Two weeks ago, late on a Wednesday afternoon, a Buffalo police officer who asked to remain anonymous—“a veteran patrolman,” as he would later identify himself—telephoned to say that he and his fellow officers had decided to stage a mass “sick-out” on St. Patrick’s Day weekend. He told Artvoice the decision had just been reached that afternoon, and claimed that 65 percent of the rank and file had committed themselves to call in sick for 48 hours.

There won’t be enough officers to cover the St. Patrick’s Day parades, he said—the South Buffalo parade on Saturday and the big one on Delaware Avenue on Sunday. And there won’t be enough officers to cover the NCAA basketball tournament, which comes to HSBC Arena that weekend.

“You’ll have a nonexistent police force for 48 hours,” the anonymous officer said. “And we’ll see how our 30,000 guests for the NCAA tournament like that and how the reputation of the city goes.”

In a subsequent conversation, the anonymous officer said that warning of the impending job action had been delivered to Mayor Byron Brown, Police Commissioner H. McCarthy Gipson, various downtown associations, St. Patrick’s Day parade organizers and those in charge of the NCAA Tournament.

“The city’s on notice,” he said, explaining that the point of the sick-out was to force the Brown administration and the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority—better known as the control board—to break the wage freeze that’s been in place since April 2004 and make good on the raises promised in the contract police signed with the city in 2003. “This is not another goon tactic. I know that people have various opinions on the parking ticket blitz, but this isn’t like that.”

In the next couple days, the rumor of some sort of slowdown or sick-out began to spread though the city. Three Buffalo police officers confirmed the rumor for Artvoice. (“It’s happening,” said one officer, who said the plan was formed in B District and then spread to officers in other districts.) Asked whether the mayor’s office had been warned about a possible sick-out by police, administration spokesman Peter Cutler replied by email: “Off the record: We have not heard from anyone as you described, so we can only assume these are rumors, not unlike rumors we’ve heard in the past. Based on that, I don’t think it’s of any benefit to anyone to comment.”

Indeed, it’s not the first time that rumors of a strike by police officers have circulated. In the three years since the the control board imposed a wage freeze on city employees, the morale of the city’s police force has been spiraling downward. The contract the police signed in 2003 traded a number of concessions—most notably one-officer patrol cars, a reduction of the police force by 200 officers through attrition, the replacement of some positions within the department with civilian personnel—for annual pay raises. The police department has honored those concessions but, because the control board came in and froze wages immediately afterward, the raises never came.

The rumor became news when it was reported on WBEN radio last Thursday. (It’s rumored that Gipson canceled an appearance on a WBEN talk show last Wednesday because he didn’t want to face questions about the rumored sick-out.) Stories in the Buffalo News followed, as did reports on television news programs. Common Council President Dave Franczyk allowed that he too had received a phone call from an anonymous police officer, warning of an outbreak of “blue flu.”

On Tuesday, South District Councilman Mickey Kearns—who is a member of the committee that organizes the St. Patrick’s Day Parade—submitted a resolution asking Gipson and the Brown administration to make a plan to deal with the possibility of a sick-out. Cutler told the Buffalo News that he did not expect the administration to do so, because the mayor did not believe that Buffalo police would “put at risk the safety of the citizens.”

There’s the question: Would they? And if they would, why these anonymous leaks three weeks before the proposed sick-out? Why would the officers warn the Brown administration and the control board, putting those officers who call in sick that weekend in danger of facing disciplinary charges? (It is illegal for police to strike.) Do they honestly expect a new contract, or the pay raises promised in the current contract, to materialize in just three weeks, and under duress? Why risk alienating the public they are sworn to protect, on the chance that the Brown administration and control board might face some fleeting public embarrassment?

