Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  Police unions are, with noteworthy exceptions, a pernicious embarrassment to law enforcement. They’ve fought ferociously against equal employment opportunity for women, people of color, gays and lesbians. They’ve opposed citizen review initiatives, and undermined existing accountability measures. They’ve whined their way to a second set of “due process” protections for brutal or dirty cops. They’ve done public fund-raising for corrupt, violent, criminal police officers. They’ve even engaged in systematic exploitation of, and theft from, their own members—and lied about it. And they’ve resisted even the most rudimentary reforms in community policing, promotions, internal discipline, and other efforts to professionalize the service.

  All of which would be tolerable if they lacked clout.

  But police unions pack big heat. How they established that power is a fascinating case study. Ironically, they owe a good deal of their political muscle to police management and to citizen critics with whom they waged acrimonious battles throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In San Diego, for example, the union resisted for decades the mere mention of a citizen review board. But in the mid-eighties, learning that some of us in management were researching citizen review possibilities, and spurred on by a ballot initiative, the union pulled a neat trick: They put their own civilian review scheme on the ballot. They spent a lot of money, politicked hard for it, and got it passed—the only police union—sponsored citizen review initiative in the country.*

  Police unions fought, and continue to fight, management- or community-pressured reforms such as citizen review boards, the inclusion of citizens on internal shooting review panels, citizen participation in policy councils, the creation of “early warning” systems designed to curb abuses among individual officers. But where they’ve come to pass, these reforms have improved the public’s image of rank-and-file cops—improvements that the unions then convert into constituent pressures on elected officials for higher pay and enhanced benefits.

  Union leaders exploit this unearned political capital to woo (or frighten) state and local politicians. In the sway of police union power, many politicians, mostly Democrats, have accorded the unions unprecedented access and influence.

  One example of the muscle of police unions, cited in an op-ed piece by Anndel Llano of ACLU Texas in the American-Statesman (February 4, 2004): “The Austin Police Association operates a political machine that . . . can single-handedly elect or defeat any city council member. The Statesman editorial board rightly concluded that the APA’s power needs weakening.”

  And there’s little doubt that police unions in Detroit and Los Angeles, unhappy with their reform-minded chiefs, used their considerable clout to force two prominent African-American chiefs (Jerry Oliver and Bernard Parks, respectively) out of the business.

  I’m not against police unions. On the contrary. Working cops unquestionably need their own labor organization. Before the emergence of true unions in the early years of the twentieth century (as opposed to purely social or fraternal associations—which lasted on the West Coast well into the 1950s and 1960s), cops were systematically used and abused by elected and appointed officials (see sidebar).

  A new Boston police officer in 1917 was paid two dollars a day, a salary that had not been raised in over sixty years. He worked seven days a week, putting in an average of eighty-five hours. Every other week he got a day off, but he couldn’t leave the city without authorization. He slept in a dilapidated, bug-infested station house.

  For two years, unofficial leaders of the rank and file pressed for basic reforms. They were ignored. In 1919 they applied for membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Their commissioner, Edwin U. Curtis (appointed not by the mayor but by the governor of Massachusetts), reacted angrily, contending that police officers were not “an employee, but a state officer.” The AFL came through for the cops, however, granting them a union charter in August of that year.

  Attorney General Albert Pillsbury immediately introduced legislation that would make union membership illegal for all public employees. He railed that the “organized work man has taken us by the throat and has us at his mercy.” The attention of both local and state officials was focused not on the grievances of the cops but on their right to unionize.

  Curtis suspended unionization leaders. Talk within the rank and file turned to possible job actions. On September 9, 1919, Boston’s cops went on strike, the nation’s first police walkout. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the action the “first step to sovietizing the country.”

  Although 25 percent of the force remained on the job, it was apparent that volunteers would be necessary to keep the peace. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, encouraged his student athletes to cross the strike officers’ picket lines and volunteer for duty. Many did, but it wasn’t enough. Capitalizing on the inadequacy of police presence, many residents engaged first in petty crimes, then in full-scale rioting. Inspired by the riots, the Los Angeles Times editorialized that “no man’s house, no man’s wife, no man’s children will be safe if the police force is unionized and made subject to the orders of Red Unionite bosses.”

  The political, ideological context for these sentiments was obvious. In February 1919, a general strike in Seattle had closed the entire city for six days. Bombs had shown up in the mayor’s morning mail. And some forty other mail bombs were intercepted on their way to public leaders throughout the country. It appeared to the power elites that a communist workers’ revolution was under way.

  But the striking cops in Boston weren’t part of some grand international conspiracy to bury capitalism. They just wanted living wages and livable working conditions.

  Every one of the strikers was fired, reflecting Governor Calvin Coolidge’s resolve that “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” The fired cops were quickly replaced by hundreds of unemployed or underemployed members of a labor force bulging with recently returned veterans of World War I. These new employees received handsome pay raises, reduced hours, and improved working conditions.

