Comically limp self-punishment- this is why police unions need broad reform.
You pay every beat cop in the country $1 million/yr and they would never agree to the level of accountability most people expect. Independent review of actions by someone outside the chain of command? Unpaid leave when you're under investigation? At-will employment? Raises and promotions based on skill, not seniority? Random, immediate, and pass-fail physical, psychological, and marksmanship tests? Most of these seem completely reasonable to most people and if you said even one of them in a contract negotiation the first order of business by the union rep would be to remove you from contract negotiation.
You can do the same thing by saying "jury nullification" during the jury duty selection process. You can watch BOTH lawyers scramble to kick you out of the room.
To be fair, how many people can say they have?
Unfortunately, the same happens in other high stress industries. Nurses are wild too.
Is Florida State University also a high-stress environment?
or…birds of a feather?
For some reason, modern police culture in american seems to increasingly value a corporatist perspective of us vs them (them being everyone who is not police), the normalization of violent response, fixation with the concept of face and widespread corruption.
Police Unions didn't create them, and abolishing them won't eliminate their lobbying power, you don't need a union to organize yourself around a lobby.
Let's not use this excuse to perpetuate the demonization of unions. After decades of increase concentration of productivity gains in the hands of capital at the expense of labor, and as we enter the AI age, this is the least thing we need.
If so, then I think you've got police problems, not police unions problems.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...
Demand of people who want your vote in the coming elections that they support a legislative correction to this judicial activism. This country was founded in large part because 250 years ago the British sent soldiers into American cities and American homes, with powers to detain, arrest and deprive of life and liberty with no accountability. If a colonial was wrongly treated they would force adjudication in favorable courts back in Britain, effectively making their soldiers immune from accountability.
The fact our judicial system has saw fit to independently replicate this injustice that none of us voted for is a crime against the very notion of what it means to be an American. Hold your leaders accountable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_police_shoving_inciden...
>The Buffalo police union, the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, was angered by the suspensions of the two officers, and it retaliated on June 5 by withdrawing its legal fees support for any other Buffalo officers for incidents related to the protests. [...] All 57 police officers from the Buffalo Police Department emergency response team resigned from the team, although they did not resign from the department.[45] According to the police union's president, the mass resignations were a show of solidarity with the two suspended officers.[46] However, his account has been contradicted by two of the resigned officers, who stated they resigned because of a lack of legal coverage. One of these officers said "many" of the 57 resigned officers did not resign to support the two suspended officers.[47]
>The Buffalo police union, the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, was angered by the suspensions of the two officers, and it retaliated on June 5 by withdrawing its legal fees support for any other Buffalo officers for incidents related to the protests.
Why do you think the union withdrew legal support here, given that the union supported the officers?
edit: a source (I assume lawyers.com is reputable..) https://legal-info.lawyers.com/labor-employment-law/wage-and...
See "Blue flu" for cases where cops coordinate a strike using sick leave. Another way they strike is by simply not doing their job. They'll just sit in their cars all day and won't respond or will severely delay response to dispatch.
AFAIK, those cops never get a ATF style house cleaning.
In Seattle, the police are "quiet quitting" (traffic ticketing is down 8x over ~10 years ago) and literally committing fraud and getting away with it (an officer on his second time falsely applying over 24 hours of work in a day, just had to return the pay for that week. There's STILL not computerized time tracking...)
They use the bargaining to set contract terms that restrict how people can be fired.
A union member who gets in trouble can leverage union resources and representation to protect themselves.
One of my family members did a term as a union rep. He was getting really frustrated with some of the little claims that union members wanted to use the union to protect themselves from, but it was part of the job. Fortunately for him there wasn’t a serious incident like this to deal with during his term.
One could argue that as litigious as US society has become, it makes sense to find out what resources are available when you’re the target of a grievance.
Further, since we are also a society of specialists, one should consult a specialist when one is the target of aforementioned grievances.
There is no way my colleagues would go out on strike to protect me if I stole anything. And that's absolutely right. Nor would I expect my union to go into bat for me, after anything like that was proven; nor for anything immoral.
Mad.
Unions are there to make sure you're treated fairly, not to shield members from consequences when they act immorally/illegally.
> Nor would I expect my union to go into bat for me, after anything like that was proven
Sure, but one of the jobs of the rep is to prevent it from being proven that you are guilty.
Also, there would be no need to strike, because the union has negotiated the bureaucratic processes that will be followed when you do something wrong. Following the usually slow process will let you look for ways to escape, including the company not properly filing paperwork within the allotted time.
Source: union steward's stories.
I've known several non-bastard cops.
Which is the point of the saying. It’s not that all cops are individually bastardly, it’s that all cops are part of a system that both protects bastards regularly, and does systemically bastardly things (like say heavily policing crimes of poverty while ignoring crimes of wealth).
> systemically bastardly things (like say heavily policing crimes of poverty while ignoring crimes of wealth)
I'm the last person I would expect to be defending police, but I think if you look at the rate of physical and property violence perpetrated by "crimes of poverty" vs. "crimes of wealth" that might have a lot more to do with it than the cop trying to decide if the victim has money or not before they do anything.
Who said that? The cops don’t need to ”decide” to bust you based on how much money you have, the system already put them on patrol in the poorer neighborhood.
The police are too busy going after crimes of poverty to go after the crimes that impoverish people. “Crimes of wealth” do plenty of violence, it’s just laundered thru abstractions and layers of misdirection.
> “Crimes of wealth” do plenty of violence
Not for actual definitions of violence, no. I'm not saying they're not crimes, or they're not serious, but there's a reason "violent crime" is a category of its own. It's an important distinction. Words mean things, and trying to say murder or aggravated battery is just one kind of violence and embezzlement or stock fraud is a different kind is, at best, incredibly dishonest.
Marijuana was made schedule 1 close to 60 years ago, and it's very possible the people who made that decision had racist motivations. It's also possible they didn't and they just wanted to punish anyone who was using marijuana more than other drugs.
"People working at the DEA 60 years after this decision was made are very obviously racist and hate blacks and poor people" is much more of a stretch than "nobody really cares enough about this to change it and it wouldn't change very much anyway," isn't it? Unless, of course, you're not interested in actually understanding why things are the way they are and are more interested in perpetuating some victimhood fantasy.
I also didn't say everybody at the DEA is racist. You said that, based off of I guess you profiling me as some radical. I'm not, I understand that the DEA is an organization.
But what some people don't acknowledge is there are two types of racism in America: individual racism, and systemic or institional racism. You don't have to say these n-word to be racist. Most of our institutions are structured and designed in such a way to be racist. The DEA is structurally racist, and so is ICE.
It's not some "victimhood fantasy", you're just uneducated on it. But it's real and the rabbit hole goes very deep, I recommend some research on these topics. And, for the record, I'm white, I'm just not blind.
If Mother Theresa or Mister Rogers becomes a cop, ACAB isn't suddenly disproved, because it's not about specific individuals and their specific moral qualities. It's about systemic and fundamental problems with policing as a whole.
See how ACAB is a lot easier to say?
Only if the other person is arguing in good faith and believes you.