Police Unions and Civilian Oversight

Organized labor in general has fallen on hard times.  But in many places, public-employee unions retain enormous power.

Jamiles Lartey at the Marhsall Project:

If you heard about a group called “Voters for Oversight and Police Accountability,” who would you guess is funding and coordinating its efforts? Progressive activists? Civic-minded community members?

How about a police union?

That’s the situation in Austin, Texas, where this fall, canvassers for “VOPA” appear to have amassed the 25,000 signatures needed to get a referendum on the so-called “Austin Police Oversight Act” into the city’s May 6 election.

The thing is, there was already an “Austin Police Oversight Act” on the ballot. The duplicate effort, funded by the Austin Police Association, is similar — but seriously watered down, when compared with the original promoted by the progressive political action committee Equity Action. That original proposal seeks to open up public access to police records, and give the city’s office of police oversight the ability to participate in investigations of officer conduct.

By contrast, the police union-funded ballot initiative would keep certain misconduct records hidden from the public and leave the board with a more passive role in investigations.

Reporting late last year found that the police union was running VOPA’s website, and this week, a reporter with the Austin Chronicle uncovered that the union had contributed virtually every penny of the nearly $300,000 raised for the campaign. The union did not respond to a request for comment from The Marshall Project, and has not responded to a request from the local Fox affiliate.

The effort appears to be a brazen version of something police unions have attempted in numerous cities recently: to derail and disempower civilian oversight groups tasked with monitoring and reviewing police conduct.

Lowest Unionization Rate on Record

 From BLS:

The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 10.1 percent in 2022, down from 10.3 percent in 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.3 million in 2022, increased by 273,000, or 1.9 percent, from 2021. However, the total number of wage and salary workers grew by 5.3 million (mostly among nonunion workers), or 3.9 percent. This disproportionately large increase in the number of total wage and salary employment compared with the increase in the number of union members led to a decrease in the union membership rate. The 2022 unionization rate (10.1 percent) is the lowest on record. In 1983, the first year where comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

... 

In 2022, 7.1 million employees in the public sector belonged to unions, about the same as in the private sector (7.2 million). (See table 3.)

Union membership was little changed over the year (+80,000) in the public sector, after a decline the prior year (-191,000). The public-sector union membership rate continued to decline in 2022; the rate went down by 0.8 percentage point to 33.1 percent. In 2022, the union membership rate continued to be highest in local government (38.8 percent), which employs many workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as police officers, firefighters, and teachers.

The number of union workers employed in the private sector increased by 193,000 to 7.2 million over the year. The private-sector unionization rate edged down by 0.1 percentage point in 2022 to 6.0 percent. Industries with high unionization rates included utilities (19.6 percent), motion pictures and sound recording industries (17.3 percent), and transportation and warehousing (14.5 percent). Low unionization rates occurred in insurance (1.2 percent), finance (1.3 percent), professional and technical services (1.3 percent), and food services and drinking places (1.4 percent).

 

Three Hundred Seventy-Six Officers Failed to Stop the Uvalde Massacre

Law enforcement in the United States is decentralized and fragmented.  Sometimes the system works well. During the Uvalde Massacre, it did not.

INVESTIGATIVE COMMITTEE ON THE ROBB ELEMENTARY SHOOTING TEXAS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, INTERIM REPORT 2022 

In total, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the tragedy at Robb Elementary School. The breakdown of responders, by agency, is as follows.

• 149 United States Border Patrol
• 91 Texas Department of Public Safety
• 25 Uvalde Police Department
• 16 San Antonio Police Department (SWAT)
• 16 Uvalde County Sheriff ’s Office
• 14 Department of Homeland Security – HIS
• 13 United States Marshals
• 8 Drug Enforcement Agency
• 7 Frio County Sheriff ’s Office
• 5 Kinney County Sheriff ’s Office
• 5 Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District
• 4 Dilley Police Department
• 4 Zavala County Sheriff ’s Office
• 3 Medina County Sheriff ’s Office
• 3 Sabinal Police Department
• 2 City of Uvalde Fire Marshals
• 2 Pearsall Police Department
• 2 Texas Parks and Wildlife
• 2 Uvalde County Constables
• 2 Val Verde County Sheriff ’s Office
• 1 Frio County Constables
• 1 Southwest Texas Junior College
• 1 Zavala County Constables 

Domestic Terrorism

 From CSIS:

To better understand the trends in U.S. domestic terrorism, CSIS compiled a data set of 1,040 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States between January 1, 1994, and December 31, 2021. The 2021 data are new, and they yield several main findings.

