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"Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police."

Perhaps your "democracy" needs more than 2 parties.

"What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?"

The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike (there are many forms of strike and some of them do not involve stopping all work, for example, work-to-rule).

Our politics are antagonistic, and that makes everything harder for sure. For that matter, so are our police!

"The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike"

Like France?

I think France is kind of odd because yes, they do strike a lot, but usually the public approval of the striking is quite high. So it is less antagonistic in this sense.

I live in Europan country with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartism, and that's one option how to make things less antagonistic. There is lot of negotiations going on before the strike happens, and it mostly gets averted.

In France most of the strikes come from the public sector. And I'm pretty sure the public approval for the strikes depends if it affects them: if you'd poll people living in Paris about the current public transportation strike, I don't think you'd see a lot of support.

You are correct that the US needs a multi-party system. The lack of recognition/appreciation of the extent that the two-party system shapes and constrains every single public discourse such as this one is frankly amazing.

The current dynamic is akin to children playing one feuding parent against the other in a broken overly-adversarial marriage. You need a minimum of about 4-5 independent voices in order to facilitate civil public discourse.

> You need a minimum of about 4-5 independent voices in order to facilitate civil public discourse.

Has this been demonstrated through mathematical/statistical models?

But the US has relatively few strikes despite being so 'antagonistic'.

This is a really big problem in America and it needs to be addressed head on, regardless of how uncomfortable the consequences may be.

LEOs hold a sacred role of trust in our society - they maintain the potential application of the use of lethal force. With that power must come the most severe of guardrails, to which unionization is completely antithetical. Our civilian control of the military is internationally lauded, but we lack full civil control of our own law enforcement.

I think the way to go about this is to break up the law enforcement departments into smaller scoped independent roles with enough potential redundancy to be able to institute reforms via divide and conquer. Remake law enforcement from the ground up in this way, and deny the new institutions public unionization by law.

If the existing police unions strike, they must be dealt with as severely as mutinous armed forces would be; they should be subject to a court marshal form of adjudication with the same penalties that a military officer would face for desertion and endangering public safety.

Start building new parallel law enforcement institutions now, prepare for how to maintain civil order in the face of a strike, then start dissolving the old institutions. It’d also probably be wise for the FBI to maintain a comprehensive database of federal, state and local LEOs in case some go underground and attempt to undermine these efforts through domestic terrorism.

I would like to have an explanation why "going after the unions" is a thing and what it means in this context?

I can understand for example limiting striking by law or similar ordnances to uphold order and democracy. Is this all the parent is talking about?

But isn't a union basically a private organisation formed by citizens by their own free will?

What does it mean for a political organization, eg a party, to go after something like that? I mean from liberal/freedom of the individual POV.

I'm most certainly missing something important here and me being european/nordic shows ;)

Isn't a private prison a private organisation formed by citizens by their own free will? :)

The unions and their membership have a financial conflict of interest when it comes to public public that impacts incarceration rate. Prison unions have, for example, lobbied extensively to keep various drugs criminalized in states where the public was going in another direction.

It's obviously a difficult subject with a lot of concerns to balance, but the posters here are just arguing that the problems of private prisons are not all unique to private prisons-- the employees of public prisons (and their orgs) have some of the same kinds of conflicts of interest.

The difference is that every prisoner in a private prison is an income source, so every law that creates fewer prisoners (such as drug legalization) is a loss of income. Are all public prisons run the same way? That is, are the prisons funded on a per-prisoner-per-day basis? Or do they get an overall annual budget, and then have to spend it as best they can to house the prisoners they're sent?

In the former case, harsh laws are good for them, same as the private scenario. But in the latter case -- fewer prisoners on the same budget -- more permissive laws would be an unconditional win. I don't know which way it actually works, just spelling out an unstated assumption that's being made upthread.

More prisoners means more jobs for prison guards which means negotiating leverage for higher pay, better working conditions, and better job security. If there were significantly fewer prisoners, there would be layoffs of prison guards, which would very much be against the interests of the union.

You are aware that public unions demand things from the government, making things difficult for said government. They consume a great deal of public moneys and demand special working conditions, usually above those received by employees in private companies doing similar work. And they give out money to politicians to make their concerns a priority. So if you care about other things than the pay of policemen, you'll have to fight the unions.

It’s more a question of curbing their corrupting influence on politics. You might notice that the US has policies that result in mass incarceration, and that US police are far more likely than police in other countries to use lethal force. Part of this is because American law and policy is heavily influenced by police unions and prison guard unions, who favor their own interests over the public interest.

It’s also not purely a matter of private association. Often there are laws encouraging or mandating collective bargaining for certain public sector jobs. These laws are often what keeps unions in business, since those laws protect them and allow them to eg sign collective bargaining agreements that effectively require public employees to join the union (or at least pay dues to it) as a condition of keeping their jobs. It was the repeal of these laws that Gov. Walker faced political pushback for in 2011.

It might be true that, for some legislators, the fear of speaking truth to this particular power is one of public disorder. I don't think there's evidence to support that fear, but that doesn't mean it's not a motivating factor.

A larger motivating factor - and this is pure speculation - might be more closely related to angering an institution with such a capacity for unchecked initiation of violence (ie, that ones person, home, or family may be in danger of direct violence).

I doubt that it would escalate even to that, but you never know.

> What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?

> When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.

> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.

https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...

The article you link to actually links to the original paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5.epdf

It occurred to me that the result is not necessarily unexpected if it were due to under reporting (i.e. during the slowdown there was less opportunity to report major crime and therefore reports fell). The researchers discuss that in the paper. I don't have time to read the paper in detail and come to a conclusion one way or another, but I thought it might be of interest to people who might not otherwise click on an La Times link.

When police go on a “slow down” recorded reports to the police should naturally decrease.

