The United States Federal Governments Should Abolish Police Unions. the United States Federal

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The United States federal governments should abolish police unions. The United States federal government should add a civil right to join any labor union, which is not a police union, to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Police unions should be abolished – it’s time we watched the watchman – they block oversight, reform, and legitimize brutality

Surowiecki ’16James Surowiecki, New Yorker, 9-19-2016, ["Why Are Police Unions Blocking Reform?", LADI//AL 7-25-2017

On August 26th, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem, as a protest against police brutality. Since then, he’s been attacked by just about everyone—politicians, coaches, players, talk-radio hosts, veterans’ groups. But the harshest criticism has come from Bay Area police unions. The head of the San Francisco police association lambasted his “naïveté” and “total lack of sensitivity,” and called on the 49ers to “denounce” the gesture. The Santa Clara police union said that its members, many of whom provide security at 49ers games, might refuse to go to work if no action was taken against Kaepernick. A work stoppage to punish a player for expressing his opinion may seem extreme. But in the world of police unions it’s business as usual. Indeed, most of them were formed as a reaction against public demands in the nineteen-sixties and seventies for more civilian oversight of the police. Recently,even as the use of excessive force against minorities has caused outcry and urgent calls for reform, police unions have resisted attempts to change the status quo, attacking their critics as enablers of crime. Police unions emerged later than many other public-service unions, but they’ve made up for lost time. Thanks to the bargains they’ve struck on wages and benefits,police officers are among the best-paid civil servants.More important, they’ve been extraordinarily effective in establishing control over working conditions. All unions seek to insure that their members have due-process rights and aren’t subject to arbitrary discipline, but police unions have defined working conditions in the broadest possible terms. This position has made it hard to investigate misconduct claims, and to get rid of officers who break the rules.A study of collective bargaining by big-city police unions, published this summer by the reform group Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee that officers aren’t interrogated immediately after use-of-force incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after three to five years. Furthermore, thanks to union contracts, evenofficers who are fired can frequently get their jobs back. Perhaps the most egregious example was Hector Jimenez, an Oakland police officer who was dismissed in 2009, after killing two unarmed men, but who then successfully appealed and, two years later, was reinstated, with full back pay. The protection that unions have secured has helped create what Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and an expert on police accountability, calls a “culture of impunity.” Citing a recent Justice Department investigation of Baltimore’s police department, which found a systemic pattern of “serious violations of the U.S. Constitution and federal law,” he told me, “Knowing that it’s hard to be punished for misconduct fosters an attitude where you think you don’t have to answer for your behavior.” For the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block policing reforms of all kinds. In the seventies, they opposed officers’ having to wear name tags. More recently, they’ve opposed the use of body cameras and have protested proposals to document racial profiling and to track excessive-force complaints. They have lobbied to keep disciplinary histories sealed. If a doctor commits malpractice, it’s a matter of public record, but, in much of the country, a police officer’s use of excessive force is not. Across the nation, unions have led the battle to limit the power of civilian-review boards, generally by arguing that civilians are in no position to judge the split-second decisions that police officers make. Earlier this year, Newark created a civilian-review board that was acclaimed as a model of oversight. The city’s police union immediately announced that it would sue to shut it down. Cities don’t have to concede so much power to police unions. So why do they? Big-city unions have large membership bases and are generous when it comes to campaign contributions. Neither liberals nor conservatives have been keen to challenge the unions’ power.Liberals are generally supportive of public-sector unions; some of the worst police departments in the country are in cities, like Baltimore and Oakland, run by liberal mayors. And though conservatives regularly castigate public-sector unions as parasites, they typically exempt the police. Perhaps most crucial, Walker says, “police unions can make life very difficult for mayors, attacking them as soft on crime and warning that, unless they get their way, it will go up. The fear of crime—which is often a code word for race—still has a powerful political impact.” As a result, while most unions in the U.S. have grown weaker since the seventies, police unions have grown stronger. All labor unions represent the interests of the workers against the bosses. But police officers are not like other workers: they have state-sanctioned power of life and death over fellow-citizens. It’s hardly unreasonable to demand real oversight in exchange. Union control over police working conditions necessarily entails less control for the public, and that means less transparency and less accountability in cases of police violence. It’s long past time we watched the watchmen.

