This stuff is simple enough. Get out of your escort, stand among the other normal people and do some dogfooding of the police experience. I guess nobody higher up wants to spend the day doing that, because at the end of it there wouldn't be anyone still employed at NYPD.
That's bad analysis. Free speech means freedom from government-imposed consequences, and since their employer is the government, being fired would be a government-imposed consequence. (For the same reason, public universities cannot discipline students for their protected speech.) Rather, the correct reason these cops should be fired is because they legally do not have the right of free speech when in uniform - see my other comment up-thread.
These police officers expressed contempt in an organized, planned way for anyone who would hold police officers accountable for murders committed on the job. They essentially declared that they expect 100% support from their boss in the executive branch, no matter the illegality of their conduct, and committed to staging a standing strike in protest, and to publicly shunning their boss at a funeral. It's a power play that a nation of rights & laws cannot permit, if it wants to remain one.
You know what? We can find other people to be police officers. Ones which aren't so abusive of the people they're supposed to be serving, and so privileged to a lack of consequences for this abuse, that they're on the edge of a coup against the elected civilian government.
Can we though? I sure as shit don't want to be one.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...
They certainly could have gone on strike, when they were not on the clock.
Similarly longshores get pretty sweet benefits too.
And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it by the people.
Further reading, from an actual lawyer: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/10/18/ferguson-revenge-of-...
Oh, they still have rights when in uniform. Eg at the most basic, the right not to be killed. But you are right about the free speech. Just like any other employee in their capacity as an employee, only more so.
In the first link, the case is about a memo written as part of the employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (district attorneys don't wear uniforms, and the word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).
In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person". It's abundantly clear that these police turning their backs on the mayor at a funeral over a political stoush between the parties are not acting as voices of the government. No reasonable person would even remotely think that the police turning their back on the mayor is 'what the government message is'. Those police are clearly not 'speaking' in an official government capacity (and literally are not speaking at all).
I have no great love for the police, but the correct path forward is a fair view, not a knee-jerk 'fire them all on principle'. This thread is full of knee-jerk hysteria, but the irony is that so many people are calling for an end to multiple people's careers because, while not on duty, the were literally standing still while facing the incorrect direction. Ironic because it's supposedly a reaction against undue application of power, and yet the punishment for facing the wrong way is termination, regardless of whether or not that officer has abused power elsewhere.
The facts are not identical, but the facts are sufficiently similar that you could cite that case as precedence for arguing that the facts in question here should be treated similarly. The lawyer I linked to certainly thinks so. Are you a lawyer?
> In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person".
You took that out of context. "Person" here means the private person, not the cop representing himself as a cop. The paragraph goes on to say, "the speech of a person who presents himself in his official governmental capacity is no longer the individual’s free speech, but the official person’s speech. And the latter is not free."
in his official governmental capacity were the words - the funeral/protesting police were not on the clock on active duty, and as I said, no-one sane would confuse their message with a governmental message, official or unofficial.
Are you a lawyer?
?
It's clear neither of us are. So what? You're still misreading the second article re: private vs offical personage. That article is not saying what you're claiming it says. And as a result, the first link you provided is also not supporting your claims. The lawyer you linked to says absolutely nothing about uniforms - the term (and concept) 'uniform' appears nowhere in the article, but it does talk about the loss of freedom of speech when speaking in an official capacity.
And no, 'in uniform' is not the same as 'official capacity'. In none of these cases are they equivalent: the district attorney doesn't wear a uniform; Novara's phone call was about abusing his official capacity, and he could have been in the nude when he called, for all it mattered; the police turning their backs at the funeral are clearly not acting as a government voice and couldn't be confused to be doing so.
Free speech does not insulate you from reasonable consequences of that speech.
However, the police unions would never allow such a thing.
Second, I suspect that a majority of the officers in question were not on the job while attending that funeral.
And the fact that my employer can't have me beaten up has nothing to do with the 1st amendment. That would be assault no matter what their motivation.
On the other hand, when the mayor shows up at a police funeral to give a speech while the press is there, that's clearly a political statement. It doesn't seem fair to use the police as props (implying their support) while you have a rule saying they can't make a statement in reply.
The police should respect the mayor, but it's more important that they - and the major - respect the law.
It seems peculiar to American discourse that wrongdoing in a job should be countered by firing rather than retraining or reform.
Anyway, police departments generally have a hard enough time already finding and keeping staff. Firing them en masse requires replacing them en masse. Who polices the city while you're looking for and training a heap of new recruits?