Police Unions Are As Much A Problem Around The Country As They Are In Los Angeles-- George Gascón For D.A.

 

Jackie Lacey is the first woman, and first African-American to serve as L.A. District Attorney. So for non-Angelenos it may have come as a surprise when Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, Color of Change, Nanette Barragán, the California Democratic Party, the Los Angeles Democratic Party, the Working Families Party all endorsed her opponent George Gascón. Lacey is a so-called "tough on crime" DA who has been opposed to the reform movement sweeping D.A. offices around the country. Both Eric Garcetti and Adam Schiff instinctively endorsed her... and then even they rescinded their endorsements. Black Lives Matters and the ACLU have come out strongly against the way she does her job.

So who backs her? The police unions have funneled over $3 million into her campaign and into independent expenditures backing her. And, while she takes their money, she has been criticized for her hesitance to hold police accountable: Over 600 Angelenos have been killed by police since she took office and not one police officer has been charged with murder.

Furthermore, Los Angeles County sends more people to death row than Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia, combined. L.A. operates the world’s largest jail system which doubles as the nation’s largest mental health institution, and incarcerates black people 13 times more than white people. L.A. prosecutes kids as adults at alarming rates, disproportionately arrests people of color, and sends people to prison at per capita rates far exceeding the vast majority of California’s prosecutors.

What's more, Lacey’s campaign partnered with the Pluvious Group, a GOP fundraising firm that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trump. The Pluvious Group was also at the center of a money laundering scheme that allowed, “donors to conceal their identities in filings and avoid exceeding campaign contribution limits."

Last year, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee pointed out that Pluvious had been, "involved in a Federal probe regarding a more than suspicious breakfast event they organized at Trump’s D.C. Hotel." The breakfast was part of a Federal criminal "investigation into whether foreigners contributed money to the Trump inaugural fund and PAC by possibly using American intermediaries."

That association is pregnant with implication, as a review of public records indicates that the Pluvious Group has not represented any other Democrat at the federal, state or county level, therefore raising questions as to why Lacey, who is registered as Democrat, selected the firm. It also raises questions as to why the Pluvious Group would choose Lacey to be the first Democrat with whom they’ve worked.

After speaking with Gascón-- and feeling very inspired by him and by his vision for a more equitable justice system in Los Angeles-- I asked him to introduce himself to DWT readers and Blue America members with the backstory of how he's come to be running for D.A. against Jackie Lacey. Please give it a read and, if you like what you see, consider contributing to his campaign by clicking on the 2020 Bluer California thermometer on the right. And, at least as important, though, tell your friends in Los Angeles County about this race and why it's important-- and who Jackie Lacey and George Gascón are. Identity politics may dictate to many well-meaning people, support for Lacey-- a woman and an African American-- but Dolores Huerta, Patrisse Cullors (co-founder of Black Lives Matter), Jane Fonda and the Black Women's Democratic Club are all working hard to replace her with Gascón. There's a reason.


Reforming America’s Largest Prosecutors Office
-by George Gascón

When I was a 13-year-old boy my family immigrated to L.A. from Cuba. Born to a blue-collar working-class family of political dissidents, I saw first-hand how the abuse of power by authorities can destroy individuals, families and communities. In L.A., I faced many hurdles to assimilate leading to my dropping out of high school. During this period of time in my life, I experienced institutional bias in our public education system and racial discrimination. I will never forget the time I was told by a high school counselor that I was too stupid and not college material, because I was failing several classes. Not once was I asked about my English proficiency, or that perhaps my limited command of the English language could be a contributing factor to my dismal academic performance. These early formative experiences contributed greatly in my personal journey and seared in me a passion for social justice.

Half a century later, I find myself at this historical moment where opportunities for change are real in ways I have never experienced before, full of hope, energized by the possibilities to reimagine our entire criminal justice system and the fear that if we aren’t careful this historical moment will too pass without meaningful change.

I started my 40-year career in law enforcement walking a beat as a young police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, and rose through the ranks to become the Assistant Chief of Police. As Chief of Police in Mesa, Arizona I stood up to Joe Arpaio's racist immigration raids, and then served as Chief of Police in San Francisco before then-Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed me to be District Attorney. In this role I earned a reputation as the Godfather of progressive prosecution, having successfully reduced violent crime to historic lows while reducing incarceration.