  Police officers through the 1960s were grossly underpaid (they still are, for my money), and their working conditions were abysmal, and more dangerous (owing to a lack of training and equipment) than necessary. Their bosses often treated them like third-class citizens.

  Some chiefs and commanders went out of their way to make life a living hell for their cops: middle-of-the-night transfers for no reason, and with no explanation; involuntary overtime, at no additional compensation; endless, illegal interrogations in internal investigations; nitpicking, demeaning discipline; promotional systems that advanced the chief’s cronies; arbitrary assignments to detectives; and on and on. Police unions emerged for the same reason the AFL-CIO, the NEA, and the Teamsters were formed: to redress legitimate grievances, and to demand fair pay and fair play for their members.

  As an SDPD sergeant in 1969 I wore a black armband with the number “22” on the left sleeve of my uniform, to signify our pay standing in the state. While I’d taken a firm stand against “blue flu” or other job actions that would jeopardize public safety—I supported Coolidge’s dictum that public safety must not be compromised, ever—I had no such scruples when it came to symbolizing, conspicuously, the miserable salaries allocated to the policemen of the second-largest city in California.

  But there remain many unattended problems with America’s police unions. Let’s start with money. Coincident to their rise in power in local and PD politics, many police union leaders developed a pattern of financial abuse. A few recent examples:

  •In 2003 the former president and treasurer of the Dallas Police Patrolmen’s Union was indicted on two counts of stealing from his fellow members. Seems he never left home without his union-issued American Express card, which he used to make the down payment of $2,420 on his new Ford F-150 pickup.

  •In Hackensack, New Jersey, the treasurer all but gutted his union’s benefit fund for the families of deceased office
rs when he ripped off $180,000.

  •In Miami, a crooked accountant bilked the Miami Police Relief and Pension Fund, diverting monies to the “Florida Fund.” It was your classic Ponzi scheme, the kind detectives work all the time. When a U.S. judge found out that the cops, who’d learned early about the scheme, had failed—criminally—to report the crime to the FBI for two months (thus recovering their own money at the expense of other bilked investors), he ordered them to repay the other twenty-seven creditors of the bankrupt estate of the Fund, along with $137,243 in back interest. The MPRPF recovery strategy had been orchestrated by its president, who has since been convicted of an unrelated charge of stealing from a police children’s charity.

  •Crooked union officials do seem to like going after funds earmarked for underprivileged kids and families of deceased police officers. Witness the Harris County (Houston area) Deputies Organization. Union officials there pocketed money they’d raised for the Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots drive. They wound up repaying the fund a total of $274,756 (including attorneys’ fees).

  •A former Santa Clara County (California) Sheriff’s lieutenant and ex-union president has been indicted for grand theft, tax evasion, and money laundering—money he’d raised for, you guessed it, police widows. The tab on this one: $1.4 million.

  •A past treasurer of the Denver Sheriff’s Union skimmed and embezzled from fellow members, and pled guilty to two misdemeanors. Then he ran for the Denver city council (he lost).

  George F. Will, a columnist I read only when my blood pressure dips too low, made rare common sense in his May 12, 2003, Newsweek column (“The Stiletto’s Sharp Idea”). He took on the duplicity of union leaders who demand “transparency” in management practices, including particular budgets and other fiscal matters, but who themselves behave like cabals, withholding critical information from their own members. He quotes Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, cautioning big business not to “ ‘look like you don’t want to disclose because you have something to hide.’ Said the kettle, calling the pot black.” (Question: How were the police union crooks cited above able to steal so freely from their members? Answer: They hid the dough before they stole it.)

  There are many other examples of union leaders (presidents and treasurers lead the pack) who steal from their brothers and sisters in blue, or from the families of fallen officers. But there are other reasons, nearer and dearer to my heart as a former police chief, to question the principles, priorities, and values of police unions throughout the land.

  •In 1993 the FBI informed the police commissioner in Buffalo, New York, that one of his narcotics officers was passing confidential information to drug dealers. Apart from the obvious moral and criminal indiscretions, this guy was endangering the lives of fellow cops. You’d think that on any of these grounds the Police Benevolent Association would support the commissioner’s decision to transfer the narc (you’d also wonder why the hell the commish didn’t fire the bastard). But, no. The PBA fought the decision—and won. The cop was reinstated to narcotics and awarded $18,438 in overtime he would have earned had he been allowed to remain a narc. Seven years later the cop was busted and charged with taking bribes, passing on information on upcoming police raids, investing his own “hard-earned” cash in dope deals, stealing drugs, and setting up his son in the drug biz.

  •In the early 2000s in Boston, union leaders decided to play hardball—with their own members. In a recent round of contract negotiations they imposed a requirement on their members to picket the mayor’s public appearances: five to seven hours every other month or face the loss of union-covered life insurance and dental plans, as well as scholarships, legal services, and voting rights.

