Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

I understand the arguments that "QI has reasonable goals in theory", but it is time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If cops didn't want to lose QI, they should have held themselves to account for the last few decades. Maybe the unions should have spoken up when cops steal tens of thousands of dollars in cash from a suspect, and get away with it due to QI.

San Antonio, TX will be voting in May on whether to disband the police union. "Back the Blue" types are saying it's Defund in disguise, that we won't be able to find good cops, and so on.

Except several large cities in Texas don't have unionized police, and they do alright. Furthermore, the cops in San Antonio can commit really awful crimes, and still have months- or years-long appeals.

Being a cop isn't a right, it is a privilege and a critical duty. It should be easy to fire bad cops. SAPD, if you didn't want your union to be busted, maybe you should have held yourselves to a higher standard.

How is it legal to vote to disband a union? Could you vote to disband the Screen Actors Guild?

The same way you change any other service provider. You find another vendor or renegotiate. The people will vote to instruct their officials to do so. Pretty straightforward.

Short version: Texas state law establishes the right for cities to decide whether their police can engage in collective bargaining.

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/LG/htm/LG.174.htm

It happens all too often: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Un...

Stop with the anti-union FUD. The worst civil forfeiture abuses are in states where the law enforcement aren't unionized.

And I am assuming you don't have any credible data to back that claim up?

https://reason.com/2015/06/09/this-map-details-whether-asset...

First result on google for civil forfeiture. Followed up by searching for [law enforcement agency] and union returns zero results for the worst locations.

Police officers are unionized pretty much everywhere. Sheriffs, which carry out the most egregious civil asset forfeitures (usually in small travel-through towns), generally are not unionized outside of the big counties and states.

Your argument doesn't rebut mine.

Mine: Unions have a direct, negative influence on the ability for departments/cities to fire bad cops.

Yours: There is correlation, but not causation, between non-unionized police departments and instances of civil asset forfeiture.

You're the one making the causal claim that unions are responsible for this. You need to prove your claim; I've already provided evidence that would refute the argument you would make.

Do you have any evidence for your claim?

Tell me how that correlation is a causation.

Public unions, and police unions specifically, are distinct in their impact on society from other unions.

Police have negotiated the right to beat and murder people and keep their jobs with pay for months.

There are cities where Derek Chauvin would have been on paid leave for weeks after killing george floyd. Minneapolis had the right to fire his ass when they saw how bad a cop he was.

I agree that police unions can be problematic when it comes to disciplining bad cops.

But don't blame them for something which is unrelated to the union itself.

There are cities where Derek Chauvin would have been on paid leave for weeks after killing george floyd.

Yes, and the police forces in those cities would all be unionized. Clearly, the issue is not the union; it is the city or county that negotiated poorly with the union. Though generally, in some states like the US Deep South, politicians are more than happy to give officers unlimited rights even without the unions requesting them.

Minneapolis had the right to fire his ass when they saw how bad a cop he was.

They fired him literally the next day. For prior incidents, none of them rose to the level justifying termination. That would have been true even in a non-union force.

NYC has two police "unions" which openly and loudly protest against police reform, defend officers who commit civil rights abuses, and are really more like PR and lobbying organizations than good-faith collective bargaining apparatus for organized labor.

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