Solvency – Reform

Successful court decisions are key – they spill over to departmental reforms against police violence

Michael Meltsner, [Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law at Northeastern and the author of The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer], What it would really take to stop the killing, Boston 7-7-2016. LADI//EC

One wonders how much longer the justice system is going to maintain its reluctance to hold individual officers accountable for wrongdoing. There is no question that occasions arise where the police are justified in using force, including lethal force, to protect themselves and others. If that wasn’t clear to all before the slaughters in Dallas, it should be now. Police officers generally have great discretion in carrying out their duties. At the same time, it’s perfectly clear that the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of the right of persons “to be secure . . . against unreasonable seizures,” prohibits law enforcement officials from using excessive force in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other seizures. The line between legitimate and illegitimate use of force depends on the facts and situation. Decisions often must be made quickly. Circumstances are usually unclear. For those reasons, the ultimate solution to the unjustified taking of lives will never be based on the promulgation of abstract legal rules by government, no matter how well-intentioned. Technological advances like body cameras, which have been adopted by some Massachusetts police (though not those in Boston, yet) may help, but real progress will occur only when law enforcement personnel are rigorously trained to understand that when bodily harm and death are possible, violent reactions should be truly a last resort. On the other hand, court decisions, most prominently Supreme Court decisions, can help influence the legal responsibilities of the nation’s more than 12,000 local police departments in schooling and disciplining officers, not to mention the important role of resolving particular cases—such as those in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York—that have caused so much stress in minority communities. “Black lives matter” must be understood as a call for action, not as disrespect for all other lives. So far, however, the Supreme Court—and this includes those thought to be liberal as well as conservative—doesn’t seem to be listening. In a series of decisions spanning recent decades, the Court has upheld what Justice Sonia Sotomayor described in a November 2015 dissent as approving a “shoot first, think later” style of policing. The Court has decided these cases in different ways but with the same result. Despite factual disputes, it has thwarted jury trials and recast the facts based on documents rather than witness testimony. It has ruled that, unlike ordinary citizens, police have “qualified immunity,” meaning that if a legal rule was not absolutely certain before the officer acted, he or she could not be held responsible for violating it, even if the officer acted in a patently unreasonable way. Each of these cases involves wrangling about specifics, but a study of the Court’s jurisprudence in this area makes it clear that, regardless of the facts, it is very difficult to win a case against a police officer. The sense that the rules are stacked against those alleging excessive force leads prosecutors to decline even to bring cases where there is any colorable defense. That’s of even greater consequence than questionable decisions in individual disputes, and it’s caused community outrage in those places like Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York. Until the Court sends a message that bad acts—selling cigarettes illegally, driving too fast, trying to escape—don’t justify a level of aggressive policing that too often produces lethal force, the Louisiana and Minnesota killings will be remembered as just two more disturbing events on a growing list, one that includes equally destructive revenge.

Even if unsuccessful, these lawsuits fill gaps in police departments’ reporting requirements, which results in reforms to the use of force

Joanna C. Schwartz. [Acting Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law] "WHAT POLICE LEARN FROM LAWSUITS" 33 CARDOZO L. REV. (2010). LADI//EC

For these departments, lawsuits are a valuable source of information about police misconduct allegations.Departments that do not gather lawsuit data rely on civilian complaints and use-of-force reports to alert them to possible misconduct. In the litigation-attentive departments in my study, lawsuits have notified officials of misconduct allegations that did not surface through these other reporting systems.For example, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s review of lawsuit claims revealed clusters of improper vehicle pursuits, illegal searches, and warrantless home entries.17 These vehicle pursuits, searches, and home entries did not appear in officers’ use-of-force reports because the events – while potentially serious constitutional violations – did not involve the application of force as defined by department policies and so did not trigger reporting requirements.18 The civilians involved in these lawsuits could have chosen to file civilian complaints but did not; people rarely file civilian complaints and may be particularly unlikely to do so if they are planning to sue.19 Even when a civilian complaint or use-of-force report is filed, the litigation process can unearth details that did not surface during the internal investigation.When, for example, a man died of blunt force chest trauma two hours after being taken into Portland police custody, a critical question was how much force the involved deputies had used to bring him to the ground.20 The night of the man’s death, the involved officer and deputy were videotaped at the Portland jail describing their confrontation.21 The audio portion of the tape was very scratchy, but Portland’s internal affairs investigators did nothing to improve the sound.22 Only during litigation did plaintiff’s counsel enhance the audio, at which point the involved officer’s statements were found to contradict his statement to internal affairs.2Lawsuits filled critical gaps in police department internal reporting systems.

