Wichita Eagle, the city hired Jensen Hughes, a national police consulting firm that specializes in organizational assessments, to draft a blueprint for restoring public trust in the Police Department and improving officer morale.

Several of the recommendations required changes to the FOP contract. Only one made its way into the new contract.

That change would eliminate a provision that gave extra pay for expected behavior and allowed officers to buy out suspension days by trading in the so-called code of conduct pay or vacation time.

Diaz said several other Jensen Hughes recommendations are still being worked on by the police chief and the FOP.

“Several of the remaining items, however, are complex and require significant time and collaboration to address properly,” he said, pointing to a new discipline matrix that would more narrowly define the penalties for police misconduct.

Among the recommendations not included are changes to the use of force policy, a duty for officers to intervene in excessive use of force cases, a requirement that officers report misconduct by other officers to a supervisor, setting minimum scoring standards for promotions and hiring an outside source to look at how the department promotes to increase diversity within the department.

Jensen Hughes recommended the department be cautious when awarding points for promotion based on seniority and investigative experience because that practice could exclude women and minority candidates due to past recruitment patterns, meaning they “would not have been afforded the same access to those seniority and experience points.”

The city’s Jensen Hughes dashboard says those changes could be implemented in 2026.

The city’s agenda report says “WPD and the FOP engaged in good faith discussions regarding the Jensen Hughes recommendations that were not included in the FOP memorandum of agreement but could affect workplace conditions.”

Those policy revisions include changes to the promotions policy, administrative internal investigations, criminal investigations involving department employees and a professional standards dashboard, according to the agenda report. The professional standards dashboard — which includes generic and brief descriptions of closed complaints against officers — does not appear to match the recommendation by Jensen Hughes that called for providing detailed summaries of complaints against officers to the Citizens Review Board and the public.

Future changes?

Faith Martin, vice chair of the Wichita Citizens Review Board and the Wichita Racial Profiling Board, said she would like to see the city take steps to make the FOP contract process more transparent in the future — such as releasing the details of the contract before officers vote on it and allowing the public to provide input early in the discussions.

She said the Racial Profiling Board recommended releasing officers’ disciplinary histories to other police departments and the public; creating an Office of Police Oversight with “unfettered access” to the police department’s internal investigations of officer misconduct to improve civilian oversight of the department’s disciplinary practices; and a new process that gives Wichita residents more of a say in the FOP negotiation process before it is approved.

None of those materialized through the FOP contract discussion.

Martin said she did not expect the city to implement all of the Jensen Hughes recommendations, given the political make-up of the council — a majority of which was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police. But she said the city’s top priority should be to make sure the community has a more active role in future FOP negotiations.

“It would behoove the city to treat the FOP contract the same way they treat the budget, where you get lots of community feedback, they go back and they iterate this with the negotiation team, run it by HR, and then a draft is presented to the community. That was our ask,” she said.