HOW POLICE UNIONS CAME TO POWER

The PBA rises amid a lac of accountability in NYPD

In East New York, Brooklyn, on the afternoon of Thanksgiving in 1976, police officer Robert Torsney was asked a simple question by 15-yearold Randolph Evans. The ninthgrader asked the officer if he and his partner were coming from apartment 7D. Torsney walked over to Evans and shot him in the head at point-blank range. Upon returning to the station house, Torsney was arrested by his shocked fellow officers.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association put up his bail and provided his legal defense. His lawyers mixed together a claim of self-defense and “temporary insanity.” In disgust, an organization of several thousand black police officers voted to withdraw from the PBA. Yet the PBA persisted in its defense of Torsney, and saw him acquitted by reason of insanity. Torsney spent a little more than a year in a psychiatric facility, and then he was a free man.

The PBA fought for him to receive a disability pension from the department, which Police Commissioner Robert McGuire had the good sense to deny him.

This may sound like an isolated incident. It is not.

For a century and a half, New York policing has been through cycles of scandal and reform. The emphasis of earlier reform efforts was most often on corruption, but has ranged in focus from deployment practices to civilian oversight. Consistently standing in the way of one reform after another has been the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, now known as the Police Benevolent Association.

Most New Yorkers think of the PBA as the union that represents patrolmen in the NYPD. But the organization’s history is more complicated than that. While the municipal labor movement has long been a vehicle for social and economic progress, particularly for people of color and women, the PBA has remained committed to a reactionary politics. Meanwhile, it has fended off countless reform initiatives by mixing appeals to right-wing politicians with the benefits of being part of the broader, left-oriented, publicsector labor movement.

It remains to be seen how much longer the PBA will be able to thrive on this contradiction.

Long before the organization became an actual labor union, it already had generations of experience in defending officers accused of malfeasance. The PBA was formed in 1894 with the proclaimed purpose of gathering money to support the widows of police officers. Yet the new group was born at a moment of scandal, as the

Lexow Committee of 1895 revealed widespread police corruption and called for extensive reform of lawenforcement practices.

Thus, the PBA immediately became a defensive organization, seeking to shield officers from disciplinary actions and firings. In these early days the PBA was no union, and was frequently referred to as a fraternal association or a welfare organization. Nonetheless, the PBA became the main advocate for patrolmen, forging an alliance with Tammany Hall, negotiating salaries, and advocating for better pensions and benefits. Meanwhile, in the early twentieth century, patrolmen were often used to break strikes, beating and harassing workers on behalf of management.

The labor movement got something of a reprieve from the billy club when federal law enshrined the right to unionize through the Wagner Act of 1935. Yet the law, written by New York Sen. Robert Wagner, excluded public workers from its provisions.

This began to change in 1958, when the senator’s son, Mayor Robert . Wagner Jr., issued an executive order extending formal unionization rights to civil service employees. Executive Order no. 49, called the Little Wagner Act, was a watershed moment in public-sector unionization. But the Little Wagner Act explicitly excluded the police, pointing to “special problems in this area.”

Over the subsequent years of politicking, lawsuits, and slowdowns, the PBA assembled the procedures and rights of a union piece by piece, even before it was formally recognized as a union by the state’s 1967 Taylor Law.

The emergence of the PBA as a strong and vocal force in New York politics coincided with an era of dramatic social change, all of which the PBA resisted strenuously. The definitive conflict of the period was the dispute over the establishment of the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The review board idea originated with an interracial commission in the aftermath of the 1935 Harlem Riot. The proposal was revived in the early 1950s with the

John Derrick. PBA head John Carton insisted such oversight would be doing the bidding of Communist subversives.

The proposal came to life once again in the aftermath of the Harlem Riot of 1964, an incident sparked by the police killing of James Powell, a 15-year-old boy. John Lindsay made the issue an element of his campaign for mayor in 1965, and he established the board the following year. The PBA quickly gathered the necessary signatures to have the board’s existence voted up or down in a public referendum while they waged a fearmongering television campaign to scare the public into abolishing the new oversight body.

As the nasty effort unfolded, a black police fraternal organization called the Guardians initiated a lawsuit against the PBA demanding that AfricanAmerican officers have their dues refunded. The president of the Guardians explained, “They have taken the money of Negro and Puerto Rican policemen and engaged themselves in