I became the first elected prosecutor to call for an end to cash bail and started a national movement when I proactively cleared marijuana convictions that were eligible following legalization. My office pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to hide race information during the charging process to reduce the potential for implicit bias, and we developed successful programs that are being duplicated around the country to divert people from jails and prisons and keep kids out of the criminal justice system. I was also the co-author of Proposition 47, which reduced simple possession of drugs for personal use from a felony to a misdemeanor, paving the way for California to reduce its role in a failed drug war-- but there is so much more to do.

My work in San Francisco was just the beginning. It's time to modernize the criminal justice system, and nowhere can we make a bigger impact than here in Los Angeles. Join me, join this movement, and let's create a criminal justice system that we can all be proud of.

 

 

Blue Lives Matter?

Do you ever get a call soliciting money for some kind of police benevolent association? I do-- frequently. I always hang up. It's different from the way I treat other phone solicitors who slip through my security net. For the others I either speak in a really low voice so they have to press their ear against the phone to hear me-- and then blow a high-decibel coast guard whistle into the phone-- or I let loose with the most incredibly ugly stream of curses imaginable, so ugly that I unsalted and frighten myself. But when it's an operator-- inevitably an authoritative-sounding male-- identifying himself as from a police organization, I hold off on the whistle and curses. I just hang up. That's because I fear retribution.

No one from my high school academic classes became a cop. That's because in my high school, they divided kids up into "honor" classes, regular classes and "modified" classes. I was in the honor classes. The future cops weren't. And there were future cops at the school. They were in my gym classes and my home room classes and in my shop class. I didn't know for sure they would be cops then; there was always the chance they could be criminals. The future cops and the future mobsters were the same group of guys. At some point, they would go one way or the other-- although a congressman who eventually represented my neighborhood (decades after I had left) never made the choice... He was both a federal law enforcement agent and a mobster at the same time. That would be Michael Grimm (R-NY), who severed a tap on the wrist sentence for cheating on his taxes as part of a deal that didn't get into a long list of criminal activities, including at least one murder, in return for strict silence on his part. Omertà.

As the president of a large company in a small city, I was tight with the local police-- more than cordial relations. When my house was robbed once, I went to these cops from the city where I worked, not the city where my house was. They solved it-- fast-- and had all my stolen stuff back to me and the perps behind bars. More than cordial. Decades apart, I had affairs with two cops. What they had in common was chilling. I'm sure there are good cops like... Harry Bosch.





But not too many. More of them, I suspect, are like the cops/robbers kids in the modified classes, getting off on the power of fear, dominance and terror. This week New York Magazine published a piece by Zak Cheney-Rice worth reading, In L.A. County, Gangs Wear Badges that might help you to grok what the Black Lives Matter movement is fighting. "Much of the recent debate," wrote Cheney-Rice, "about policing’s excesses involves a clash of two viewpoints: one claiming that there is something structurally and culturally wrong with American law enforcement that encourages immoral behavior, and another that attributes their worst conduct to 'bad apples,' rogue individuals whose actions speak for them alone and do not indict their fellow officers or their profession as a whole. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department provides a helpful literalization of the former point: an entire law-enforcement entity whose members regularly join criminal gangs, earn clout by harassing, assaulting, and killing county residents, and retaliate against their colleagues who dare to oppose them." Oh great!

Sworn testimony made in June by a whistleblower, Deputy Art Gonzalez, details a pattern of such behavior inside the Compton sheriff’s station, which exists as part of the Southern California city’s partnership with the county sheriff to provide local law enforcement. Gonzalez claimed that Deputy Miguel Vega, who shot 18-year-old Andres Guardado during a June incident that sparked protests, was a prospective member of the Executioners, a dozen or so deputies who allegedly operate as a gang-- setting illegal arrest quotas, threatening work slowdowns if they don’t get their desired shift assignments, assaulting their fellow deputies, and holding parties to celebrate when their members shoot or kill someone in the line of duty, the Los Angeles Times reports. The existence of the Executioners is “common knowledge” within the department, Gonzalez said, according to Spectrum News 1, which obtained a transcript of his testimony this week. Decades of harassment and violence at the hands of the Compton office-- including one 2019 incident where the city’s mayor, Aja Brown, claims to have been ordered out of her car by more than half a dozen deputies and searched for drugs that she did not possess-- have led the city to propose severing ties with the department altogether, a proposal that the Executioners revelations stand to accelerate. According to the whistleblower complaint, Deputy Vega, who shot Guardado six times in the back, was “chasing ink”-- a term used to describe efforts to impress the Executioners in order to be drafted into their ranks and obtain their signature tattoo: a skeleton backed by flames, brandishing a rifle and wearing a Nazi-style helmet.

