USA TODAY International Edition
Police unions stand in the way of reform
Tyre Nichols was killed by a group of police officers on Jan. 7 in Memphis, Tennessee. His brutal beatdown was caught on video and finally released Friday. The shocking video sparked a new wave of police brutality protests, with angry people taking to streets to vent their frustrations and rage at a broken, corrupt system.
Are we in America doomed to repeat a cycle of police killings and civil unrest indefinitely?
End qualified immunity
It’s been 2 1/ 2 years since the riots over George Floyd’s death. Out of the fires of those events emerged a deepseated distrust and resentment for police officers. That summer, a wave of “defund the police” movements swept the country, and for a while, there were serious talks of reform.
Sen. Rand Paul, R- Ky., sponsored a bill to end no- knock raids, and a few cities slashed their police budgets.
As the outrage faded, though, many citizens reasoned that communities do need police officers – they just need a way to hold them accountable.
An obvious solution would be an end to qualified immunity, which shields police and other public officials from civil lawsuits over actions they have taken as part of their job.
Unfortunately, there is one powerful force that stands in the way of that much- needed goal: police unions.
We spend a tremendous amount of energy focused on elections, but government employee unions, known as public unions, have a near stranglehold on the day- to- day operations of our government. In parks and transportation departments, the consequence is a waste of taxpayer money and inefficient operations.
In policing, the consequences are more dire: loss of life, rioting and a national vote of no confidence in the very organization that’s supposed to keep the peace.
The problems with public unions are so pervasive that the entire system needs to be scrapped.
As Philip K. Howard states in his book, “Not Accountable,” “they are impervious to reform.”
Public union workers are incentivized to focus on entitlements and power instead of accomplishments.
Public unions are one of the largest contributors to political campaigns and the largest source of campaign workers. All of their political power is consolidated toward protecting and benefiting themselves against decisions by elected officials and supervisors. They crush candidates who oppose them, aggressively lobby elected officials and use the same tactics internally.
Why it’s hard to fire police
Over the past several decades, public employee unions have imposed increasingly tighter restrictions on managers. Collective bargaining agreements effectively bar the most important management tool – basic accountability.
They also prohibit basic management choices, including reassigning personnel and reallocating responsibilities for work projects.
If accountability and instruction are off limits, discipline and termination are certainly out of the question.
Fewer than 140 of Connecticut’s 30,000 public employees were fired for performance issues from February 2018 to February 2019. From 2010 to 2019, nearly 70% of San Antonio’s police officers fired for cause were rehired on appeal. In the private sector, termination rates are much higher.
The procedural hurdles for police termination are quite steep, and they generally include:
Inability to interview the officer about what happened without providing him advanced notice.
Allowing the officer to hear other people’s testimony first so he can try to match his story.
Arbitrators who have been selected by the police union.
No sharing of past misconduct with arbitrators unless it occurred recently. Multiple levels of appeal. Strict confidentiality so the general public has no transparency regarding how the police department is run.
If we want to end qualified immunity and hold the police accountable, we must come to terms with the fact that public unions are designed to insulate government employees from accountability.
The entire system needs to be scrapped to restore the public’s faith in our civil servants.