Hacker News Reader

Comment by trianglem | Hacker News Reader

I think the best thing for America would be to completely dissolve the police union. This single action should fix a lot of the issues.

View on HN

That's really what "defund the police" does. The police union has a toxic contract with the police department. By dissolving the counterparty of the contract, you remove it from the equation. New law enforcement agencies can start from scratch without the weight of either the contract or, initially, any of the problematic personnel.

So having seen many ground up rewrites of code I have to ask how do we make sure that when we redo the police we avoid the problems we got this time around?

Try Rust?

Police toxicity is a path-dependent phenomenon. We got here by decades of incrementalism, where politicians, many of whom were, at the time, avowed racists, agreed to various aspects of civilian-police relations. Simply starting over today with current civilian leadership to draft a new doctrine guarantees a dramatically different outcome.

> Simply starting over today with current civilian leadership to draft a new doctrine guarantees a dramatically different outcome.

The current leadership (Trump) is very racist and authoritarian, so I'm not sure that your confidence fits the current time;

Yes but the federal government has only so much influence in local level decisions so it will still pan out to be a massive net positive.

My local police union has been called out multiple times for publishing racist things in their newsletter and literally nothing has come from it. They can openly publicize in print that they're racist and continue policing. They also blame "antifa" for any anti-police action without investigating.

Are unions really the problem? Why not raise the standards and the wages for police officers instead of dismantling labor power?

Because the unions have much more power than labor negotiations, including being able to decide what laws and policies apply to the police departments.

How is it that police unions can determine what laws apply to police departments? I've never heard of that, could you point me to where I could read up more on that?

Here's one recent article: https://reason.com/2020/06/03/its-time-to-bust-police-unions...

So the article seems to present the typical argument against unions, i.e. "they protect bad employees", but ultimately the story concludes with the creation of a new union that negotiated an improved and ostensibly successful deescalation policy as part of the labor agreement. I don't think article presents a convincing case that unions are the problem.

I gave you the link that was closest at hand. There are many. For text, try https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/police-un...

For video, and I highly recommend this, try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4cea5oObY

But if you don't like BuzzFeed or John Oliver, it's trivial to find articles about the harms caused by police unions from sources across the political spectrum.

In the abstract, conceptually, unions aren't a problem. I love unions! But police unions have such a long and consistent pattern of making police worse that I'm not sure any police union can maintain good things for more than a year or two.

I would be pro-police-union if police unions worked like all other unions, fighting for better pay and conditions for their members. That's just not how police unions work in the USA.

P.S. As you say, the article mentions a new police union that so far seems to be okay. It should be noted that union was formed after completely dissolving the existing police force of Camden, NJ, and all of its contracts, including the contract with the existing police union. Time will tell whether the new union starts to be a problem or not, but certainly starting under the threat of "act up and we will dissolve the entire police force again" is a good start.

A number of ways, for instance from what I read in the New York Times article a couple days ago. First is direct political activity -- anybody in city governance who crosses the union loses their seat in the next election.

Second, the union contract can effectively dictate how laws are enforced on the police, e.g., the what the disciplinary mechanism is like, so the laws become un-enforceable.

Third is through labor action such as work-to-rule.

There's a reason most other labor unions don't want anything to do with cops joining. A police union is closer to a mafia family that protects its members instead of a traditional labor union.

I've heard the same line of argumentation used against all kinds of labor unions though. e.g. "teachers unions are failing our kids because they protect bad/apathetic/partisan teachers" or "auto unions are why American auto companies are failing since they protect workers who work 30 minutes a day and slack off the rest".

There's something to this argument, in my view. I think that unions are torn between serving the "labor movement" for lack of a better term, and serving the narrow interests of their most senior or influential members.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit at a time when the auto industry was contracting. What I recall was that senior assembly line workers (my neighbors) were working 60 hour weeks and pulling down overtime pay, while junior workers were getting laid off.

Naturally, unemployed people had no union representation at all, and this was a perfect opportunity for politicians to start stoking anti-union resentment amongst the working class, which persists today.

Meanwhile as I recall in one of the European countries, perhaps Germany, the unions negotiated with the government and agreed to a 4 day work week, in order to keep a larger number of workers employed. As reported in the US, this became fodder for "those lazy Europeans and their 4 day work weeks."

In the US, the car companies reacted by pulling the plug on entire factories and moving them to anti-union states.

You should examine who is telling you those things about non-police labor unions and what they stand to gain by saying those things.

Well sure, I am only human after all, but trying to have a discussion based off of what I perceive is going on in someone's head rather than based on the merit of the argument is usually not a fruitful way to have a discussion. Further, I have personally lived through experiences where bad teachers have been protected by the union, including a teacher who made a pass at students but was ultimately protected by the union. Years later, that teacher was eventually let go, but it was only after said teacher made some unsavory comments on social media and the school faced a ton of backlash because of it. That experience did not change my view on unions even though I felt that they should have been fired a very long time ago.

> "auto unions are why American auto companies are failing since they protect workers who work 30 minutes a day and slack off the rest".

I grew up in Flint, MI and my father was an electrical engineer at one of the 3 major automakers. We would frequently go to the auto plants for school field trips. I remember one particular trip where we were walking around the production floor and there was a guy just sitting in a chair sleeping right in the middle of everything. Nobody seemed to think it was a good idea to wake him up. Everyone just worked around him like he wasn't there. It was kind of surreal.

I'm not saying that proves the point in your quote above, but the unions were notorious for making it impossible to fire employees even if they showed up drunk or high or didn't do their jobs. They also didn't seem to be protecting workers interests very well, as their wages have stagnated for decades and they've lost the great benefits they used to have. It doesn't mean unions are a bad idea, but the auto unions seemed to be a particularly bad implementation.

Here's a great npr podcast - https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-p...

Police unions are different than others in that they are the only group allowed to impose violence on other citizens. No issue with dismantling unions if it is not found to be an optimal organizational solution to minimizing harm.

I think the police's role in state sanctioned violence is a fair distinction, but is violence the only important factor? I have seen a lot of arguments against unions for e.g. harming children by protecting bad teachers; some would argue that the education of future generations underpins a large section of systematic inequality within our society, including poverty and crime, which are issues that also happen to intertwine with the problems surrounding police violence. Bad cops are easier to spot than bad teachers so I understand the impulse to dismantle systems that openly protect them, but I am not convinced that unions themselves are actually the issue.

Unions protect bad apples.

In most cases, the net harm is actually minimal, e.g. increased levels of incompetence, drinking on the job doing paper work, forcing bosses to outsource, slower delivery times, etc.

In the case of police though, harm can be quite high when bad apples are protected.

Not unions. Literally just the police union.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com