Part of what makes this dynamic notable is how ordinary it is. Though the central allegation is that the Executioners “dominate” the Compton sheriff’s office, at least nine other such gangs are known to operate across the department, and have done so for decades. “Vikings, Reapers, Regulators, Little Devils, Cowboys, 2000 Boys and 3000 Boys, Jump Out Boys, and most recently the Banditos and the Executioners,” Matthew Burson, chief of the department’s professional standard division, told KABC last month of the LASD’s gang problem. “I am absolutely sickened by the mere allegation of any deputy hiding behind their badges to hurt anyone.” Sheriff Alex Villanueva has said he intends to fire or suspend more than two dozen deputies involved in a widely covered assault on four non-gang members at an off-duty party in 2018. Villanueva was elected under immense pressure to clean up the department, whose former heads-- Lee Baca and his undersheriff, Paul Tanaka-- were convicted of obstructing a federal probe of abuses in the county’s jail. Tanaka was an alleged member of the Lynwood Vikings, a white supremacist sheriff’s gang. Villanueva has also said that he will implement measures to discourage deputies from joining these cliques at all, but county Inspector General Max Huntsman said last month that he’d seen no evidence of this actually happening. The fallout has been costly on several fronts. Since 2010, misconduct claims linked to these sheriff’s gangs have cost the county $21 million in settlements and associated legal costs, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It’s hard to make sense of this phenomenon without acknowledging that discrete individual malfeasance is insufficient for explaining its scope and longevity. The existence of ten or more gangs operating within the law-enforcement agency that patrols America’s most populous county, and whose members have occupied its highest ranks, indicates a level of tolerance and normalization that cannot be isolated to any one person, and a scale of public danger that cannot be calculated in mere dollar amounts or police shooting statistics. These gangs have been implicated in sustaining an environment of terror, and are regularly celebrated and rewarded for it. Their existence, and seeming intractability, are stark manifestations of the ways that American law-enforcement agencies operate as fraternities the nation over, with less regard for public partnership than for capitalizing upon their own impunity. This is perhaps most evident in the conduct of police unions. But survey any heavily patrolled community and it becomes clear that the existence of police gangs are not necessary to promote illegal arrest quotas, work slowdowns, or internal plaudits for acts of brutality-- though gangs are an especially brazen way of formalizing them. This is simply the reality of policing.

A full year ago-- so long before the Democrats chose a candidate-- the International Union of Police Associations endorsed Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. In doing so, union chief Sam Cabral said "Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims. They seem to take any union’s support for granted. Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary. While his candor ruffles the feathers of the left, I find it honest and refreshing. He stands with America’s law enforcement officer and we will continue to stand with him." Last month the union representing most NYC cops also endorsed Trump. Union president Patrick Lynch, said "Across this country, police officers are under attack. Our neighborhoods are being ripped apart by violence and lawlessness. Most politicians have abandoned us, but we still have one strong voice speaking up in our defense."

Reforming The Police Has To Include Keeping Racists And Bullies Off The Force-- And Firing The Ones Who Are There Now

Last week, the NYC police union endorsed 3 contemptible candidates for Congress-- "ex"- Republican Michelle Caruso-Cabrera against AOC, anti-Choice/anti-LGBTQ fanatic Rubén Díaz, Sr. against Tomas Ramos and conservative IDC-er David Carlucci against Mondaire Jones. This exactly aligns the police union-- once again-- with the Wall Street banksters. The police union are a bunch of scumbags coast to coast. In fact, there have been increasing demands that the AFL-CIO kick them out of the umbrella union. In Seattle, that's already moving along.

"AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka," wrote Candice Bernd, "has refused to expel the International Union of Police Associations and other law enforcement unions from the U.S.’s largest labor federation. Trumka told Bloomberg Friday that he won’t cut ties with police unions because 'police officers and everyone who works for a living has the right to collective bargaining' and that the 'best way to use our influence on the issue of police misconduct is to engage with our police affiliates rather than isolate them.' He told labor leaders and reporters Wednesday that 'the answer is not to disengage and condemn' police unions, while imploring labor organizers to fight racism. Trumka has praised the Minnesota Federation of Labor’s ousting of the openly racist Minneapolis Police Officers Federation President Bob Kroll. He also said the labor movement must play a leading role in the racial justice movement 'because protesting racial brutality, whether at the hands of a police officer, or a neighbor, or an employer, is not only the right cause. It’s a responsibility.'"