If they do it, they’ll do it because many police officers—especially patrolmen, and especially the newer hires—think they have nothing to lose. In a number of conversations, again anonymous, Buffalo police officers have told Artvoice that they don’t believe the public is on their side. They believe the control board is determined to undermine their union. They think they’ve been robbed and lied to by the control board and by the Masiello and Brown administrations. They believe that the lifting of the wage freeze for city engineers and for the unsuccessful firefighters contract, the hiring of a new technology officer at a higher salary than even the mayor, attempts to lift the wage freeze for non-union seasonal employees and the fact that the control board itself has expanded its personnel budget by 50 percent over three years, among other facts, argue that the city is not so financially strapped that it can’t honor the contract it entered into four years ago.

“They say the city is operating at a surplus now,” one officer said over the phone. “They can afford to give us back the raises they promised. The money is there, they’ve admitted that.”

“Wage freeze in effect till 2010,” reads a posting on theleftyline.blogspot.com, a chat site for Buffalo police officers that is equal parts interesting, paranoid and offensive. “That is what Brown sent to the BFSA in the City’s 4 yr plan. That is in part the reason for the improved credit rating. That will make 7 yrs of no raises in the City. These motherfuckers don’t give a flying fuck about you or I or our families. How much are we going to take?”

“Saw Byrons State of the City speech,” writes another poster. “Have come to the conclusion: We are fucking retards. We are being shorted 10 to 20% of what we are contracted to make, and producing arrest numbers for this guy to brag about.”

Cutler told Artvoice that the administration would not discuss the state of contract negotiations with the city’s police union. But Bob Meegan, president of the Police Benevolent Association, was more than happy to.

“I can see where these guys are coming from, I understand,” said Meegan, who had just fielded a phone call from Gipson about the threatened sick-out. Gipson did not respond to an interview request.

“My heart breaks for some of these younger guys,” Meegan continued. “I have Patty Parete lying on her back staring at a ceiling for the rest of her life. Regardless of what the Buffalo News says—they make it sound like she was going to come walking out doing the Irish jig, for Christ’s sake. They keep printing saying she’s okay, she’ll be all right. Horseshit.

“You know what she makes? $51,000 a year. You know why? Because the control board froze her salary. So they force her out on pension, she’s getting $13,000 less in her base salary for pension purposes. That’s real nice, isn’t it? I mean honest to God. That plays on a lot of people around here. A lot of coppers are disgusted with this whole thing, and I can understand where they’re coming from.”

Meegan said that the state of contract negotiations is dead in the water. “The last time we actually sat down and tried to negotiate anything was back in September,” he said. “Basically we had negotiated a workable agreement back in May 2006, after being told repeatedly—in May, in June, in July, in August—that it was going before the control board in each of those respective months. The mayor and the commissioner then submitted a new document, a new contract, to us, that basically was completely changed from the original. There were additional givebacks. It had the fingerprints of the control board all over it.”

Meegan said the amended contract the administration brought back from the control board demanded new concessions that have no impact on the actual cost of the police department. For example, the contract sought the right to fire officers for “just cause,” a policy that would diminish the union’s ability to protect its members.

“In other words, we’ll fire you for whatever infraction we deem appropriate and then you fight to get your job back,” Meegan said. “What does that have to do with the city’s so-called—and I stress that, so-called—financial well-being? It’s punitive.”

Meegan explained that when the wage freeze went into effect in April 2004, the PBA was the only union that had a long-term contract. In the midst of the city’s fiscal meltdown in 2003, Meegan said, the police union negotiated a new contract that was expected to save the city between $11 million and $20 million over its four-year life, even accounting for increases in overtime pay that would accompany the decrease in the number of officers on the job. (Recently the Brown administration revealed that police overtime pay as a result of the decrease in the number of officers costs far less than initially expected.)

Meegan suspects that the Masiello administration knew that the contract would save even more money than that, because the mayor must have known that the imposition of a state control board was imminent and that the promised pay raises would never materialize.

“We were the only ones who actually lost anything because no one else had a contract,” Meegan said. “It’s upwards of thousands of dollars [per officer]. For some of our newer officers who’ve only been on a few years, it’s in excess of $25,000 [per officer].”