  •In Los Angeles, the Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation, a five hundred-member African-American officers’ group, filed suit against the Police Protective League, calling the union a “bastion of white supremacy” and alleging discrimination in training and promotions. That same union supported Mark Fuhrman, financially and emotionally, even with his virulent racism firmly established.

  •In New York City, twenty-three African-American cops have been shot and eighteen others assaulted by white officers in cases of “mistaken identity.” Not one white cop has ever been shot by a black cop. The PBA, while bemoaning these “tragic incidents,” has done nothing to help remedy the problem.

  •Pat Frantz, president of the Tacoma police officers’ guild, blamed a reporter for pushing his boss (and former guild president), Chief David Brame, over the edge. Days before Brame shot and killed his wife and then himself, John Hathaway, the muckraking publisher of The New Takhoman, had exposed Brame’s abuses. Frantz sent Hathaway an e-mail: “If you want to throw stones you had better live in a bulletproof glass house.” (He later apologized.) (See chapter 1.)

  •Throughout the country, including Seattle, police unions have fought citizen review panels—in any form. Where they have been established, several unions (Philadelphia, Oakland, New York, and others) have instructed their members not to cooperate, or have otherwise dragged their feet.

  The river of police union duplicity and hypocrisy runs deep. Police unions rail nonstop about laws and court decisions that afford criminal defendants their constitutional guarantees of due process; yet they lobbied for, and now enjoy (throughout most of the country), various versions of the “Police Officers Bill of Rights,” a supplementary collection of due process privileges exclusively for cops, some provisions of which have seriously handcuffed internal investigations of alleged police misconduct. State and local laws, the direct product of police union influence, bar the release of names of officers involved in misconduct and/or the outcome of internal police discipline.

  I support full due process rights for all public employees, including police officers. But I can’t help but choke on certain extra privileges: A cop suspected of wrongdoing may not be required to give IA investigators a statement for up to a week after an incident (Delaware); he or she may have the right not to be interviewed at all but instead to supply a written statement to written questions (Seattle); he or she must be informed in writing of the nature of an internal investigation prior to being questioned (almost everywhere). Try conducting a garden-variety criminal investigation under these procedural burdens.

  The Mollen Commission, the latest in a long series of blue-ribbon groups empowered to investigate and study police corruption in New York City, noted that “police unions and fraternal organizations can do much to increase professionalism of our police officers. . . . Unfortunately, based on our observations and on information received from prosecutors, corruption investigators, and high-ranking police officials, police unions sometimes fuel the insularity that characterizes police culture.”

  In order to understand how police unions foster such insularity, thus defeating organizational effectiveness and accountability to the public, it’s useful to understand the unique features of the police culture itself.*

  Jerome Skolnick, author of the classic Justice Without Trial (1966), argues that cops become insulated from the communities they serve because of their unique work, which consists of exercising authority in the face of danger against a backdrop of organizational “efficiency” (i.e., demands for the production of traffic citations, field interrogations, and arrests, and the prompt handling of 911 calls). These conditions inevitably produce social isolation and in-group solidarity. Which gives rise to a powerful, insular culture of policing. A world of us versus them.

  In a sense, police unions become the surrogate family for their members, with union leaders acting as Daddy. (I’ve never met, or even heard of, a female president of a police union, although I understand a woman constable filled in for her president while he was on annual leave from his job—in Wollongong, New South Wales.)

  Insulation, isolation, alienation. It’s no wonder most union leaders can’t stand being questioned. They develop a pattern of brittle defensiveness, and snarky offensiveness against their “enemies,” attacking hon
est efforts, internal or external, to make policing more accountable to the citizens it serves. It doesn’t have to be that way.

  It’s 1998. I’ve just finished fielding questions at a roll call at Seattle’s South Precinct. One of the patrol officers intercepts me as I head for my car. “I don’t know how you stand it, Chief.”

  “What’s that?”

  “All that bitching and whining back there.” I have to smile.

  “Have you ever known cops not to bitch and whine?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But don’t you get tired of it? And all that garbage in The Guardian?” I tell him I stopped reading the union’s newspaper long ago. Month after month of articles and editorials about my positions on discipline, promotions, affirmative action, community policing, internal investigations—full of factual errors, mind-reading assertions about my “motives,” and endless innuendos. I used to read it as entertainment, some of it being so over-the-top malicious or juvenile it was downright funny. But the “humor” wore thin.

  “Tell me, how many of the officers agree with those articles in The Guardian?”

  “Honestly? I’d say maybe twenty percent. Depends on the issue, of course. If you’re talking promotions, where a white male gets passed over?” He shakes his head, grimaces. “I’d say just about everybody is with the Guild on that one. Hell, I’m with the Guild on that one.”

  “What about community policing?”

  “We’re with you there, Chief. We need to be better partners with the community, more open and so forth. And community policing really works. I think the majority of the cops are with you on just about everything you do. I really do.”