"I Can't Breathe" by Nancy Ohanian

Protesters set the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the AFL-CIO, aflame Sunday night, smashing in its windows and graffitiing its gold 16th Street entrance with 'Black Lives Matter.' While the motivations for the arson remain unclear, the action has put the federation’s partnership and affiliation with police under further scrutiny.

...U.S. police departments remain one of the heaviest unionized sectors in the country, representing hundreds of thousands of cops at the state, federal and local levels. The national largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, has more than 340,000 members. Former Minneapolis Police Department officer Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd last month, was a union member.

By continuing to affiliate with police unions, Trumka and other labor leaders are betraying the demands of protesters and some of the federation’s own affiliates, including the United Auto Workers Local 2865, who want the organization to take a stand and let go of hundreds of thousands of unionized officers. Trumka’s reticence comes as the 2018 Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision continues to erode some public-sector union rolls.

Still, racial justice activists say now is exactly the moment to “disengage,” and that the federation has done so before, pointing to the AFL-CIO’s disaffiliation with the Teamsters and other unions.

...[A]ctivists have pointed out that police unions don’t show up regularly in solidarity for the broader labor movement; instead they actively repress working people by routinely beating and murdering them in the streets. Police officers have long been used to break strikes and kill striking workers, as they have done during historic labor uprisings such as the 1897 Lattimer Massacre, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain and the 1937 Little Steel Strike in Chicago.

Police unions largely work to protect their own. The contracts they bargain keep racist officers who have killed and abused immune from accountability. They maintain policing’s structural system of white supremacy while maintaining wages and benefits that often exceed those of public servants like emergency medical technicians and child care workers.

To be sure, Trumka has called out police-perpetrated violence in the past. After the Ferguson uprising of 2014, Trumka noted that Darren Wilson and Michael Brown’s mother were both union members, saying, “Our brother killed our sister’s son,” last September. “We do not have to wait for the judgment of prosecutors or courts to tell us how terrible this is.” During his tenure as president of the United Mineworkers of America, he criticized police for brutalizing a striking miner during the 1989 Pittston Coal Strike.

Still, amid the historic uprisings of the past two weeks, simple criticisms and affirmations of anti-racism without bold action sound like mere lip service to many in the streets.

If the [Seattle] MLK Labor council votes to disaffiliate the Seattle Police Officers Guild on June 17, it would be the first significant expulsion of a police union from an organized labor council anywhere in the country.

That said, I have very mixed feelings about defunding police departments, likely to be a major losing issue for Democrats. In fact, I think police officers should be paid more-- with grants from the federal government. Why more? Simple: bigger salaries would attract better officers, as in not racists and bullies. These are the average annual salaries for police officers in the 10 states that pay them the least, states where the police departments and the KKK have horrifyingly similar membership:

• Mississippi- $36,290
• Arkansas- $40,570
• Louisiana- $42,470
• South Carolina- $43,520
• West Virginia- $44,450
• Georgia- $44,700
• Tennessee- $45,370
• Alabama- $46,510
• Kentucky- $46,720
• North Carolina- $47,340

Higher pay for police officers (as well as for public school teachers) will be worth the money and, in the case of the police, come with strict enforcement of rules against predatory behavior against civilians. Jail time for "bad apples" must become standard, the way it is for other criminals.

Yesterday, The Atlantic issued a podcast, Would Defunding Police Make Us Safer?, that included Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing. Vitale explained that the central argument of his book is that "policing is an inherently problematic tool for the state. Policing is a tool of violence that has historically been used to facilitate gross inequalities and systems of exploitation like slavery, colonialism, the breaking of unions, and the suppression of workers’ rights movements. And so then to say that that tool is best suited to solve a broad range of community problems is misguided. And further, [the idea] that we can fix that problem with a series of superficial procedural reforms really misunderstands the nature of that institution and the missions that our elected officials have given to it... Racism is baked into the institutional mission set by our political leaders, including President Obama. So this reform cannot possibly give us any relief. Neither can having police-community encounter sessions, which they did in Minneapolis. Or instituting accountability mechanisms that were largely procedural in nature: body cameras, new use-of-force policies, de-escalation training. There’s absolutely no empirical evidence that this makes any more than a superficial difference in the way policing is conducted."

