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 |  Subject: Police Union Grip on Cities Must Be Broken  Thu Jul 02, 2020 8:31 am | |
| It’s called “the blue wall of silence,” that seemingly impenetrable code of honor among cops who cover for fellow officers suspected of breaking the law. For decades, this code has been scrutinized, but rarely as much as right now in the wake of the videotaped death of a black suspect, George Floyd, while in the custody of Minneapolis police. In addition to triggering demonstrations and riots, the incident, less overtly, has caused many people to raise the possibility that unions representing cops are part of the problem. Critics argue that police unions do more to shield members from accountability than promote good community relations. While riots and calls for the abolition of police forces are indefensible, there are legitimate concerns that police unions are doing more harm than good.
There are currently about 700,000 law enforcement officers in this country, most of whom belong to a labor organization. The three principle unions are the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) and many affiliates of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). American labor leaders are progressive in their politics, but for the most part defend unionization on principle. “Everyone should have the freedom to join a union, police officers included,” writes Lee Saunders, president of the AFL-CIO-affiliated AFSCME, whose union represents around 90,000 officers. “The tragic killing of George Floyd should not be used as a pretext to undermine the rights of workers.” Likewise, the AFL-CIO general board in June came out with a list of aggressively Left-leaning recommendations for reform, including a call for the Minnesota AFL-CIO to fire Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis. “People of color have suffered for far too long,” the statement read. Yet the board rejected expulsion of police unions as an alternative: “It would be quick and easy to cut ties with police unions. But disengagement breeds division, not unity.”
The context of all this, of course, is the disruptive and often violent street protests in cities across America in response to the May 25 death of a 46-year-old black suspect, George Floyd, following his arrest for passing a counterfeit bill at a Minneapolis convenience store. A homemade video showed a handcuffed Floyd apparently dying of asphyxiation after one of the officers on the scene, Derek Chauvin, kneeled on his neck for close to nine minutes. The next day, based on a police department review of eyewitness statements and security camera footage, he and three other officers at the scene were fired. Two separate autopsies subsequently concluded that this was a homicide. Officer Chauvin was charged with manslaughter and second-degree murder; the other officers were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder.
The rioting in response to this death, led by a pair of pair of social media-driven radical groups, Antifa and Black Lives Matter, is indefensible. Yet amid the hysterical recriminations, including calls for abolishing (or “defunding”) police forces across the nation, the responses, if unintentionally, have raised a legitimate and often ignored issue: the need to reform police unions that often wield power far out of proportion to their numbers. The labor organizations representing police officers often sow the seeds of public distrust. Part of the distrust of cops is the result of inadequate union self-governance. The bigger part related to how these unions interact with City Hall and other external forces.
As to self-governance, many police unions have experienced financial scandals, something that Union Corruption Update often has chronicled in recent years. In Rhode Island, Christopher Hayes, president of a Fraternal Order of Police lodge, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a sum of more than $70,000, while its treasurer, Adam Coheeny, pleaded guilty to stealing over $30,000. In Detroit, Paul Stewart, vice president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, was convicted by a jury of honest services fraud for false obtaining about $48,000 through his dealings with the corrupt administration of the eventually convicted Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. In Miami, Fla., Vernell Reynolds was convicted of wire fraud in connection with the disappearance of more than $200,000 in funds from the Police Benevolent Association affiliate which she headed. And in Jacksonville, Fla., Nelson Cuba and Robbie Freitas, respectively, president and vice president of the lodge of that city’s Fraternal Order of Police, were convicted for their roles in a scheme to transfer more than $575,000 from an illegal gambling operation to a nonprofit foundation connected to the FOP.
The more significant form of corruption, however, are the activities that are legal and represent the way business is done. In point of fact, police unions have played a central role in shielding members from internal affairs and outside investigations, and the potential criminal charges. These unions, in other words, are an integral part of “the blue wall of silence.” They enforce an unofficial code of honor in which a cop never rats out another cop, regardless of the evidence. To cross the line would be to open one’s self to ostracism, termination and possibly loss of life. Unions have devised various ways to provide member cops with a wide range of procedural safeguards otherwise unavailable to civilians. Libertarian critic Peter Suderman describes the primary mission of police unions as “defend the narrow interests of police at the expense of public safety.” The following are several manifestations of this unofficial mission.
