It's Time to Bust Police Unions | Hacker News Reader

It's Time to Bust Police Unions

reason.com

51 pointsresalisbury36 comments

I don't know where else to post about it, this thread seems the most relevant.

Regarding yesterday's Buffalo police department incident where one officer pushed an elderly person who was then bleeding on the floor.

The police department put out a statement [1]: > "Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square," Evans said. "It doesn't specify clear the square of men, 50 and under or 15 to 40. They were simply doing their job. I don't know how much contact was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards."

IMO - This idea of "I was just following" orders needs to be eradicated. That is a cop out (pardon the pun) and totally puts the responsibility towards no one because the superiors are not even at the scene. Every cop, every officer, every law enforcement persons must not blindly follow orders like they're in the military. They must have some self restraint and put public safety first.

I am sorry as this has nothing to do with Police unions, but I felt like speaking up about this excuse of following orders from the superiors is absolutely terrifying.

[1] https://buffalonews.com/2020/06/05/57-members-of-buffalo-pol...

>IMO - This idea of "I was just following" orders needs to be eradicated.

There's a phrase for this type of defense, named after a city in Germany...

Even in the military, "I was just following orders," is not a defense for crimes committed. In the US military, you _must_ disobey orders if those orders are unlawful or a person of ordinary sense and understanding would know them to be unlawful. German soldiers had the same issue after WW2.

If their order was to clear the square, they did a very poor job of it. As he was still there. But is it really required to write the order "clear the square in a humane and decent way?"

The quote:

>”I don't know how much contact was made.”

Is such a bullshit quote too

Why don’t you ask or look at the video?

Or say the officer’s name and let the press ask them.

BPD won’t even name the officer. But if a civilian had done the same thing there would be a public mugshot now.

Definitely. Police unions are a major obstacle to removing bad apples from the police, and to changing police culture. And yet...

Management (either police chiefs or politicians) can push police into things that are not safe for the police officers. There needs to be somebody to push back that's bigger than the individual officers.

I feel like this could end badly, like I feel about the rampant efforts I'm hearing about to "defund the police". Yes, maybe less structural protection and military grade hardware might help.

But conversely, non-unionized jobs can easily turn into mills for low skilled, unmotivated people. If there is no nuance to this, are we going to end up with a deteriorated police force scrounging for anyone willing to run into a fight and start shooting. I think an over correction here would be very costly long term. Once a union is gone, getting it back has historically been..challenging.

Well, TFA gives the example of Camden. 8 years ago they fired all the unionized cops and hired a new force. Now those new cops are unionized... but with a different contract that gives the union less power.

What’s the problem with defunding the police?

Take 3/4 of their budget. Put 1/4 in community development (so people might actually be able to get jobs or a decent future) 1/4 in mental health, and 1/4 in community-based, nonviolent conflict de-escalation and resolution.

See what happens.

Or, you know, keep watching videos of cops shove 75-year old men onto the concrete or murder unarmed black American citizens while their police buddies stand by and twiddle their thumbs.

[edit: as recent video evidence conclusively shows, the police are already full of people who are ready to start a fight and come in shooting. And police unions are enablers of that criminal activity.

It's a utopian gamble contradicting every lesson of human history and culture - namely that evil cannot be eradicated. The idea that social workers will eradicate crime is so foolish, that I'm absolutely bewildered this is being offered. By (what I can only assume) humanities majors! The irony!

A dark thought: Posit that some fraction of all people (of all backgrounds) are irreparably evil. Where can civilization best harness their skills to minimize the harm to rest of humanity?

Why even posit that to begin with, when we have plenty of science - psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, etc - that are intensely interested in human behavior?

We have actual data and reasonably useful models to draw on.

What you describe is the setting for a Young Adult fantasy series. Which is fine, and interesting for a while, but not a good way to think about how we would like our society to function.

Go read Hannah Arendt's "On Violence", if you haven't. Or "Eichmann in Jerusalem."

It's the banality of evil that's the really unsettling thing.

You are the utopian,

You live in a fantasy world where you imagine that police forces in America serve to uphold law and protect the public.

Black Americans, as a group, have made it abundantly clear that they in fact feel threatened by the police as they currently exist.

If the police don't treat everybody equally, how can you ever really trust them?

Lastly, shame on you for exercising tired stereotype of the humanities. The Founding Fathers studied the humanities.

But conversely, non-unionized jobs can easily turn into mills for low skilled, unmotivated people.