First, there was a significant increase in the number and percentage of domestic terrorist incidents at demonstrations in cities in 2020 and 2021. In 2019, only 2 percent of all U.S. terrorist attacks and plots occurred at demonstrations, but this portion rose to 47 percent in 2020 and 53 percent in 2021. The result is that some metropolitan areas of the United States—such as Portland, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—are becoming focal points of domestic terrorism, where extremists from opposing sides square off against each other and against law enforcement agencies. This development has created a “security dilemma” in metropolitan areas, where attempts by one side to improve its own security threatens the security of others, leading to further escalation.

Second, U.S. law enforcement agencies have increasingly become a target of domestic terrorists from all sides of the political spectrum. The government, military, and especially law enforcement were the primary targets of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in 2021, composing 43 percent of all attacks. They were most likely to be targeted regardless of perpetrator ideology: they were selected in 48 percent of violent far-left events, 37 percent of violent far-right events, and all Salafi-jihadist events in 2021. This development indicates that U.S. security agencies—particularly law enforcement—are increasingly at risk from domestic terrorism.

Third, there was an increase in the percentage of attacks and plots by anarchists, anti-fascists, and other likeminded extremists in 2021. While white supremacists, anti-government militias, and likeminded extremists conducted the most attacks and plots in 2021 (49 percent), the percentage of attacks and plots by anarchists, anti-fascists, and likeminded extremists grew from 23 percent in 2020 to 40 percent in 2021. This rise has occurred alongside an increase in violence at demonstrations. However, although there was a historically high level of both far-right and far-left terrorist attacks in 2021, violent far-right incidents were significantly more likely to be lethal, both in terms of weapon choice and number of resulting fatalities.

Deliberating about Civil Asset Forfeiture

 From C-SPAN:

Britannica defines civil asset forfeiture as a “legal process that enables a government to seize property and other assets belonging to persons suspected of committing a crime.” This law enforcement tool has been used throughout United States history, dating back to the earliest days of the country and the nation’s foundation on English law. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University describes the tool as having gained popularity during the Prohibition era, as the government sought to seize illegal alcohol and prevent further illicit production.

The tool once again grew in popularity through the 1980s’ War on Drugs. Legally, the tool was federally codified in the Comprehensive Crime Act of 1984, which allowed the government to “seize first, and defend the forfeiture in court later.” Since that decade, the use of the tool has been subject to robust debate regarding its appropriate use and potential safeguards. For example, the Department of Justice under the Obama Administration issued a 2015 order that eliminated most types of federal adoptions of state and local seizures. This order was then reversed by the Department of Justice in 2017 under the leadership of the Trump Administration.

Supporters of civil asset forfeiture describe its effectiveness in reducing potential crime and limiting the impact of organized crime groups. Opponents of the tool argue that law enforcement agencies have a clear bias and incentive to seize property, as law enforcement agencies are able to use the funds or proceeds from sales for regular operations. Regardless of perspective, the use of the tool has exponentially escalated since 2000.

This deliberation guides students through a review of both the historical and contemporary arguments for and against the use of the tool. After a careful review of multiple perspectives, students will determine whether federal, state, and local law enforcement officials should continue the practice of civil asset forfeiture.

Objectives and Outcomes

• Students will be able to describe key vocabulary terms and concepts associated with the debate surrounding the continued use of civil asset forfeiture.
• Students will be able to identify and explain aspects of the civil asset forfeiture debate including those of civil liberties, due process, criminal justice, and law enforcement.
• Students will be able to evaluate arguments relating to the continued use of civil asset forfeiture and formulate an opinion on this question.

Militarization of Police

Connor Sheets and Robert J. Lopez at LAT:

Policing in Los Angeles changed forever on the morning of Feb. 28, 1997, when Americans watched on live TV as a 44-minute firefight unfolded between two heavily armed bank robbers and outgunned LAPD officers at a Bank of America in a bustling North Hollywood shopping district.

In the end, nearly 2,000 bullets were fired, the two robbers were killed, and multiple officers and civilians were injured in the now-infamous showdown, which helped usher in the modern era of militarized police.

Last week, another shocking incident just three blocks away offered a tragic postscript to the high-powered approach that police adopted after the bank shootout.

