Their defense of officers’
working conditions is a barrier to investigating misconduct claims and getting
rid of those who break the rules.
By James Surowiecki
On August 26th, Colin Kaepernick,
a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national
anthem, as a protest against police brutality. Since then, he’s been attacked
by just about everyone—politicians, coaches, players, talk-radio hosts, veterans’
groups. But the harshest criticism has come from Bay Area police unions. The
head of the San Francisco police association lambasted his “naïveté” and “total
lack of sensitivity,” and called on the 49ers to “denounce” the gesture. The
Santa Clara police union said that its members, many of whom provide security
at 49ers games, might refuse to go to work if no action was taken against
Kaepernick. A work stoppage to punish a player for expressing his opinion may
seem extreme. But in the world of police unions it’s business as usual. Indeed,
most of them were formed as a reaction against public demands in the
nineteen-sixties and seventies for more civilian oversight of the police.
Recently, even as the use of excessive force against minorities has caused
outcry and urgent calls for reform, police unions have resisted attempts to
change the status quo, attacking their critics as enablers of crime.
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.
All labor unions represent the
interests of the workers against the bosses. But police officers are not like
other workers: they have state-sanctioned power of life and death over
fellow-citizens. It’s hardly unreasonable to demand real oversight in exchange.
Union control over police working conditions necessarily entails less control
for the public, and that means less transparency and less accountability in
cases of police violence. It’s long past time we watched the watchmen. ♦
James Surowiecki is the author of
“The Wisdom of Crowds” and writes about economics, business, and finance for
the magazine.