> In our analyses, we examine how crime under-reporting may bias the results. We employ precinct fixed-effects to address time-invariant sources of under-reporting, such as communities’ varying histories of police distrust. We then model time-variant sources of under-reporting biases, such as those caused by the killing of Eric Garner and/or the heightened conflict between protesters and police. Model (5) in Fig. 3 controls for the number of community complaints reported in each precinct-week for misdemeanours and criminal violations. Assuming that time-variant sources of under-reporting are correlated across crime types, this model is robust to slowdown-induced under-reporting bias. While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting, our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory. Additional tests show the results are robust to specifications including controls for long-term trends in crime (Fig. 3 model (6)), lagged ‘Major crime arrests’ (Fig. 3 model (7)) and lagged ‘Major crime complaints’ (Fig. 3 model (8)).

doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0211-5

It’s hard for me to see how they can control for police slowdown. In most cases, in order for there to be a complaint the police have to:

Answer the phone Show up Take the person’a claim seriously, encourage the person to formally complain Actually write up the complaint Actually file it

I’m really skeptical those things wouldn’t be altered by a slowdown, it wouldn’t be much of a slowdown, in my opinion, without altering these things.

Edit: I understand it might be in principle possible to control for a slowdown, if you had many many other slowdowns to use as data points.

I find it very malicious to just drop numbers like this. It gives the impression that you state a simple fact, while the reality is much more complicated than that. The studies on the subject require much more subtlety and statistical understanding when interpreting the results that a 2 line quotation to make a point.

There are a number of factors to take into account when giving credit to such studies:

- Is there enough observations to have statistically significant results? (i.e. do we have enough occurences of police strikes to really have meaningful results? can we have overwelmingly influencing factors not present in the studied samples: I guess it would likely highly depend on the city where the strike happens also)

- Did the sample properly allowed the isolation of the variable being studied against other influencing factors?

- What is the collinearity between the variables used for the regression? (i.e. if violence complaints are made on the spot, then less police means harder to fill complaints, it doesn't necessarily mean less violence)

"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" has a good introduction to the challenges of such studies, and discusses a bit the particular case of police.

Thank you for the last bit about Freakonomics- it lets everyone know it's safe to ignore you.

On contrast, your ad hominem argument is not appreciated by me.

> ad hominem

Hardly-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"),[1] short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

You failed at the "genuine discussion" part by citing pop econ horseshit.

Ouch, please don't. We ban accounts that do personal attacks like this, and I don't want to ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I "attacked" pop econ bullshit, not a person.

"It lets everyone know it's safe to ignore you" is a personal attack. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd really appreciate it.

> "It lets everyone know it's safe to ignore you" is a personal attack.

No, it's a general attack on anyone that cites horseshit.

Ok, I believe you that that was your intent. But "you" is a personal pronoun. If you use that pronoun and sling pejoratives, people are naturally going to interpret it as a personal attack, as I did. If you don't want to be read that way, the burden is on you to disambiguate that.

As an outsider reading this thread I couldn't help but laugh at this.

Galanwe said phry was "very malicious", which is actually and not just tenuously a personal attack. Do you plan to delete their comment as well? Interesting standards on HN.

Please don't interpret as "standards" what is typically a simple case of us seeing one comment and not the other. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. If you run across something that didn't get moderated when it should have, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it.

Edit: I've tracked down the comment you're referring to and indeed, no moderator saw it. I've replied to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20964408. In the future, if there's a comment you're concerned about, you should either flag it or email us at hn@ycombinator.com.

If you haven't checked specifically with us about a post, please don't draw conclusions about HN moderation—those are almost always non sequiturs. People usually jump to the idea that we secretly support the one side (where they didn't see us moderate) over the other side (where they did). That is reading patterns into randomness.

Edit: Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

But it can be equally malicious to just drop generic potential shortcomings of scientific studies, without any attempt to figure out whether they apply to the specific study under discussion.

I don't agree with this comment at all. Skepticism isn't denying the claim or advocating an alternative one, it is promoting thoroughness and responsibility. The uninspected claim is quite a bit more dangerous.

This particular flavor of skepticism does not promote thoroughness and responsibility, in fact it promotes laziness: "Why read (or even skim) through the article when I can just state these five ways in which the article might be bad and therefore its argument void?"

I completely disagree. You believe skepticism is just as bad as blind trust?

If you think broad skepticism or criticism of a scientific study based on class characteristics is admissible (some statistical investigations are poorly conducted, so this one might be poor too), why not trust based on class characteristics (scientific articles in Nature tend to be really good, so this one might be good too)?

You're right, I don't think either of these options is better than the other.

>I find it very malicious to just drop numbers like this. It gives the impression that you state a simple fact, while the reality is much more complicated than that. The studies on the subject require much more subtlety and statistical understanding when interpreting the results that a 2 line quotation to make a point.

And yet such numbers are dropped all the time. I also do not see callouts for number drops being consistently applied. For example in political subreddits sees number drops without callouts when it supports the lean of the subreddit and number drops with callouts when it does not.

Criticism of science seems to be unequally applied, and given how important equal application of criticism is to science being reliable, it creates a reliability problem.

Please don't introduce personal swipes like "malicious" into what's otherwise a fine HN comment. It usually provokes the person you're talking to into replying with worse; or if that doesn't happen, it causes other people to take your comment the wrong way (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20960084). It also breaks the site guideline against calling names in arguments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That’s not the same as going completely on strike. It’s possible that police wouldn’t go completely on strike, but it’s also possible that the work stoppages or disruptions would affect something more essential than the “broken windows” policy. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what might go wrong even inside prisons.

There is a non-trivial risk of violent, even armed conflict if there really was a police strike and the National Guard was called in to restore order. That’s not something a state governor wants on their record.