A Los Angeles police officer carrying an assault-style rifle rushed with several other officers into a Burlington department store after receiving reports that a man was attacking people inside. The officer charged ahead to confront a man who had attacked shoppers with a bike lock, firing three rounds and killing the man seconds after first laying eyes on him.

But those shots also killed 14-year-old Valentina Orellana-Peralta, who was hiding in a nearby changing room with her mother and was struck by one of the rounds after police say it ricocheted off the floor and pierced a wall.

Those two violent events — 24 years apart — demonstrate the pendulum swing in American law enforcement that has become a part of the outrage that followed Valentina’s killing.

After the shootout, the LAPD and law enforcement agencies across the country boosted their firepower, equipping officers with high-powered rifles and other weaponry. The LAPD also authorized its officers to carry high-caliber handguns, and Los Angeles passed a series of gun control measures.

The officer who killed Valentina fired a military-grade rifle.

Police Reform

At Divided We Fall, Michael Javen Fortner writes:

“This concerted nationwide attack on police is nothing less than the gravest assault on the rule of law in modern times,” U.S. Senator Tom Cotton blared a few months ago. In a partisan broadside, he added, “The simple fact is that today’s Democrat Party is pro-riot, anti-cop, and anti-prosecutor. Democrats today have more sympathy for violent criminals than for innocent victims.” When former Democratic President Barack Obama dubbed “defund the police” a counterproductive “snappy” slogan, U.S. Congresswoman Cori Bush responded, “With all due respect, Mr. President – let’s talk about losing people. We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence.” She pressed, “It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.” There we have it: a debate where one end of the ideological spectrum considers police reform an existential threat to the rule of law and where the other end sees law enforcement as an existential threat to Black life. Like with so many issues today, these extremes do not represent the bipartisan, cross-racial consensus that exists among the American people.

...

In California, 75% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans say “more jobs and economic opportunity” would prevent violent crime. Overwhelming numbers of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians felt similarly. Nearly 80% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans believe “more mental health and treatment services would reduce violent crime,” a view also shared across racial groups. These positions are not unique to liberal California. In the national Washington Post-ABC news poll, the majority of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics believe that having social workers “help police defuse situations with people having emotional problems” would reduce violence somewhat or by a lot. However, his issue was divisive among party lines: 83% of Democrats say it would reduce violence somewhat or by a lot while 54% of Republicans said it would not reduce crime. There was more consensus on structural approaches: 90% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans reported that increasing economic opportunities in poor communities would reduce violence somewhat or by a lot. This view was shared across all racial groups as well. Most Americans – Republicans, Democrats, Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians – insist that community investment and economic opportunity should be part of a reimagined public safety strategy.

The Deadly Culture of Traffic Stops

 Mike McIntire and Michael H. Keller at NYT:

A hidden scaffolding of financial incentives underpins the policing of motorists in the United States, encouraging some communities to essentially repurpose armed officers as revenue agents searching for infractions largely unrelated to public safety. As a result, driving is one of the most common daily routines during which people have been shot, Tased, beaten or arrested after minor offenses.

Some of those encounters — like those with Sandra Bland, Walter Scott and Philando Castile — are now notorious and contributed to a national upheaval over race and policing. The New York Times has identified more than 400 others from the past five years in which officers killed unarmed civilians who had not been under pursuit for violent crimes.

Fueling the culture of traffic stops is the federal government, which issues over $600 million a year in highway safety grants that subsidize ticket writing. Although federal officials say they do not impose quotas, at least 20 states have evaluated police performance on the number of traffic stops per hour, which critics say contributes to overpolicing and erosion of public trust, particularly among members of certain racial groups.

Many municipalities across the country rely heavily on ticket revenue and court fees to pay for government services, and some maintain outsize police departments to help generate that money, according to a review of hundreds of municipal audit reports, town budgets, court files and state highway records.

 

Polarization and Confidence in Institutions

 Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Majorities of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, as well as Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, express confidence in the military and small business. Both party groups express similarly low confidence in the Supreme Court, big business, banks and the criminal justice system.

However, partisans' confidence in the remaining 10 institutions diverges. Republicans have far more confidence than Democrats in the police and the church. Meanwhile, Democrats' confidence in the other eight institutions outpaces Republicans' by double digits.