How would that would be worse than what we have now?

> There needs to be somebody to push back that's bigger than the individual officers.

We do have that. It's Congress. It's the same thing that keeps private sector employers from forcing non-union employees to endanger their lives.

And if that fails, they still have the option of last resort -- quit. They're not in the military. They can walk away at any time and get a job at another police force with better leadership, and those kinds of resignations are just what it takes to get the media attention necessary to change bad policy.

I feel that the police need a bit more than the OSHA rules. The police walk into an environment that OSHA rules are quite inadequate for.

There isn't any reason the legislature can't have safety rules specifically for the police. They have safety rules specifically for the oil industry and the airline industry etc.

I don't think we should "bust unions", we need to pass laws that hold them accountable and have consequences. Make disciplinary records permanent and on a national registry. Many employees get "points" from getting to work late and fired after too many points. Excessive force should be on this list for police.

Make lying in police reports a crime that results in firing, make not reporting on other cops a crime.

Absolutely right.

I believe in unions. But unions don't exist to protect and reinstate members who have abused their power or committed crimes on the job. And that's what police unions have a pattern of doing.

This is true with all public sector unions. Regular labor unions have a natural limitation in that if they push negotiations too far, they bankrupt the corporation and now the workers are even worse off.

It's not even about negotiating pay: if the standards of workmanship aren't high enough the company can't deliver the goods or they costs from cleaning up the mistakes are too high.

There are no such natural limitations on the ability for public sector unions to negotiate with the state.

Not only that, the purpose of a private sector union is to negotiate with capital. The capitalist has no duty to give the workers a fair deal. Whereas the government in a democracy represents everybody, and public workers are a large voting block. Having a union on top of that gives them undue and disproportionate influence at the expense of, not corporate shareholders, but the general public.

Same with teacher unions. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-roo...

That's a great point. I forgot about this story.

I don’t think this will actually happen. What I see happening is that any bill that tries to get rid of police unions will get a Republican rider that also gets rid of teacher’s unions. Teacher’s unions are a big part of the Democratic coalition, so the Democrats will balk at passing it.

Then stop calling everyone else bootlickers when the left doesn't seem to be able to stand up to unions. There's people's lives on the line. Teacher's unions protect pedofiles.

Police deserve a union IMO. But we the public deserve to ignore the union when they push for bad decisions, or otherwise are counterproductive.

Cutting the voice out of the Police would be a step too far. All workers deserve a chance for assembly and collective action.

There is a difference between "assembly and collective action" and a union. You can get the former from a PAC.

The latter, for example, requires everyone to join as a condition of employment. That's not a freedom, it's a coercion -- which can drive out good officers (or teachers) when the union is protecting bad ones.

A union is also negotiating with ostensibly public representatives who owe their election to its members. A PAC has only the leverage it gets through the votes or donations of its members. A public sector union that gets a candidate elected and then negotiates with them for its contract is self-dealing at the expense of the public.

This is an interesting question because it cuts across the usual left/right divide in a rare way. Union busting is a right-wing thing.

A similar issue is the prison guards' union (a major political influence in California at least), which some people have been arguing for years has been a major factor in the brutalization of prisons.

Unions, in general all suffer from the same problem with removing bad employees and in this case, cops that can do harm.

It can be seen with police, automotive employees, and teachers.

I find it ridiculous that the left idealizes them as these vital emancipatory organizations when they (obviously) all seem to suffer from the same drawbacks, corruption and abuse found in any other sufficiently large and long-lived human organization.

Why are unions being blamed here?

Is there a special law that provides immunity for union members ?

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/police-un...

"Police unions have become increasingly rightwing as a backlash to the Obama administration and Black Lives Matter — and that’s bad news for the cities they police."

"Police are public servants granted enormous power over the citizenry. They are tasked with protecting the public and serving their interests. Police unions, in contrast, are tasked with protecting police and serving their interests—even in direct contravention of serving the public. That distinction makes them a barrier to reforms aimed at improving public safety and increasing oversight of how law enforcement behaves. "

But the same could be said for many unions, such as public service employees, doctors, nurses, airline pilots, etc.

Luckily, none of the people you listed have to decide whether or not to beat or murder me. You may make the same argument against other unions, but I do not think that you may imply that the consequences are equivalent.

Teachers can and do abuse children from time to time.

Doctors are not typically unionized per se, although they do have medical associations. For airline pilots, safety-wise, their interests are strongly aligned with the passengers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com