A World Without Police

by Geo Maher

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  It is impossible to distinguish between the police and their so-called unions, however, or to blame white supremacy in the abstract without confronting the most virulently white supremacist institutions in policing—and broader society—today. Moreover, the concern that any attack on police associations will boomerang back onto the broader labor movement is exaggerated, and the benefits far outweigh any possible risk. The reality is that it is only by expelling and ultimately abolishing police unions that we can begin to glimpse a broader and more radical horizon for inclusive working-class struggles without and against the police.

  The best response to those who argue that the disaffiliation and dismantling of police unions will undermine other public sector unions was offered by former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker himself. In 2011, Walker dealt a crushing blow to public sector unions in the state with the passage of Act 10, which among other things severely limited collective bargaining and made union dues nonmandatory. No longer able to justify their function to beleaguered members, many of the state’s unions have since collapsed, hemorrhaging one-third to one-half of their membership. But not the police union, which along with firefighters was exempted from Act 10 by a carve-out from the law’s provisions. Far from an isolated incident, however, the reality is that police unions have been little more than a massive carve-out from the beginning, extorting higher wages and special privileges in exchange for loyalty.

  Police claim union status when it suits them, but where it benefits them to refuse the label of workers, they are the first to do so. For instance, in 1970, the New York PBA went even further than the law required to dissociate themselves from other city employees. And “in major confrontations” today, writes Matthew Cunningham-Cook of The Intercept, “police unions have already failed to show solidarity with other public sector unions.” When Walker carved cops out of his anti-union crusade, this “depriv[ed] teachers and other public workers of the political protection that could come from a broader coalition. The police unions did not stand with the other workers.”40 When Walker floated the possibility of applying similar changes to police in 2013, moreover, police associations balked: for Milwaukee Police Association president Mike Crivello, there was “an absolute difference between public safety and general employees in this regard.” Well, so be it. More recently, though, the Houston Police Officers’ Union showed just how little solidarity cops feel even for other public safety workers, by spearheading the defeat of a ballot measure that would have equalized pay between police and firefighters.

  This is why calls either to reform the police from within a broader labor movement, or to embrace dissident elements within cop unions, are naive nonstarters. Political scientist Cedric Johnson, for example, argues that we should engage with “reformist elements within police unions and departments,” in order to “embolden internal dissent … and counter the most vocal, reactionary police elements.” Police aren’t all bad, Johnson suggests: most join the force out of “an earnest desire to serve” and are subject to the same expendability and austerity as other public sector workers.41 However, this is a misunderstanding of the police and their power from top to bottom. Police are simply not subject to the same austerity and expendability as other workers—they are shielded from these by special rights and negotiated privileges—and even where austerity slows the growth of their exorbitant wages, police unions accept increased impunity in lieu of salary increases.

  In fact, the entire structure and function of police and their fraternities is inimical to change. Even if it were embraced with open arms, we have seen how police reform does little more than legitimize the police. “Hoping for reform-minded police unions is also delusional,” argues writer and activist Shawn Gude, adding that “the few reform organizations that do exist—such as the National Black Police Association—have failed miserably.” If anything, Gude argues, dissident cops would have more room for maneuver without a reactionary and united police association keeping members in line and on message.42 Furthermore, the AFL-CIO’s proposed code of excellence is a cop-out, pun intended: such codes generally refer to professionalism and the quality of union work, not the behavior of affiliates. The AFL-CIO already has its own code of conduct that bars discrimination and harassment of all types, but police unions violate these basic precepts daily, since their job is to defend the police, and the job of the police is to harass, intimidate, and brutalize working-class people of color.

  Moreover, to compare police unions to other public sector workers like teachers is fundamentally misleading, and while left-wing critiques of police and right-wing attacks on educators might share language of public accountability, the comparison is meaningless from the jump. Teachers are not violently hostile to the constituency they interact with daily. In fact, most teachers ultimately want what’s best for their students, which is why their unions tend to support progressive policies across the board. Much the same could be said of health care workers like nurses—National Nurses United has endorsed Medicare for All, not petty privileges for themselves. For the police, as Kristian Williams argues, “these relationships are exactly reversed,” providing “a permanent basis for the conservative orientation of police unions.”43 If teachers wrote into their contract the right to abuse students without punishment, would we be making the same excuses for their behavior that people make for police every day? And while it would be a good thing indeed to give teachers more control over schools, and workers greater self-management on the factory floor, we wouldn’t argue that the police should run the streets—and yet, often they do.

