Police unions are all about protecting their own at all costs. Which I’d normally support. But not when it helps murderers walk free.
How Police Unions Fight Reform:
The City Council member Ritchie Torres described the S.B.A. as “a hate group masquerading as a labor union.”
He says that he understands the unions’ defensiveness, but not their vitriol: “Imagine a nurses’ union that hated patients, that went on TV and talked about how much trouble the patients give them.”
In June, police in Buffalo shoved an elderly demonstrator to the ground with enough force to crack his skull, and then marched past him, expressionless, as he lay bleeding. After the two officers who did the pushing were suspended, pending an investigation, all fifty-seven members of an élite Emergency Response Team resigned in solidarity.
Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who now teaches law at the University of South Carolina, argues that law enforcement’s “warrior problem” begins in the first days of training. “Would-be officers are told that their prime objective, the proverbial ‘first rule of law enforcement,’ is to go home at the end of every shift,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 2015. “But they are taught that they live in an intensely hostile world. A world that is, quite literally, gunning for them. . . . As a result, officers learn to be afraid.” This message is then drummed into young cops on the job. The only way to survive is by hypervigilance, addressing civilians in a tone of “unquestioned command,” and identifying those who don’t readily accede to authority as enemies.
Everybody hates a rat, and everybody mentions the Blue Wall of Silence, or something called “police culture.” Frank Serpico, the N.Y.P.D.’s best-known whistle-blower, got shot in the head during a drug raid, under disputed circumstances.
Ben Brucato, a sociologist at Rhode Island College, argues that police unions are crucially different from other labor unions. “These organizations function as lobbies to both resist accountability legislation and shield implicated officers,” he writes. A public-sector union is distinct from its private-sector counterparts; its negotiations necessarily include, at least morally, a third party—the public, the taxpayer. And yet many police unions, in their contracts and their ideology, seem to make no provision for this invisible third party. They defend their members against the public, and punish whistle-blowers with even greater zeal than management does. Police unions “represent hundreds of thousands of people, and, except in a very few states, have the ability to organize without any opposition from government,” Brucato told me.