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.”