by Geo Maher
If you know the game, you know the trick: they’re both the bad cop.
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Police are not workers, their unions are not unions, and despite the name, their associations are far from “benevolent.” Indeed, “fraternal orders” seems far more fitting, given all that they share with the racism, the violence, the unearned privilege, and the toxic masculinity of college fraternities (which are also worth abolishing).14 Developing in isolation from the labor movement and following a different trajectory, police associations came late, and no sooner did they become antagonistic to the institutional order than they were fully incorporated into its functioning.
While drawn from the lower classes a century ago, their wages quickly leapfrogged those of other workers—today, “police officers are among the best-paid civil servants,” and “they’ve been extraordinarily effective in establishing control over working conditions.”15 While most unions have gotten weaker, police unions have only grown stronger, and the power and privileges police enjoy today are unheard of in any sector of the labor movement—perks afforded not through working-class struggle but as hefty bribes paid to the essential workers of racial capitalism for their betrayal of broader solidarities. If the police emerged as poor, white slave catchers—ensuring a docile labor force and assuaging white fear—these two elements tell us much about the power police associations wield today and the nature of their demands.
Today, nearly 80 percent of uniformed police—some 600,000—are represented by an association. The majority, around 340,000, belong to the more than 2,000 lodges of the arch-reactionary FOP, which is not affiliated with a broader labor federation, while others belong to a range of local and regional associations. Of the remaining 20 percent that are technically union members, the largest organization is the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), chartered by the AFL-CIO in 1979, which formally represents 20,000 members but claims closer to 100,000. The International Brotherhood of Police Officers (IBPO) is nearly as large with 15,000 members, and organizes with its sibling organization, the International Brotherhood of Correctional Officers under the umbrella of SEIU’s National Association of Government Employees (NAGE). Often confused with a union, the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) is a lobbying body. While police associations have become increasingly notorious for media scare tactics, intimidation campaigns, and thinly veiled racism, the backbone of police power comes from the work these associations do behind the scenes.
While police power is occasionally written into local law and guaranteed in city charters, more often it manifests through collective bargaining between police associations and elected municipal leadership. This bargaining certainly includes wages—and indeed, has led to near-constant pay hikes while other public sector workers have suffered austerity budgets. Unlike real unions, however, the true centerpiece of these negotiations is impunity. Faithful to their origins, police associations, as David Correia and Tyler Wall note, “have transformed police violence into a contractually protected condition of their employment.”16 While police first flexed their collective power in opposition to civilian oversight, negotiated impunity has accelerated since the 1980s, when cash-strapped cities found themselves unable to pay raises and offered special rights instead.
In most cities, this negotiated impunity works just as it did for Jonathan Josey in Philadelphia. Cops accused of misconduct cannot be compelled to speak until after a mandated “cooling off” period, and when they do speak it is often to their own colleagues, before then appealing to a binding arbitration board composed of their peers. The time frame for accountability is contractually narrow: misconduct complaints must be filed immediately (in some cities, within thirty days), and disciplinary records are quickly scrubbed—sometimes after only six months. Officers under investigation continue to collect their pay under suspension, and if they are fired and reinstated—which occurs in 46 percent of cases, according to one study—it’s with back pay.17 The result is a clear pattern of misconduct, in which repeat offenders are rewarded with a clean record every six months and can continue to abuse the public.
In 2013, San Antonio police officer Jackie Neal was fired and briefly jailed for raping a woman in his police cruiser. According to a Reuters investigation, however, Neal had a history of sexual misconduct that included sex with a teenage participant in a police youth program and a history of domestic violence, but had never been meaningfully punished, aside from a brief suspension that he swapped out for vacation days—a perk negotiated into the union contract. When city manager Sheryl Sculley, outraged by Neal’s case, sought to eliminate the contract clause that scrubbed previous disciplinary records, the San Antonio Police Officers Association “targeted Sculley with a $1 million advertising campaign.” Her reform failed. An investigation by Reuters uncovered similar patterns of contractually-enabled abuse elsewhere, including in Columbus, Ohio.18
While police power on the local level is mostly about contracts, on the state level it manifests primarily as legislation through which police associations institutionalize their negotiated privileges in the form of Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights (LEOBoRs). After Freddie Gray was killed in a “rough ride” orchestrated by a multiracial squad of officers, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake openly complained that the Maryland LEOBoR prevented her from compelling the officers involved to give statements. While Rawlings-Blake was far from innocent, she wasn’t lying, either: Maryland law enshrines one of the most aggressive packages of special rights for police in the country. When pressed, police advocates insist that they don’t enjoy special rights and that LEOBoRs simply uphold the due process of officers who might otherwise be scapegoated by elected officials trying to pass the buck. Indeed, according to Vince Canales, president of the Maryland FOP, “The police have rights like anyone else.” But this begs the question of why the FOP has dedicated seemingly endless resources to the proliferation of such laws if they add nothing not already promised to everyday citizens.19