That adds up to many millions of dollars. Meegan said the PBA has been working on calculating an estimate of the total savings the 2003 contract, and its breach, have accrued to the city.

State Supreme Court Justice Joseph D. Mintz, who is hearing a suit in which the PBA asks for the right to strike, responded to the PBA’s complaint by authorizing the PBA’s lawyers to depose former Governor George Pataki, former Pataki aide and current control board executive director Dorothy Johnson, Mayors Masiello and Brown and numerous city officials to determine if there was, in effect, a conspiracy to defraud the PBA by negotiating a contract that they knew the city would not have to honor.

“We got the right from Judge Mintz to depose [these people] to find out what they knew and when they knew it,” Meegan said. “Guess what happens? City says, ‘We had nothing to do with it.’ Control board says, ‘We had nothing to do with it.’ Guess what they both do, just before Christmas? They appeal it. Why would you appeal it if you had nothing to do with it?”

The matter has been adjourned until the middle of May, and the current police contract expires on June 30. Both Brown and the control board have said that any new contract must save the city more money than it provides in raises. The PBA contends they already have a contract that does just that and the city isn’t honoring it; until the city makes good on the raises promised in that contract, the PBA won’t negotiate a new one.

“What am I to do, negotiate with a group that won’t honor the contract again if I sign another one? What assurances will I have?” Meegan said. “Don’t pay your mortgage for month with [control board member] Bob Wilmers over at M&T Bank and see how fast they come and foreclose on you. Jesus Christ.”

Meegan’s aggravation tends to be directed more toward the control board than the Brown adminstration and the commisioner’s office, and it is compounded by what he considers arrogant remarks by Johnson. Last fall she mocked an allowance for cosmetic surgery in the union’s healthcare package, saying that the city had “a lovely workforce.” Cumulative salaries at the control board have risen from $341,000 to more than $500,000 in three years. Johnson reportedy said that these were not “raises”; they were “upgrades.” At the same time, the control board was trying to wring concessions from the city’s poorest workforce, cafeteria workers, in exchange for a 25-cents-an-hour raise.

“[Johnson] says we’re taking on more responsibilities, we’re doing more” to justify the increase in control board salaries, Meegan said. “Well, what about the copper that went from a two-man car to a one-man car? The added danger, the added workload? You lost a pair of hands, you lost a pair of eyes, you lost a potential lifeline. If there was a way I could go back to two-officer cars, I’d go back to them tomorrow. But we made a deal. And the deal was we go to one-officer cars, the attrition of 200 people out of the police department—it’s an added workload.

“A lot of coppers are just disgusted. Officers are out thousands of dollars. Officers who have retired in the interim have been adversely affected for the rest of their lives.This city has an obligation to pay its police officers on a contract. They made a promise with the officers.”

For all that, Meegan—who says, of course, that the PBA does not approve of or have anything to do with any illegal job action—doesn’t believe a sick-out is in the offing. He suspects that the threat of a sick-out is designed to give the police a black eye, to turn public sympathy against the union just as its contract is due for re-negotiation—at a time when the city is also acknowledging that its financial crisis is over. (One Buffalo police officer, discussing the “blue flu” threat, noted that it is about time for the Buffalo News’ annual article about cops who make more than $100,000 a year, another effort to paint Buffalo cops as overpaid and lazy.) Meegan said, only half-joking, that he’s been calling over to the control board to determine which of its members started the rumor.

Nonetheless, if it did happen, he said he’d understand why. What he doesn’t understand is why there’s so much fuss about police staying home for a couple days. After all, the most attention the police have garnered in the past year—apart from the shooting that left Officer Parete paralyzed—has been indignation when police stepped up vehicle ticketing to protest the contract situation.

“What’s everybody worried about?” he said. “Nobody gives a damn. Nobody’s fighting to get us what we’re owed—legally, morally and ethically. All of a sudden it’s big deal if they want to walk out—we need them. But we don’t need to pay them, is what it is. It’s always been that way in this town.

“These people are out of control, I’m telling you.”