Police need reform. Police unions need to go entirely. Police unions exist primarily to prevent police from consequences of their abuses of power. The State doesn't need unions to protect itself from its citizens.
I have friends who are cops.....the amount of shenanigans that happens behind the curtains is insane. It is literally full of high school drama, divorces, sleeping around, just all around poor behavior.
Unfortunately, the same happens in other high stress industries. Nurses are wild too.
I don’t think “high stress” is the common denominator for that kind of behavior. That just sounds like horny, immature humans - happens in lots of places.
It happens essentially everywhere. If you think it doesn't happen at your place of work, it's likely just because you haven't been included in the gossip circle.
Drama is stressful/exciting. People who have a high tolerance for stress/excitement are the ones who take on stressful jobs (nurses, police, flight attendants...) and the ones who are more tolerant of/likely to engage in drama.
A lot of this will happen without unions anyway. It seems like every country has a completely different cultural gestalt surrounding police work.
For some reason, modern police culture in american seems to increasingly value a corporatist perspective of us vs them (them being everyone who is not police), the normalization of violent response, fixation with the concept of face and widespread corruption.
Police Unions didn't create them, and abolishing them won't eliminate their lobbying power, you don't need a union to organize yourself around a lobby.
Let's not use this excuse to perpetuate the demonization of unions. After decades of increase concentration of productivity gains in the hands of capital at the expense of labor, and as we enter the AI age, this is the least thing we need.
i dont know that it's a modern phenomenon. For example law enforcement being used to attack strikers in West Virginia, cops from Los Angeles being sent to the CA border to attack Dust Bowl Okies, maybe other readers can think of others. For all the good that LE does, there has always been a strain of working for more extreme capitalist interests.
Cops (modern cops) grew out of capital trying to socialize the cost of protecting their interests. Whether it was slave patrols or dock warehouse security, central cops evolved to protect capital's interests.
I would think Police unions would probably gladly accept. higher pay for more accountability. It feels like accountability sheltering is a deal with the devil that cities made.
You've never negotiated with a union rep on anything, have you?
You pay every beat cop in the country $1 million/yr and they would never agree to the level of accountability most people expect. Independent review of actions by someone outside the chain of command? Unpaid leave when you're under investigation? At-will employment? Raises and promotions based on skill, not seniority? Random, immediate, and pass-fail physical, psychological, and marksmanship tests? Most of these seem completely reasonable to most people and if you said even one of them in a contract negotiation the first order of business by the union rep would be to remove you from contract negotiation.
>you said even one of them in a contract negotiation the first order of business by the union rep would be to remove you from contract negotiation.
You can do the same thing by saying "jury nullification" during the jury duty selection process. You can watch BOTH lawyers scramble to kick you out of the room.
Cops are already paid very, very highly and should be held accountable. Cops don't take accountability and do take the pay, so your thesis is pretty well tested and didn't work.
Back in 2019 the police in Fresno stole a bunch of rare coins during a search of a house where the warrant did not cover anything like said coins, valued at $125,000, by reporting that they seized $50,000 when they actually took twice that much in cash and the coins. The 9th Circuit ended up deciding that while it was obviously morally wrong, qualified immunity applied because there's clearly established case law that stealing property that was specifically targeted for a search does violate the Constitution, because there's no analogous case regarding property stolen by police that the police did not know was there and are not covered by the warrant, there's no clearly established violation of the 4th Amendment even though it is literally an unlawful seizure of property. Supreme Court denied cert, allowing the decision to stand. I wish I was joking.
Qualified immunity is a stain on American jurisprudence and an insult to the idea of America as a free society.
Demand of people who want your vote in the coming elections that they support a legislative correction to this judicial activism. This country was founded in large part because 250 years ago the British sent soldiers into American cities and American homes, with powers to detain, arrest and deprive of life and liberty with no accountability. If a colonial was wrongly treated they would force adjudication in favorable courts back in Britain, effectively making their soldiers immune from accountability.
The fact our judicial system has saw fit to independently replicate this injustice that none of us voted for is a crime against the very notion of what it means to be an American. Hold your leaders accountable.
Despite how the USA barely pretends to be egalitarian, there is 100% an importance totem pole, with billionaires and businesses on the top, then politicians, the police, the military, religious leaders all somewhere in the middle in some order, and then the rest of the population on the very bottom. Any fight between these cohorts will be decided based on where they are on the totem pole, not based on the law, the Constitution, or what's right.
It's an AND. The union is why administrations can't get rid of the problem employees.
In Seattle, the police are "quiet quitting" (traffic ticketing is down 8x over ~10 years ago) and literally committing fraud and getting away with it (an officer on his second time falsely applying over 24 hours of work in a day, just had to return the pay for that week. There's STILL not computerized time tracking...)
Unions strike primarily for collective bargaining purposes.
They use the bargaining to set contract terms that restrict how people can be fired.
A union member who gets in trouble can leverage union resources and representation to protect themselves.
One of my family members did a term as a union rep. He was getting really frustrated with some of the little claims that union members wanted to use the union to protect themselves from, but it was part of the job. Fortunately for him there wasn’t a serious incident like this to deal with during his term.
I'm in a union. My dad has been a union rep (different union), so I know a bit.
There is no way my colleagues would go out on strike to protect me if I stole anything. And that's absolutely right. Nor would I expect my union to go into bat for me, after anything like that was proven; nor for anything immoral.
Mad.
Unions are there to make sure you're treated fairly, not to shield members from consequences when they act immorally/illegally.
