Police violence and union complicity

With the recent murder of George Floyd looking like it may finally get and keep people’s attention, police violence has become a hot topic. Some commentators have mentioned the historical role played by police unions in helping bad cops escape consequences of their actions.

I address this issue as a former local union vice president, representing state employees in social and human services agencies, as a member of AFSCME Council 4, which also represents various municipal police unions. From that position, I remain a strong supporter of unions and the benefits they’ve brought to this country, fully understanding the historical reasons for their birth. However, there has been a dark side, too. Something that starts out with a high moral purpose can be perverted by individuals greed and egos.

Police unions have come to exemplify the perversion of their duty to protect their members from faulty decisions made by police bureaucrats and politicians, because of the extreme practice of defending members in all situations, regardless of the level of the misdeed, the amount of evidence involved or the threat to the public.

That extreme practice is not typical of all unions. In my former role, I had to defend members who were clearly guilty of extreme incompetence and/or activities harmful to the clients we were paid to help. In doing so, I attempted to do what could provide the best possible outcome for the member. That did not mean taking the radical position that no member was ever guilty of anything substantial, which seems to be the MO for police unions today.

Re: the Floyd murder, I defy any police union president to present a reason why Officer Derek Chauvin is not guilty as charged of murder. Any union representing public employees has both a duty to its members but also to the public at large. That means representing members but not engaging in extreme tactics to allow the guilty to walk, such as the reported union pressure to coerce the entire unit to resign from their special duties in crowd control in response to the suspension of two officers due to their televised assault on an elderly protester in Buffalo, N.Y.

The “blue wall of silence” must be broken down by officers with the courage to stand up for the very laws they have sworn to uphold. For officers as individuals and their unions to continue to aid and abet felonies makes them nothing more than a self-serving street gang with blue colors. We, and the national labor movement in particular, need a national conversation about how police unions can both serve their members and society.