He explained that in NYC, for example, the police budget is $6 billion-- more than the Department of Health, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Youth Services, and the Department of Employment Services combined. NYC is attempting to cut the Education Department by over $600 million. But the proposal for the police department is a cut of $23 million.

There’s kind of a continuum for understanding what “defund the police” means, and it doesn’t really mean that tomorrow the police budget is zero. There are actually dozens of campaigns that were underway before the events in Minneapolis that were calling for defunding policing, but [they] took the form of things like we want to halt new hiring, we want to get a handle on overtime, and we want to close down certain problematic programs, like the gang unit, and shift those resources into community needs.

So this is not about: Tomorrow, there are no police. There are folks, though, for whom defund the police is also about thinking about a bigger vision of a kind of world where we don’t rely so heavily on policing and prisons, and that comes out of the prison- and police-abolition movement that’s emerged over the last 20 or so years.

...[J]ust defunding the police by itself is almost never what people are calling for. What they’re calling for is a redistribution of resources, because communities do have problems. They have problems of violence. They have problems of disorder. They need help, but they don’t need help from the police in many of these cases. So it’s got to be about redistribution, not just defunding. It needs to be targeted and specific.

Police unions are a separate problem, one that was well-examined by a team of NY Times writers Saturday in a piece called How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts. "Over the past five years, as demands for reform have mounted in the aftermath of police violence in cities like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and now Minneapolis," they wrote, "police unions have emerged as one of the most significant roadblocks to change. The greater the political pressure for reform, the more defiant the unions often are in resisting it-- with few city officials, including liberal leaders, able to overcome their opposition. They aggressively protect the rights of members accused of misconduct, often in arbitration hearings that they have battled to keep behind closed doors. And they have also been remarkably effective at fending off broader change, using their political clout and influence to derail efforts to increase accountability. While rates of union membership have dropped by half nationally since the early 1980s, to 10 percent, higher membership rates among police unions give them resources they can spend on campaigns and litigation to block reform. A single New York City police union has spent more than $1 million on state and local races since 2014."

With the police union backing Carlucci and Díaz, Sr. against progressive reformers Mondaire Jones and Tomas Ramos and with the union backing Caruso-Cabrera against AOC, it's more important than ever to contribute to Jones and Ramos (here) and to AOC here. Back to The Times:

It remains to be seen how the unions will respond to reform initiatives by cities and states since Mr. Floyd’s death, including a new ban on chokeholds in Minneapolis. But in recent days, unions have continued to show solidarity with officers accused of abusive behavior.

The president of a police union in Buffalo said the union stood “100 percent” behind two officers who were suspended on Thursday after appearing to push an older man who fell and suffered head injuries. The union president said the officers “were simply following orders.”

All 57 officers on the Emergency Response Team, a special squad formed to respond to riots, had resigned from their posts on the team in support of the suspended officers, according to The Buffalo News.

Unions can be so effective at defending their members that cops with a pattern of abuse can be left untouched, with fatal consequences. In Chicago, after the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke, it emerged that Mr. Van Dyke had been the subject of multiple complaints already. But a “code of silence” about misconduct was effectively “baked into” the labor agreements between police unions and the city, according to a report conducted by task force.

...When liberal politicians do try to advance reform proposals, union officials have resorted to highly provocative rhetoric and hard-boiled campaign tactics to lash out at them. This past week, the head of the sergeants’ union in New York posted a police report on Twitter revealing personal information about the daughter of Mr. de Blasio, who had been arrested during a protest.

...At times, the strident leadership appears to beget still more strident leadership. In 2017, Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police elected a new president who denounced a federal Justice Department investigation prompted by the shooting of Mr. McDonald as “politically motivated” and pledged to fight the “anti-police movement.” That president was ousted this year by a candidate who had derided the ensuing consent decree as “nonsense” and criticized his predecessor for failing to stand up to City Hall.

While statistics compiled by the group Campaign Zero show that police killings and shootings in Chicago have fallen following a set of reforms enacted after a federal investigation, advocates worry that the union will undermine them in contract negotiations. Police unions have traditionally used their bargaining agreements to create obstacles to disciplining officers. One paper by researchers at the University of Chicago found that incidents of violent misconduct in Florida sheriff’s offices increased by about 40 percent after deputies gained collective bargaining rights.

“By continuing to elect people who stand for those values, it more deeply entrenches the break between the community and the police,” said Karen Sheley, director of the Police Practices Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “It makes it far more difficult for reform efforts to go forward.”