The reality is that LEOBoRs do more than reinforce basic constitutional rights: they promise a special set of rights specific to the police as a special category of citizens. Not only that, but these special rights exist in a zero-sum relationship to everyone else, contributing to the systematic violation of the rights meant to be enjoyed by the public. LEOBoRs emerged simultaneously with police unions, amid calls for civilian oversight and the reining in of police impunity. While police resented Supreme Court decisions like Mapp and Miranda, they selectively embraced others, notably Garrity v. New Jersey in 1967 and Gardner v. Broderick in 1968, both of which found that police had been unjustly deprived of their ability to plead the Fifth. Speaking to Eli Hager of the Marshall Project, Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska and expert on police accountability, argues that LEOBoRs grant police a sort of due process on steroids—one that “impedes accountability, and truly is a key element of our lack of responsiveness to these cases.” Walker adds, “It’s a scandal, really.”20
Like local contracts, LEOBoRs often include a so-called cooling-off period—in Maryland, an absurd ten days—during which officers accused of misconduct can find a lawyer and access all evidence against them before even having to settle on a story. When they eventually are questioned, police are guaranteed perks like bathroom and snack breaks and are not to be threatened or plied in any way—thereby, in Hager’s words, “assuring police officers treatment that they themselves do not consistently offer to suspects they are questioning.”21 Some legislation specifies that police can only be questioned by other police, and the accused can appeal to a binding arbitration board consisting of three of their own colleagues. In Rhode Island, which boasts the strongest LEOBoR in the country, accused officers are even allowed to name one of the arbitrators. Like local contracts, these usually include a statute of limitations, often one hundred days but sometimes as short as a month, after which officers can no longer be disciplined, and a period after which discipli
nary proceedings are purged. And of course, they continue to draw paychecks while suspended from work.
All in all, the process is so difficult that many departments are hesitant to even undertake the task of disciplining officers, leading to cases where “an officer can rack up a number of complaints but be given a pass until he does something more serious.”22 Today, fourteen states have LEOBoRs, and eleven more are considering them, while a federal version is regularly proposed to Congress—all thanks to the efforts of FOP lobbyists and a vociferous pig majority. The predictable result of such a thick protective layer is what Walker describes as a “culture of impunity.”23 But if many Americans have generally been willing to grant special rights to police, for all the racial and class reasons we might assume, these laws have come under heightened scrutiny today, with some turning the police justification for special rights around on them. If, as police unions argue, they make life-and-death decisions on a daily basis, then shouldn’t this imply a special level of scrutiny, not a special layer of protection?
“If a doctor commits malpractice,” writes James Surowiecki in The New Yorker, “it’s a matter of public record, but, in much of the country, a police officer’s use of excessive force is not.”24 As Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School, asks with more than a bit of incredulity, “They want better treatment than other criminal defendants? They already have 95 percent of civil-rights law on their side, starting with qualified immunity”—that special layer of protection that shields police from civil misconduct claims, and has been applied with increasing stringency by the Supreme Court. Unless police brazenly violate the law and this violation has been upheld by precedent under almost identical conditions, most claims can be peremptorily dismissed before trial. As the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice has described it, qualified immunity means that the police and other government officials “can get away with violating your rights as long as they violate them in a way nobody thought of before.”25
However, no amount of special protection is too much for the police. As the bizarre ressentiment that goes by the name “Blue Lives Matter” makes clear, police suffer a perennial victim complex that they share with their white supremacist brothers-in-arms—armed guardians of the state competing in a perverse Oppression Olympics with those they brutalize on a daily basis. The FOP has recently sought to turn this slogan into federally legislated fact, pushing Congress to amend the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act to include police as a protected category. Little surprise, then, that the FOP endorsed Trump in 2016, even re-upping its endorsement during his 2020 reelection campaign with a declaration of “full and enthusiastic support” for the then-president. The FOP was joined by many local police fraternities and the IUPA, whose president, Sam Cabral, complained in his endorsement that many Democrats “still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder.”26 Yes, Sam—it was a murder.
Where all of the special rights that police have strong-armed from the public through decades of extortion fail, they don’t hesitate to turn to more extreme measures. Writing in The New Republic, Sam Adler-Bell describes how “police unions deploy ominous social media campaigns to vilify and intimidate reform-minded legislators. They exploit racialized law-and-order rhetoric to polarize the public. And they threaten liberal mayors with widespread civic chaos and destruction if their demands aren’t met.”27 There is a direct line that connects police unions and the special rights they demand to the continuing epidemic of police violence that killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. Collective bargaining and special legislation are the main reason that officers like Derek Chauvin were still walking the streets with a badge after multiple use-of-force incidents. The connection is more direct still: after Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey sought to rein in aggressive police trainings in 2019, police union president Bob Kroll openly flouted the mayor by offering free warrior-style trainings to his members. Shortly after Floyd’s death a year later, the IUPA shared an article from Police magazine that upholds kneeling on a suspect’s neck as a “non-deadly force option.”28
When you multiply this single case by the thousands of cities and police associations nationwide, a dark picture emerges. Indeed, a paper authored by three professors at the University of Chicago Law School has shown that the right to collective bargaining correlates to a 40 percent increase in violent police misconduct.29 By demanding the right to kill, maim, and abuse with impunity, these violent fraternities are directly responsible for police brutality and murder.