Contract clauses. Police unions exert their leverage to insert clauses in collective bargaining agreements that protect their own. Such clauses typically cover a wide range of issues such as probes of officer misconduct, the length and manner of interrogations, sanctions for guilty officers, and opportunities for guilty officers to reverse or avoid sanctions. Especially advantageous to police unions is what is known as the “purge clause,” in which a police department must remove all records of disciplinary action against a particular officer after a certain time elapse, typically two to five years. A Reuters analysis of collective bargaining agreements in 82 U.S. cities revealed that most of them required expunging the records of disciplined officers. In some cases, the elapse was only six months. Union contracts also often prevent officers from being questioned quickly after an incident. Officers, in fact, may review all relevant evidence against them prior to submitting to an interrogation. Public transparency regarding ongoing contract negotiations is quite limited. In fact, in all but eight states, all collective bargaining must take place behind closed doors.
Covering for fellow members. Police unions instinctively circle the wagons on behalf of a fellow officer under investigation, often paying the officer’s legal bills. “I think police unions are always going to default to the position that the officers are blameless in instances where they use deadly force,” remarked Merrimack College criminologist Thomas Nolan several years ago. “Even though internally unions and union officials might express reservations among themselves, at least publicly the position is always going to be that the officer feared for his life or feared for the life of another person, and that his use of deadly force was entirely justified.”
Legislation. Police unions know to apply pressure to get favorable legislation. Fully 16 states, for example, have a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights on the books. Such laws, which build on existing collective bargaining agreements, often prevent police departments from publicly identifying officers under investigation. Moreover, if an officer is cleared of wrongdoing, the department may not acknowledge that an investigation even took place. Even states without such laws offer similar insulation from accountability, such as denying public access to an officer’s personnel files and body camera footage.
Political donations. To labor unions, the best kind of politician is one who can be bought. Police unions know this lesson as well as anyone. They give generously to candidates for state and local office in both parties. Successful candidates, once in office, in return often act favorably upon requests from unions that helped get them there. Charles Ramsey, former police chief for the District of Columbia and former police commissioner for the City of Philadelphia, for one, has seen too much. “They (police unions) form a political action committee,” he told CNN. “They donate to district attorneys’ races or state attorneys’ races, state senators and representatives and so forth. And then we wonder why you can’t get anything done.”
The leverage wielded by police unions may be making our cities less safe. A recent study by Oxford University researchers of the hundred largest U.S. cities concluded that a high degree of police protection in union contracts positively correlated with the frequency of cases involving alleged excessive force. Likewise, a study by researchers at the University of Chicago showed that extending collective bargaining rights to Florida sheriffs led to a 40 percent increase in the number of cases of excessive force. Such outcomes are party the result of the frequent use of arbiters in matters of police conduct. Arbiters aren’t simply negotiators. They also are vested with the power to override decisions of supervisors, elected officials and civilian review boards. A study of more than 170 police union contracts by Loyola University Chicago law professor Stephen Rushin revealed that about 70 percent of police union contracts allowed officers to appeal to an arbiter.
None of this should be taken as a denial of the importance of law enforcement to a community. Police, sheriffs and other law enforcement officers protect the innocent from violent and otherwise destructive wrongdoers. Their work is dangerous and often thankless as well. Those who would defund police forces should explain to the rest of us how such a step is going to make anyone safer. The recent collapse of public safety in Minneapolis and Seattle in particular is a direct result of what happens when political leaders order police to pull back in the face of a riot situation. The verbal and physical attacks on police, minus support from City Hall, in fact, has triggered a wave of police force resignations in various cities, especially Atlanta and New York City.
The challenge is supporting police in their work yet neutralizing their capacity to use their unions to thwart the public interest. A few needed steps come to mind. First, state legislatures should prohibit collective bargaining by these unions (the tenure of former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker showed that this can be done for public-sector employee unions generally), or failing that, prohibit them from inserting clauses into contracts that shield members from public accountability. At minimum, lawmakers should bar the use of records-purge clauses and require that all interrogation rules applying to accused officers match those applying to civilians. State and local governments also should ban police unions from endorsing political candidates and making contributions either directly or through PACs. When a police union influences the outcome of elections, it compromises its ability to serve the public. Another necessary step is to eliminate the use of arbiters in resolving police misconduct cases. These outside parties carry far too much veto power over the review process. Finally, police unions, like police departments, need to be held to account for protecting overzealous officers.
Police serve a valuable and necessary function in our society. Too often, however, through their respective public-sector labor unions they are at least as focused on protecting the jobs and reputations of officers as one protecting the public. The riots following the death of George Floyd, replete with looting, arson and statue-toppling, was an outrage. But is conceivable that his death, and others like it, could have been prevented with reform measures too often rejected by police unions.
https://nlpc.org/2020/07/01/police-union-grip-on-cities-must-be-broken/ |
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