I agree with you on moral grounds, but I have some stories.
> Nor would I expect my union to go into bat for me, after anything like that was proven
Sure, but one of the jobs of the rep is to prevent it from being proven that you are guilty.
Also, there would be no need to strike, because the union has negotiated the bureaucratic processes that will be followed when you do something wrong. Following the usually slow process will let you look for ways to escape, including the company not properly filing paperwork within the allotted time.
> … claims that union members wanted to use the union to protect themselves from ...
One could argue that as litigious as US society has become, it makes sense to find out what resources are available when you’re the target of a grievance.
Further, since we are also a society of specialists, one should consult a specialist when one is the target of aforementioned grievances.
It wasn't really that complicated. It was a lot of stories about someone getting caught doing something like time card fraud or even unarguable sexual harassment and then desperately trying to avoid consequences for their own actions.
Police Unions engaged in collective action beyond striking to support other police who shoved a senior citizen to the ground and gave him brain damage, so stealing is nothing.
That's seemingly contradicted, or at least cast in doubt by your own article:
>The Buffalo police union, the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, was angered by the suspensions of the two officers, and it retaliated on June 5 by withdrawing its legal fees support for any other Buffalo officers for incidents related to the protests. [...] All 57 police officers from the Buffalo Police Department emergency response team resigned from the team, although they did not resign from the department.[45] According to the police union's president, the mass resignations were a show of solidarity with the two suspended officers.[46] However, his account has been contradicted by two of the resigned officers, who stated they resigned because of a lack of legal coverage. One of these officers said "many" of the 57 resigned officers did not resign to support the two suspended officers.[47]
Either the officers resigned in protest, or the union withdrew legal support in protest and the officers resigned as a result of that. Either way, the resignations were a result of union support for the criminals in their ranks.
>The Buffalo police union, the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, was angered by the suspensions of the two officers, and it retaliated on June 5 by withdrawing its legal fees support for any other Buffalo officers for incidents related to the protests.
Why do you think the union withdrew legal support here, given that the union supported the officers?
No, but they go on strike when negotiating their collective contracts, and put terms in the contract that govern how failures like this are investigated and punished.
Apologies if I misread/misinterpreted you, but police can't (generally) strike in the USA. Most states have a specific laws against police and firefighters from going on strike. Federal law enforcement cannot strike
It's not legal, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
See "Blue flu" for cases where cops coordinate a strike using sick leave. Another way they strike is by simply not doing their job. They'll just sit in their cars all day and won't respond or will severely delay response to dispatch.
AFAIK, those cops never get a ATF style house cleaning.
That's a funny thing because, as with all absolutes, it's trivially easy to prove it wrong. All you need is _one_ cop to not be a bastard to prove it wrong.
If you work alongside bastards, like civil-rights-violating bastards not chew-with-your-mouth-open bastards, and aren’t actively working to get them removed from the force - i’ve got bad news about your bastard status.
Which is the point of the saying. It’s not that all cops are individually bastardly, it’s that all cops are part of a system that both protects bastards regularly, and does systemically bastardly things (like say heavily policing crimes of poverty while ignoring crimes of wealth).
I'd have to go through a decent chunk of the dictionary before I started referring to people who chew with their mouth open as "bastards."
> systemically bastardly things (like say heavily policing crimes of poverty while ignoring crimes of wealth)
I'm the last person I would expect to be defending police, but I think if you look at the rate of physical and property violence perpetrated by "crimes of poverty" vs. "crimes of wealth" that might have a lot more to do with it than the cop trying to decide if the victim has money or not before they do anything.
> than the cop trying to decide if the victim has money or not before they do anything.
Who said that? The cops don’t need to ”decide” to bust you based on how much money you have, the system already put them on patrol in the poorer neighborhood.
The police are too busy going after crimes of poverty to go after the crimes that impoverish people. “Crimes of wealth” do plenty of violence, it’s just laundered thru abstractions and layers of misdirection.
Poor neighbors are where the crime happens - at least the crime that some beat cop is qualified to see or investigate.
> “Crimes of wealth” do plenty of violence
Not for actual definitions of violence, no. I'm not saying they're not crimes, or they're not serious, but there's a reason "violent crime" is a category of its own. It's an important distinction. Words mean things, and trying to say murder or aggravated battery is just one kind of violence and embezzlement or stock fraud is a different kind is, at best, incredibly dishonest.
It's deeper than this. If you try to justify why Marijuana is schedule 1, you can't. The only reasonable explanation is "the DEA hates black Americans and poor people and wants to punish them most". That's the reasonable explanation, not the conspiracy.
"The DEA" doesn't have opinions because it's not a person.
Marijuana was made schedule 1 close to 60 years ago, and it's very possible the people who made that decision had racist motivations. It's also possible they didn't and they just wanted to punish anyone who was using marijuana more than other drugs.
"People working at the DEA 60 years after this decision was made are very obviously racist and hate blacks and poor people" is much more of a stretch than "nobody really cares enough about this to change it and it wouldn't change very much anyway," isn't it? Unless, of course, you're not interested in actually understanding why things are the way they are and are more interested in perpetuating some victimhood fantasy.
Then you, like many others, misunderstand what the saying All Cops Are Bastards means. It's not an observation about the morality of each individual cop. It's shorthand for the fundamental corruption and injustice inherent to the institution of policing itself.
If Mother Theresa or Mister Rogers becomes a cop, ACAB isn't suddenly disproved, because it's not about specific individuals and their specific moral qualities. It's about systemic and fundamental problems with policing as a whole.