Bull-bleep on behalf of cops and other stirrings

Dan Walters is what I think of as a classic curmudgeonly columnist. He's been writing in newspapers about California politics nearly forever -- since 1960 in fact. He's a smart old white guy who knows where a lot of bodies are buried, and he has a sharp eye for how power has worked. At this point he's also deeply cynical and out of tune with the hopeful, multi-racial, loosely left, California that is emerging. So, naturally, he gives voice to police unions' propaganda about why it would be terrible if racial justice reform chipped away at the cops' power.

It's not that Walters doesn't see a problem with policing: he calls out

... the cozy relationship between police unions and politicians and the laws and policies that protect violence-prone officers from consequences for their acts.

The unions get what they want from local and state officials, not only legal protections but generous salaries and pension benefits. The politicians also get what they want, campaign funds and union endorsements testifying to their crime-fighting credentials.

But right on cue, he insists that police unions are just like other public employee unions.

... the political clout that police unions have wielded in California for decades is no different from what other public employee unions have done. Universally, they seek more job security and increases in pay and fringe benefits for their members, and do so by supporting politicians who will deliver the goods, regardless of how it impacts the larger public.

If, therefore, we condemn the unhealthy relationship between police unions and politicians, we should subject other public employee unions to the same critical scrutiny.

Police unions have often blocked accountability for violent acts. Education unions flex their muscle to stifle competition and avoid accountability for how schools treat their neediest pupils. The outcomes of both damage the larger society.

Why, in Walters' view, cops are just like teachers!

Here he's equating organized teachers' fight to prevent private charter schools from sucking up public school funding with cops' demand for a protected right to beat, gas, and shoot persons they consider scary or uppity. Usually Black or Latinx persons. And to get paid well for this.

Walter's sleight of hand makes a false equivalence between a policy difference over how to achieve a socially agreed common good -- educating kids -- with perpetuating a license to harm without effective legal limits.

That is, he's spewing bull shit for the cops.

Many of us have long called out corrupt police unions defending indefensible behavior by some of their members. I certainly have. Too often these unions serve as toxic reservoirs of white (and usually male) resentment in a changing society. The labor movement at large is going to have to decide whether it can advance the interests of a multi-ethnic working class while treating police work as just another type of work for wages.

This is not a new dilemma. Because throughout the 19th century, police in the U.S. north had served as violent strikebreakers for bosses, the 1886 American Federation of Labor wanted nothing to do with organizing cops. (In the Jim Crow South, policing in that era meant local white sheriffs whose job was to maintain the racial hierarchy by force.) Labor journalist Steven Greenhouse explains that police officers only won the right to collective bargaining in the 1960s as part of a general expansion of labor organization among public employees. Once governments agreed to bargain with their police, a poisonous dynamic played out.

Initially, newly established unions focused on winning better wages and benefits. A major recession in the early eighties and the anti-tax fervor of the Reagan era caused budget crunches in many cities. Local leaders told police unions and other public-sector unions that they had little money for raises. In turn, the police demanded increased protections for officers facing disciplinary proceedings.

Since the eighties, police contracts in New York and many other cities have added one protection after another that have made it harder to hold officers accountable for improper use of force or other misconduct. Such protections included keeping an officer’s disciplinary record secret, erasing an officer’s disciplinary record after a few years, or delaying any questioning of officers for twenty-four or forty-eight hours after an incident such as a police shooting.

This is how you get a killer officer like Derek Chauvin still on the Minneapolis police force and training newcomers after 17 previous complaints.

Progressive unions within the laboring movement are edging up to the problem of how to deal with affiliates which act as bullies for white supremacy. SEIU President Mary Kay Haney has been willing to talk about expelling police groups. Though national union leadership, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, are flinching from a fight over police, plenty of progressive parts of the labor movement such as United Teachers Los Angeles, the second largest teachers organization in the country, want the police out.

One of the accomplishments of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to force organized labor to re-examine its allegiances -- to decide whose side it is on.