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The case against police associations seems cut-and-dried, especially for the left: they are not unions, and they “organize police as police, not as workers.”30 In the churning wake of the George Floyd rebellions, calls for major union federations to expel police from their ranks grow louder by the day. Within the AFL-CIO in particular, a veritable revolt quickly spread, with the president of the Minnesota branch demanding Kroll’s resignation almost immediately following Floyd’s killing. This was soon followed by a powerful statement by the Association of Flight Attendants, which under the leadership of socialist Sara Nelson unanimously approved a resolution “demanding law enforcement unions immediately enact policy to actively address racism in law enforcement and especially to hold officers accountable for violence against citizens, or be removed from the Labor movement.”31
Many more are not waiting around to see if the police reform themselves before demanding the immediate disaffiliation of the IUPA from the AFL-CIO. While graduate student employees in California were ahead of the curve when they made this demand in 2015, five years later the consensus had become more widespread. The Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) approved a resolution demanding the expulsion of the IUPA, citing the AFL-CIO’s stated commitment “to vanquish oppression, privation and cruelty in all their forms,” and was soon followed by Workers United of Upstate New York.32 The young president of the South Dakota AFL-CIO, Kooper Caraway, has called for the same, and similar calls have spread to other affiliated unions, like the call for a “Cop-Free AFSCME” (home to Alaska’s Public Safety Employees Association, among others).33
Campaigns have spread outside the AFL-CIO as well. Citing the vicious attacks on the Service Employees International Union’s 1990 Justice for Janitors strike in Los Angeles, as well as the fact that Rayshard Brooks’s killer, Garrett Rolfe, is formally represented by the SEIU-affiliated NAGE, members have launched a campaign under the tagline “SEIU drop the cops” (the broader Change to Win federation of which SEIU is a part also represents the IBPO, and the Teamsters actively organize police and prison guards).34 In a major victory, a county labor council in Seattle successfully voted to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild, the largest police association in the Northwest.
So far, labor federations have largely resisted these calls, however, closing ranks around their affiliated “brothers.”35 Unwilling to alienate more conservative members or to lose the most heavily unionized sector of the US workforce, not to mention the resources and leverage that comes with organizing police, prison guards, and border patrol, the AFL-CIO has argued that the best way to change the behavior of police is not to expel them, but to pressure police unions from within by establishing the kind of “code of excellence” demanded of other trades. For his part, AFSCME president Lee Saunders, who is Black and has denounced Floyd’s killing, has nevertheless refused to consider disaffiliation. Saunders has even echoed a Blue Lives Matter logic of equivalence by insisting that “just as it was wrong when racists went out of their way to exclude black people from unions, it is wrong to deny this freedom to police officers today.”36 The real reason that labor leaders are resisting calls to disaffiliate police unions, however, is a broader anxiety shared by many on the left that any attack on unionized workers will only accelerate the demise of already-beleaguered public sector unions.
Some, like law professor Benjamin Levin, are critical of police unions but seek to distinguish the police from their union. For Levin, demands for transparency and public a
ccountability are “risky” because they echo arguments made against other public sector unions like teachers, and because “attacking police by arguing for stripping organizing rights legitimates anti-union arguments.”37 This suspicion is not entirely unjustified: right-wing libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute have jumped on the police reform train, with Cato affiliate Ilya Somin arguing that it is possible to weaken police unions if “liberal civil liberties advocates can work together with conservatives who dislike public sector unions more generally.”38 Longtime union organizer Bill Fletcher Jr. agrees with Levin, insisting that “the central issue is police repression, not police unions,” even going so far as to argue that “law enforcement unions are not the problem; the history, culture and practices of the U.S. law enforcement system are the problem.” Absent a broader “reckoning” with the role of police in colonialism and capitalism, Fletcher argues, “police would just find ways other ways to wield political power, and elected officials would find other excuses to hide behind.”39
Even the organized left has struggled to find a unified perspective on police unions. Take the recent dustup within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) over the 2017 election of Austin organizer Danny Fetonte to a national leadership post. Fetonte had spent years organizing cops and prison guards under the aegis of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), which has resisted police oversight and accountability, including in the shooting of mentally ill seventeen-year-old David Joseph, who was naked and unarmed. At the time Fetonte was elected, DSA had only recently endorsed prison and police abolition, and many had a hard time reconciling this abolitionist vision with organizing inside police unions. In the end, the organization’s national committee failed to remove Fetonte, issuing a halfhearted statement that stressed “the complicated nature of police union affiliations with large unions.” Under pressure from chapters nationwide, Fetonte—who argued that police deserve collective bargaining rights—resigned a few weeks later. While disagreements over police unions persist, DSA as a whole has consistently reiterated its commitment to abolition.