Turns – Aff

Police unions are anti-thesis of labor unions

CEGU ‘16(,RESOLUTION ON TAKING AN ACTIVE ANTI-RACIST STAND IN OUR UNIONS AND SUPPORT THE MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES, - part of legislation) LADI//NJW

Whereasthe fact that most killer and racist cops are protected by the judicial institution so that they can act with impunity given that they are never found guilty (for example, withthe cops who murdered Freddie Grayin Baltimore in 2015, who have beenfound not guilty on all counts), and Whereasthe very nature of police unions is antithetical to the interests of labor, provided that a historical perspective demonstrates that police unions protect capitalist interests and support white supremacy, ultimately aiding in the continued brutalization of working- class Black, Latinx, and indigenous communities, and

Turns – Neolib Aff

Turns case- addressing neoliberalism is impossible until we acknowledge that police were created to reinforce capitalist society

Sam Mitrani. December 29, 2014. [Sam Mitrani is an Associate Professor of History at the College of DuPage. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009 and his book The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 is available from the University of Illinois Press. ], Stop Kidding Yourself The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, LAWCHA. LADI//EC

In most of the liberal discussions of the recent police killings of unarmed black men, there is an underlying assumption that the police are supposed to protect and serve the population. That is, after all, what they were created to do. If only the normal, decent relations between the police and the community could be re-established, this problem could be resolved. Poor people in general are more likely to be the victims of crime than anyone else, this reasoning goes, and in that way, they are in more need than anyone else of police protection. Maybe there are a few bad apples, but if only the police weren’t so racist, or didn’t carry out policies like stop-and-frisk, or weren’t so afraid of black people, or shot fewer unarmed men, they could function as a useful service that we all need. This liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do. The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class. This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate. Slave patrol badge, 1858. Slave patrols to hunt down escaped slaves were the original police in the South. Before the nineteenth century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods. Class conflict roiled late nineteenth century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late nineteenth century echoes down to today – except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers. Chicago police cast themselves as the defenders of civilization for a society ordered by capitalist premises. After Haymarket in 1886, they contended that they stood between civilization and anarchy. Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted, and had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control. This is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking, and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control, and established their own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior. The police increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms, establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion, and firing, working to build a unique esprit des corps, and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets. There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal (for that matter, the law itself has never been neutral). In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems. The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but were the consequences of careful policies designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy. For instance, in the short, sharp depression of the mid 1880s, Chicago was filled with prostitutes who worked the streets. Many policemen recognized that these prostitutes were generally impoverished women seeking a way to survive, and initially tolerated their behavior. But the police hierarchy insisted that the patrolmen do their duty whatever their feelings, and arrest these women, impose fines, and drive them off the streets and into brothels, where they could be ignored by some members of the elite and controlled by others. Similarly, in 1885, when Chicago began to experience a wave of strikes, some policemen sympathized with strikers. But once the police hierarchy and the mayor decided to break the strikes, policemen who refused to comply were fired. In these and a thousand similar ways, the police were molded into a force that would impose order on working class and poor people, whatever the individual feelings of the officers involved. Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples – and neither is it today. Much has changed since the creation of the police – most importantly the influx of black people into the Northern cities, the mid-twentieth century black movement, and the creation of the current system of mass incarceration in part as a response to that movement. But these changes did not lead to a fundamental shift in policing. They led to new policies designed to preserve fundamental continuities. The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system which continues to play the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system – who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people. A democratic police system is imaginable – one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol. But that is not what we have