#Samantha Michaels, "The Shield," Mother Jones, September/October, 2020. - As Floyd's death thrust the nation into protest, Mayor Jacob Frey described the city's [Minneapolis] as a 'nearly impenetrable barrier' to disciplining officers for racism, and other misconduct, because of the legal protections it bargained for. "As other labor unions have shrunk in recent years, membership in police unions has remained high." "A forthcoming research paper from the University of Victoria in Canada found that after police officer formed unions -- generally between the 1950s and the 1980s -- there was a substantial increase in police killings of Black and brown people in the United States. For example, officers did not want to be questioned about misconduct without time to 'cool off' and examine any testimony against them -- privileges that are not offered to suspects pulled in from the streets for interrogation."
Bob Knoll, police union president in Minneapolis, had "a history of discriminatory attitudes and misconduct, according to a 2007 lawsuit alleging racism in the Minneapolis Police Department." "The training espoused a 'killology' view of policing that urged officers to be prepared to use more force, not less." "Koll called the [existing policy] illegal, and vowed to make the training free for union members."
"Minneapolis organizer Ricardo Levins Morales, who's part of MPD 150, a collective of activists who studied the union's history, has said it's 'just one of the layers of smugness that you see on officers' faces when they are committing a crime and know nothing is going to happen to them. They have the ultimate power!' He adds: 'Almost any time a police officer's use of excessive force has made national news, you can bet that police unions were pushing back against the protests and calls for change.'
"When one of the officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore was acquitted of murder in 2016, the union there posted a magazine cover on its Twitter account that referred to local prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, a Black woman, as 'The Wolf That Lurks.' When San Francisco 49er's quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality, the Santa Clara police union said its officers might stop providing security at home games."
"In at least 50 cities, according to a 2017 'Duke Law Journal' article, union contracts require police departments to wait a significant period of time, normally least 48 hours, before interviewing an officer for misconduct." "In at least 34 cities, departments must show officers all the evidence against them before the questioning." "In the event that a cop is fired, union contracts and state law often guarantee that [the cop] can appeal [his/her] firing to independent arbitrators, who can reinstate them in their jobs with back pay."
"While other labor movements have shrunk since the 1970s, the Fraternal Order of Police, one of the country's biggest police unions, had 141,940 members at the end of 2018, its most in almost a decade." "When the Center for Public Integrity reached out to 10 major unions and labor groups following George Floyd's death, including the AFL-CIO, none were willing to have a conversation about police unions."
#Zoe Carpenter, "When the Police Don't Keep You Safe," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "For the past four decades, a dominant project for American feminists has been getting the police and the legal system to respond seriously to the crisis of domestic violence. More than 10 million people in the US are abused by their partners each year." "Nearly half of the women who are murdered are killed by a domestic partner. Two studies in the 1990s indicated police have their own domestic violence problems, with as many as 40 percent of officers' families experiencing domestic violence, compared with 10 percent of families in the general population."
"In reality, intimate partner violence is more common, and usually more serious for low-income women of color, who bear an even greater risk." "A Washington 'Post' analysis of men in five cities who killed their partners found that at least a third had restraining orders or prior convictions for violent crime. Research has shown little evidence that typical battered intervention programs work."
#William Finnegan, "The Blue Wall," The New Yorker, August 3 & 10, 2020. - "Law enforcement kills more than a thousand Americans a year. Many are unarmed, and the disproportionate number are African American. Very few of the officials involved face serious, if any, consequences, and much of that immunity is owed to the power of police unions." "In their territorial 'safe zone,' police unions can offer their members extraordinary protections."
"Since 2005, there have been 13 law enforcement officers convicted of murder or manslaughter in fatal on-duty shootings, according to data provided to The Huffington 'Post' by Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminology at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. Stinson's data doesn't involve cases in which civilians died in police custody, or were killed by other means on such charges in which officers only faced lesser charges. No officers were convicted on such charges in 2014. In 2015, that number was also zero.
Information from outlets like The Guardian, The Washington 'Post', and the civilian tracker, Mapping Police Violence, have led to estimates of roughly 1,000 deadly shootings by law enforcement officers each year. A study by Samuel R. Gross and Michael Shaffer into the 75 cases in which the defendant was provably factually innocent, showed that the leading cause was poice perjury. A study by the Wisconsin Innocence Project showed that police misconduct was a factor in up to 50% of all DNA-based exonerations.
#A lengthy article entitled "The Role of Police Misconduct in Wrongful Convictions" can be found in the 'Criminal Legal News' in the September 2019 issue.
"In the city's large, and largely segregated, Black community, police brutality had been a first-order for decades." "By the end of the sixties, a racialized law-and-order ideology has emerged as a sort of unexamined American consensus, and it has basically prevailed since then, providing the political context in which police unions thrive." "White cops, Black and brown suspects: that remains the dominant paradigm."
"But, statistically, law enforcement does not make the list of the ten most dangerous jobs in America. Studies of patrol officers' service calls have shown that less than five per cent are related to violent crimes." "Pro-police analysts always talk about 'bad apples': it's only a few cops who misbehave - ten per cent, tops. But the problem is that the other ninety per cent inevitably know about their misconduct, and thus are made compliant." Ben Breecoto, a sociologist at Rhode Island Collage, says: 'These organizations function as lobbies to both resist accountability legislation, and shield implicated officers.' " There remains a relic of mid-century policing, "when cops were always right and usually white, and could take a free hand in Black and brown neighborhoods."
#Bill Fletcher Jr., "No!, The Nation, November 2-9, 2020. The Nation magazine had Fletcher and Kim Kelly debate whether or not police unions should be expelled from the organized labor movement. This is a brief excerpt of Fletcher's argument: "Much of white organized labor took pride in building this exclusionary state, and therefore now finds it difficult, if not impossible to come to terms with its role in racist oppression and imperial expansion." "Also, unions are understandably afraid that the expulsion of police from organized labor could expose themselves to a right-wing assault on public sector collective bargaining."
"But racial injustice is not just about the extinguishing of Black lives; it is also about segregated housing, poor health care, exclusion from skilled employment, and an education that prepares particular racial minorities only for prisons and menial work."
#Kim Kelly, "Yes!" The Nation, November 2-9, 2020. - "You'll never see cops join a picket line; instead, they're the force that the bosses call to break the strike." "Report after report reveals the proliferation of white supremacists and far-right rhetoric within the ranks of law enforcement." "We cannot stand by and watch as our so-called union of brothers continue to brutalize and extinguish working-class lives with impunity." "It is imperative that labor unions address and eradicate the poison from rank-and-file members up to the highest levels of leadership."
"In 2016, nearly 40 percent of union members voted for Donald Trump, including over 50 percent of white male members, but the problem is not a new one."
#Michael McQuarrie, director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, suggests that abolishing these unions might also threaten the collective bargaining rights of teachers, nurses, bus drivers, and other selective service employment.
ADDENDUMS:
*Philip V. McHarris, "When Police Traffic-in," The Nation, November 30 - December 7, 2020. - "Another study published by the Stanford Open Policing Project found that Black drivers were about 20 percent more likely to be pulled over, and that, once stopped, they were one and a half to two times as likely to be searched."
*Kali Holloway, "The Front Burner," The Nation, October 19-26, 2020. - "Recently, Trump announced that he is launching the 1776 Commission, which will 'promote patriotic education' and 'teach' our children about the miracle of American history." "Trump is fighting to shut up those who are calling out America's racial falsehoods and selective remembrances..."
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