  To insist that there is a place for police within the labor movement is to embrace “workers” who routinely kill and brutalize their own union affiliates. This contradiction could not have been clearer when AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said of Darren Wilson’s murder of Mike Brown, “Our brother killed our sister’s son.” Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, a grocery store worker at the time of his death, was a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 88. As writer and organizer Kim Kelly has observed, this wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last: just months later, Los Angeles sheriffs gunned down eighteen-year-old Andrés Guardado. “His father, Cristobal Guardado, is a member of Unite Here Local 11. Once again, a brother had killed another brother’s child.”44 This isn’t simply about the killings, galling as they are: it’s about the fact that collective bargaining by police is about ensuring impunity for just this kind of act. No other workers bargain for the right to murder other workers without consequence.

  The right has never needed an excuse to attack unions and we provide them no new weapons by dismantling police associations, which is why to argue that targeting police associations would encourage such attacks borders on bad faith. The reality is the opposite: the future of the labor movement and its most radical base, especially when it comes to public sector unions, is low-income people of color—precisely the same demographic targeted by police violence. What message does it send to those workers when union leaders bend over backward to appease their oppressors, and what image of a labor movement does it project? For Saladin Muhammad, a founder of Black Workers for Justice and co-coordinator of the Southern Workers Assembly in North Carolina, “This killing with impunity that exists really speaks to the question of whether the working class is going to unite on a multinational, multiracial basis around conditions that affect a section of the working class.”45 If our goal is to build a larger and more vibrant labor movement in the future, the question isn’t simply a quantitative one, and not all disaffiliations should be seen as a net negative.

  None of this is to suggest that unions, especially large federations like the AFL-CIO, are somehow innocent. Historically, many have trafficked in the same kinds of privilege and racism in order to legitimize their own power. But it’s no coincidence that it was precisely after many large unions had themselves become integrated within the capitalist system that police decided to play worker—police unions were bo
rn full-grown as a “labor” aristocracy, guns and all. Rather than worry that the expulsion of cop unions will weaken labor movements, we need to recognize that their presence is a liability to movements and a barrier to their growth. In the words of Clarise McCants of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), “We’re definitely pro-labor union” but “the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) is not just like any union. They are a fraternity—and they are the most dangerous fraternity in America.”46 For writer Alex Press, we can glimpse an alternative in the 2016 march of Minneapolis teachers in solidarity with Philando Castile—killed by police outside of Saint Paul—which took place in defiance of local police associations. “An anti-racist labor movement,” Press argues, “requires an end to collaboration with the police.”47 And she’s right: it is only once police “unions” have been expelled and abolished that a vibrant and inclusive vision for labor can appear on the horizon.

  Whatever quantitative loss the disaffiliation of police unions entails would be more than compensated by the qualitative impact, in ways that go well beyond anti-racism. The very presence of police unions has an overall conservatizing effect on broader federations, as Bill Fletcher himself argues:

  Having law enforcement units in other unions, whether it is AFSCME, UFCW or the Teamsters, has a very conservative impact on the union … The law enforcement units tend to be very well organized and very conservative. They will intervene when there are union debates on anything that has to do with law enforcement, the movement for black lives or issues of immigration and detention.48

  Police unions are not partners in the project of building a more just world—they are an albatross weighing heavily on the neck of labor and narrowing its political horizons. Moreover, the demand to defund the police and reinvest those funds in social goods would mean a redistribution of resources toward large swaths of the public sector labor movement—helping to build a broader constituency for change in the process.

  For Williams, the history of police unions represents a paradox. Police have formed unions and gone on strike, while breaking strikes as well. They have fought elected authorities not in the name of greater freedom and equality, but in support of authoritarianism and hierarchy. They claim to uphold the law, but they break it all the time, and they claim to prevent violence while inflicting it on the public. But, Williams concludes, this dilemma is merely “illusory”: “Working people cannot afford to extend solidarity to the police, and we cannot let the reactionary goals of police unions restrain us in our attacks on injustice.”49 Even police from working-class backgrounds are brought into the job as “part of the managerial machinery of capitalism,” controlling the poor and Black people in particular for the sake of capitalist control. Police are a part of contemporary capitalism just as overseers were part of slavery; they weren’t against it then, and they aren’t against it today.

  Moreover, disguising police as workers is a trick, part of the broader system of police magic that helps to bind the capitalist system together. We have seen how police magic transforms violent crime—ostensibly a failure of policing—into an argument for more police, and how it magically turns movements for police reform and change into window dressing for a violent status quo. Here, we see how, equally magically, police are transformed into “workers” and their fraternities, whose concrete function is to ensure that broader solidarity among workers is impossible, are turned into “unions.” In the words of Jed Dodd of the Pennsylvania Teamsters, “I always considered police unions to be little more than organized scabs.” But they are actually worse than that: scabs cross picket lines; cops break them. “There is no justification for defending police unions,” Robin D.G. Kelley concludes. “They are company unions. Their job has not changed, and it will not change: to provide security for the reproduction of racial capitalism.”50 And for the sociologist Eve Ewing, there is a deeper reason still that police fraternities shouldn’t be considered unions: whereas “a union is a pact, wrought among the human. Among the fallible … there can be no error in the brotherhood. And the brotherhood can never be reformed.”51

