Policing, Politics, and Police Unions

 Policing and racial discrimination in our country have been deeply and permanently intertwined.  In On the Origins of Police Violence we discussed how policing in the United States has always been focused on applying violence to those who would be deemed enemies of society.  In the beginning, the targets were escaped or unruly slaves, they would progress to blacks who did not respect Jim Crow laws and immigrants considered undesirable.  They were later tasked with breaking heads of union activists and maintaining segregation in northern and western cities as blacks migrated from the South.  The techniques of delivering violence would be borrowed from military organization and military experiences resulting in a perverse perspective on what the role of policing is in a modern society.  Rather than organizing to provide a service to the community employing them, often police structure themselves as a force to control an enemy.  Eventually all the enemies except blacks and a few illegal immigrants faded away, but the violent origins left a persistent legacy. 

Adam Serwer provides an interesting perspective on the recent history of policing in our society with a focus on the emergence of police unions after the civil rights era.  His article was titled Bust the Police Unions in the paper version of The Atlantic.  It became The Authoritarian Instincts of Police Unions in the online version.  He opens with this lede.

“They condition their members to see themselves as soldiers at war with the public they are meant to serve, and above the laws they are meant to enforce.”

Serwer uses the response of the Minneapolis police union to George Floyd’s death as an example of the worst in police mentality. 

“Most Americans who watched the video of Floyd begging for his life, as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, saw a human being. Robert Kroll did not. The head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis saw a ‘violent criminal’ and viewed the protests that followed as a ‘terrorist movement.’ In a letter to union members, he complained that Chauvin and the three other officers involved in Floyd’s death had been ‘terminated without due process’.” 

“Kroll’s response was typical. In the apocalyptic rhetoric of police-union leaders, every victim of police misconduct is a criminal who had it coming, and anyone who objects to such misconduct is probably also a criminal, and, by implication, a legitimate target of state violence. Due process is a privilege reserved for the righteous—that is, police officers who might lose their jobs, not the citizens who might lose their lives in a chance encounter with law enforcement.” 

George Floyd’s death initiated a series of demonstrations against police brutality, particularly against blacks.  The anger at that incident was sufficiently widespread that police and their agencies seemed to be losing their hold on the support of the general public.  This would not be the first time the nation found itself in such a position.

“In the early 20th century, the widespread ineffectiveness and corruption of police departments had sparked a reform movement. In 1931, the Wickersham Commission, appointed by Herbert Hoover, issued a report on ‘Lawlessness in Law Enforcement,’ which documented a range of abuses, including ‘physical brutality, illegal detention, and refusal to allow access of counsel to the prisoner.’ These were particularly common when police interacted with Black people and immigrants.”

This investigation would lead to improvements in police performance, but it did not eliminate tendencies towards unnecessary violence.  A second attempt to reform police performance was driven by the civil-rights movement. 

“The civil-rights movement was a rebellion against the law. It had to be. And the police were called upon to crush it. Many of the most iconic images of the era were representations of police brutality: the Birmingham police siccing dogs on protesters, Alabama state troopers beating marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Atlanta cops manhandling Martin Luther King Jr. after arresting him at a sit-in.”

There was outrage at these violent episodes prompting the supreme Court to rein in some of the worst practices.

“In a series of decisions, the Court compelled cops to inform suspects of their rights, barred the use of evidence obtained through illegal search and seizure, and gave all defendants a right to counsel. These decisions curtailed, even if they did not eliminate, many of the lawless practices described by the Wickersham Commission.” 

However, policing is ultimately a local issue.  There are many thousands of independent police agencies which can contend with local authorities over control of their actions.  While the Supreme Court was trying to tie their hands, policing authorities were at the same time developing new forms of leverage and accumulating new allies willing to let them behave as they saw fit. 

“To many police officers, the reforms were simply pro-criminal. These incursions on their long-standing prerogatives spurred unionization efforts around the country. “The police unionism movement, which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was a reaction to new efforts to bring the police under democratic control,” David Sklansky, a Stanford Law professor and the author of Democracy and the Police, told me.”

“If the civil-rights movement drew fresh scrutiny to police abuses, however, the backlash to the movement provided the police with new allies and new opportunities. For most white voters, riots and clashes with police in Black neighborhoods in 1967 and ’68 confirmed that liberal efforts to alleviate racial inequality had failed and that overwhelming force was the answer. ‘Unions discovered that they had a lot of power, that in union contract negotiations, they could play the crime card,’ Samuel Walker, a historian of American policing and a professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, told me.”

It is noteworthy that one the police organizations’ biggest supporters was George Wallace.

“Among the unions’ most ardent champions in the tumult of the ’60s was the segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, a Democrat. ‘The police in this country are a beleaguered group,’ Wallace said in an interview republished by The New York Times in 1967. They deserved ‘praise’ for beating civil-rights marchers in Selma—or, as he put it, for shutting down the ‘unlawful assembly’ there. In a speech before the convention of the Fraternal Order of Police that same year, Wallace drew a standing ovation as he called for a literal police state: ‘If the police of this country could run it for about two years, then it would be safe to walk in the streets’.”

Police organization moved openly to associate crime with race and use the underlying racial anxieties to earn the allegiance of much of the citizenry.

“Americans who would never have personally identified with Wallace tacitly took a version of the trade that he’d offered: Give the police impunity, and they will give you order.”

