NewYorker | Police unions emerged later than many
other public-service unions, but they’ve made up for lost time. Thanks
to the bargains they’ve struck on wages and benefits, police officers
are among the best-paid civil servants. More important, they’ve been
extraordinarily effective in establishing control over working
conditions. All unions seek to insure that their members have
due-process rights and aren’t subject to arbitrary discipline, but
police unions have defined working conditions in the broadest possible
terms. This position has made it hard to investigate misconduct claims,
and to get rid of officers who break the rules. A study of collective
bargaining by big-city police unions, published this summer by the
reform group Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee
that officers aren’t interrogated immediately after use-of-force
incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after
three to five years.
Furthermore,
thanks to union contracts, even officers who are fired can frequently
get their jobs back. Perhaps the most egregious example was Hector
Jimenez, an Oakland police officer who was dismissed in 2009, after
killing two unarmed men, but who then successfully appealed and, two
years later, was reinstated, with full back pay. The protection that
unions have secured has helped create what Samuel Walker, an emeritus
professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha,
and an expert on police accountability, calls a “culture of impunity.”
Citing a recent Justice Department investigation of Baltimore’s police
department, which found a systemic pattern of “serious violations of the
U.S. Constitution and federal law,” he told me, “Knowing that it’s hard
to be punished for misconduct fosters an attitude where you think you
don’t have to answer for your behavior.”
For
the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block
policing reforms of all kinds. In the seventies, they opposed officers’
having to wear name tags. More recently, they’ve opposed the use of body
cameras and have protested proposals to document racial profiling and
to track excessive-force complaints. They have lobbied to keep
disciplinary histories sealed. If a doctor commits malpractice, it’s a
matter of public record, but, in much of the country, a police officer’s
use of excessive force is not. Across the nation, unions have led the
battle to limit the power of civilian-review boards, generally by
arguing that civilians are in no position to judge the split-second
decisions that police officers make. Earlier this year, Newark created a
civilian-review board that was acclaimed as a model of oversight. The
city’s police union immediately announced that it would sue to shut it
down.
Cities don’t have to concede
so much power to police unions. So why do they? Big-city unions have
large membership bases and are generous when it comes to campaign
contributions. Neither liberals nor conservatives have been keen to
challenge the unions’ power. Liberals are generally supportive of
public-sector unions; some of the worst police departments in the
country are in cities, like Baltimore and Oakland, run by liberal
mayors. And though conservatives regularly castigate public-sector
unions as parasites, they typically exempt the police. Perhaps most
crucial, Walker says, “police unions can make life very difficult for
mayors, attacking them as soft on crime and warning that, unless they
get their way, it will go up. The fear of crime—which is often a code
word for race—still has a powerful political impact.” As a result, while
most unions in the U.S. have grown weaker since the seventies, police
unions have grown stronger.
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