  The deepest irony here is that those who avoid conflict with police unions in the name of protecting labor participate in a sleight of hand that ensures police power goes unchallenged. Republicans attack unions while sparing cops, but Democrats—hamstrung by the demand to support labor—are unwilling to push back on the police “union” masquerade. Why would the left want to play into this game? Cities don’t need to hand over as much power to the police as they do, but because not even liberals will put up a fight, “some of the worst police departments in the country are in cities, like Baltimore and Oakland, run by liberal mayors.”52 What if unions—and workers more broadly—refused to be blackmailed and instead played a leading role in the struggle against these violent fraternities? Their arguments lose their power as soon as we refuse to take them seriously.

  Ultimately, there’s no path toward police abolition—or even police reform—that doesn’t involve a reckoning with police unions as the central bastion of police power. Not only are the police the enemies of workers and people of color, but from their very origin they have been synonymous with the racialized division of the working class that has always forestalled progress, much less revolution. Police unions today remain faithful to those origins and to that history of betrayal.

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  Our task is to break police power, and this means starting from its very foundation: police unions. On the federal level, this begins above all with an immediate end to qualified immunity through a modification of the federal code. On the state level, it means the immediate repeal of all Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights and refusing the idea that police should enjoy a special layer of due process, above and beyond other citizens. On the local level, there should be a nationwide campaign to immediately suspend binding arbitration—even the editorial board of the New York Times agrees that it’s long past time to “ax the arbitrators.”53 Ultimately, cities should be pressed to unilaterally cease contract negotiation with FOP, PBA, and other police unions—adjusting state law where necessary in order to achieve the latter (in Pennsylvania, for example, this means changing or repealing Act 111 from 1968).

  We should immediately push to disaffiliate all police unions, prison guard unions, and border patrol unions from the AFL-CIO and other labor federations on the grounds that these are not labor organizations, that they do not represent workers, and that their presence violates the spirit and the word of the organizations to which they currently belong.54 This may mean losing some members and leverage in the short term, but in the long term it opens up the possibility of rebuilding a vision of public sector labor organizing from the grass roots, bringing together a broader majority of low-income workers, working women, and workers of color. The FOP—the worst of the worst—is not affiliated, and stands to gain thousands of members if unions disaffiliate. Nevertheless, by isolating police organizations and denying them the legitimacy provided by the broader labor movement, we will reveal them for who they are and make them far easier to fight on the local, state, and federal level.

  As Kelley has argued, we also need to simultaneously work to dismantle police foundations. By operating as “conduits for corporations to contribute financially to police, influence policy, and introduce hardware and technologies in which they may have a vested interest,” police foundations have come to play an underrecognized role as surreptitious transmission belts between private capital and policing. As thinly veiled payoffs for the protection of property, moreover, they also underline the relationship between policing and capitalism: most of America’s largest corporations funnel millions into police foundations, either because they have a vested interest in equipping police with new technologies they stand to profit from, or simply because they know the police are there to protect them.55 Small wonder then, as Kelley demonstrates, that the Philadelphia Police Foundation receives large donations from real estate companies and (what are effectively the same thing) local
universities like Temple and University of Pennsylvania, for whom policing is essential for attracting wealthier students and guaranteeing lucrative student housing contracts.56

  Today, police unions are on the defensive, although you wouldn’t know it from their rhetoric. The leaders of police associations have become some of the most visible and aggressive critics of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other dangerous figments of the racist imagination, but while such belligerence is nothing new, there are signs that it might not be working today. “As their public image declines,” Sam Adler-Bell writes, “police unions rely more heavily on fear tactics, singling out their political enemies for ridicule and worse.”

  Their response has been to abandon any pretense of neutrality. They appeal, more explicitly than ever, to the social factions they intend to protect, while adopting a posture of unconstrained menace toward their critics and enemies. They act and speak as a class for themselves. In this way, police unions are contributing to the dissolution of the myths that might otherwise preserve their political power.57

  Rhetorically and politically, police unions have become more firmly associated with the far right and with Donald Trump’s cartoonish worldview, while on the local level they have consistently alienated potential supporters with their intransigence. Think of Minneapolis, where the union’s militant opposition to minor reforms pushed the city council unwillingly to the brink of abolition. Or think of New York, where whatever sympathy police garnered when two officers were shot in 2014 was quickly squandered with an ill-conceived offensive against the mayor. Writing in the Washington Post, Andrew Grim suggests that the same tactics that helped expand police power, the “blue flu” in particular, “might backfire” today.58 Stuart Schrader agrees: “They’re in a process of overplaying their hand.”59