Police unions realized that they had a tremendous amount of leverage in negotiating with local politicians.  The police usually had firm, long-term support from the voters, whereas the influence of politicians was fleeting at best.  Often, those who would negotiate terms of a union agreement with the police were in need of police support in order to be elected.  With a strong hand, the unions would negotiate pay and benefit packages, but often their main concern was with eliminating oversight of their activities by civilian reviewers.

“The damage that these types of provisions have done is hard to overstate. In one recent study, the economist Rob Gillezeau of the University of Victoria found that after departments unionized, there was a ‘substantial increase’ in police killings of civilians. Neither crime rates nor the safety of officers themselves was affected.”

“The provisions do more than simply protect bad actors. They cultivate an unhealthy and secretive culture within police departments, strengthening a phenomenon known as the code of silence.”

“Michael Quinn, a retired Minneapolis police officer and the author of Walking With the Devil, told me, ‘The whole problem with the code of silence is not so much that cops don’t want to report misconduct, but that there’s no accountability for the officers that are involved in misconduct. And if a department’s not gonna hold them accountable, why should they step up’?”

“This is not a system ruined by a few bad apples. This is a system that creates and protects bad apples by design…individual good intentions cannot overcome a system intended to render them meaningless. Being a good cop can get you in trouble with your superiors, your fellow officers, and the union that represents you. Being a bad one can get you elected as a union rep.”

Our big cities must maintain a large police force.  A cadre of armed officers whose allegiance to its own organization is greater than to its community is a constant threat to democratic processes.  Consider the state of affaires in New York City as described by William Finnegan in an article for The New Yorker: How Police Unions Fight Reform.

“In many cities, including New York, the unions are a political force, their endorsements and campaign donations coveted by both Republicans and Democrats. The legislation they support tends to get passed, their candidates elected. They insist on public displays of respect and may humiliate mayors who displease them. They defy reformers, including police chiefs, who struggle to fire even the worst-performing officers. In an era when other labor unions are steadily declining in membership and influence, police unions have kept their numbers up, their coffers full.” 

“In their interstitial safe zone, police unions can offer their members extraordinary protections. Officers accused of misconduct may be given legal representation paid for by the city, and ample time to review evidence before speaking to investigators. In many cases, suspended officers have their pay guaranteed, and disciplinary recommendations of oversight boards are ignored. Complaints submitted too late are disqualified. Records of misconduct may be kept secret, and permanently destroyed after as little as sixty days.”

David Dinkins became the first, and only, black mayor of New York City.  He had the temerity to attempt to install a civilian review board to cover police activities.  The largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), expressed its displeasure by rioting in the streets.

“When Mayor David Dinkins sought to install a civilian review board, in 1992, the P.B.A. staged a ferocious protest at City Hall, with ten thousand off-duty officers, virtually all white and many carrying guns and drinking alcohol. Demonstrators waved racist placards—'Dump the Washroom Attendant’—attacked reporters and bystanders, vandalized City Council members’ cars, stormed City Hall, and overflowed onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they stopped traffic and jumped on occupied cars. It was a wild performance of police impunity, and the on-duty officers did nothing to stop the mayhem.”

“Jimmy Breslin was there, reporting for Newsday, and he described a scene of toxic racism. ‘The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,’ he wrote. Newsday had more. A city councilwoman, Una Clarke, who is Black, was prevented from crossing Broadway ‘by a beer-drinking, off-duty police officer who said to his sidekick, ‘This nigger says she’s a member of the City Council.’  As the rally surged, Rudolph Giuliani, a former prosecutor, stood on a car, leading obscene chants through a bullhorn. He defeated Dinkins the next year and went on to two terms as mayor.”

“Dinkins ultimately succeeded in installing a civilian complaint-review board, but its disciplinary recommendations to the department are rarely followed. In public, the union trashes its every step.” 

The NYPD is the oldest and largest police force in the United States.  With 36,000 well-armed uniformed officers it is an army; one that has demonstrated that it can be mobilized as a single unit to counter any move to which it objects.  Its tools are political leverage and the constant threat of massive civil disobedience if provoked. 

Yes, our major cities must maintain armies.  But these armies that have the power to shelter themselves from democratic processes and civilian accountability if they so choose.  Why should this be allowed?  Serwer concludes his article with considerations of this issue.

“In democratic societies, the use of state-sanctioned violence is meant to be constrained by the rule of law. Instead, led by their unions, the police in America have become a constituency with a strong interest in the ability to dispense violence with impunity. Such a constituency will have a natural affinity for authoritarianism. And having leveraged a racist backlash to establish their grip on power, such unions will inevitably attract the support of those who see the preservation of racial hierarchy as paramount.”

Consider the other possessor of a mandate for state-sanctioned violence: our military forces.  Would we allow soldiers to form a union and negotiate for the terms of civilian oversight?

“Yet the military—hardly exempt from questions about fair pay or capricious leadership—lacks a union. This is a matter of tradition, not law, but it reflects an understanding that such an organized political entity would be dangerous, placing the military beyond democratic accountability and civilian control. Instead, the military relies on public support, which means its members must maintain an outward stance of political neutrality—even when a sitting president expects them to interfere on his behalf.”

Something has gone terribly wrong in our system of policing.  With around 18,000 individual police departments across the nation, we cannot expect each community to gain control and impose appropriate constraints on its police force.  Some communities have shown that competent and effective police forces can be assembled given the appropriate training and management.  Massive restructuring of policing in this nation will require national rules for use in recruiting, training, and oversight.