 The largest partisan gap in confidence for any institution is for the presidency, with 49 points separating Democrats' and Republicans' ratings. Confidence in the presidency has become increasingly linked to the party affiliation of the president, with supporters of the president's party much more confident than supporters of the opposition party, consistent with the greater party polarization in presidential job approval ratings. Between 1993 and 2004, the average party gap in confidence in the presidency was 34 points. Since then, it has averaged 50 points.

Opinion on Equal Justice

At Axios, David Nather reports on a new Ipsos poll:

By the numbers: Nearly six out of 10 respondents — 59% — disagreed with the statement "police treat all Americans equally," while 58% said the same about criminal justice courts and lawyers.

• Black Americans gave the system an especially strong vote of no confidence, with 84% disagreeing that police treat people equally and 76% saying the same about the courts.
• But 53% of white Americans, 62% of Hispanic Americans and 67% of Asian Americans also disagreed that police treat everyone equally, while 55% of white Americans and Asian Americans and 56% of Hispanic Americans voiced a lack of confidence in the courts.
• That lack of faith extended across virtually all other groups, including by gender, age, region, urban/suburban/rural residency, and education and income levels.
• The only hint of confidence in the police came from Republicans, with 51% saying police treat everyone equally (only 7% of Democrats and 18% of independents agreed). Just 42% of Republicans said the courts treat everyone equally.

Between the lines: Most Americans still have a positive view of the police, regardless of how they feel about equal justice. But that's not true of Black Americans — nearly six out of 10 (57%) said they have unfavorable views of the police and law enforcement.

...

When Americans face the courts, the poll found a large gap in their experiences, with Black and Hispanic Americans more likely to depend on court-ordered attorneys than other groups.

• 43% of white Americans and 52% of Asian Americans said they've had their own attorneys when they or a family member has had to appear in court.
• By contrast, just 29% of Black Americans and 39% of Hispanic Americans had their own lawyers, while 49% of Black Americans and 43% of Hispanic Americans had court-ordered attorneys.
• That's important because public defenders are widely considered to be overworked and underfunded, and because researchers have become concerned in recent years that some public defenders might have their own forms of implicit bias.

US Policing: Decentralized and Mostly Small-Scale

At WP, Mark Berman reports that police reform is tough because policing is decentralized and most departments are small.

According to a federal survey in 2016, there are more than 12,200 local police departments nationwide, along with another 3,000 sheriff’s offices. And most of those don’t look like the New York Police Department, which employs more officers than Brooklyn Center, in suburban Minneapolis, has residents.

Nearly half of all local police departments have fewer than 10 officers. Three in 4 of the departments have no more than two dozen officers. And 9 in 10 employ fewer than 50 sworn officers. Brooklyn Center, which has 43 officers, and Windsor, which reported a seven-member force, fit comfortably in that majority.

Experts say that while smaller departments have their benefits, including being able to adapt to their communities and hire officers with local ties, these agencies also are typically able to avoid the accountability being sought as part of the national movement to restructure and improve policing. These departments’ often limited resources and the decentralized structure of American law enforcement complicate efforts to mandate widespread training and policy changes, experts say.

“You want to change American policing, figure out how to get to … the departments of 50 officers or less,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based group that works with police departments. “How do you reach them? How do you get to them? … That’s what the American people keep wondering.”

Domestic Terrorism Data

 From the Center for Strategic & International Studies

U.S. active-duty military personnel and reservists have participated in a growing number of domestic terrorist plots and attacks, according to new data from CSIS. The percentage of all domestic terrorist incidents linked to active-duty and reserve personnel rose in 2020 to 6.4 percent, up from 1.5 percent in 2019 and none in 2018. Similarly, a growing number of current and former law enforcement officers have been involved in domestic terrorism in recent years. But domestic terrorism is a double-edged sword. In 2020, extremists from all sides of the ideological spectrum increasingly targeted the military, law enforcement, and other government actors—putting U.S. security agencies in the crosshairs of domestic terrorists.

... 

There is growing concern about the extent to which U.S. military and law enforcement personnel have perpetrated—and been victims of—domestic terrorism.1 In March 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) sent a report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees which concluded: “DoD is facing a threat from domestic extremists (DE), particularly those who espouse white supremacy or white nationalist ideologies.” It continued that some domestic extremist networks “(a) actively attempt to recruit military personnel into their group or cause, (b) encourage their members to join the military, or (c) join, themselves, for the purpose of acquiring combat and tactical experience.”2 In 2020, the FBI alerted the DoD that it had opened 143 criminal investigations involving current or former service members—of which nearly half (68) were related to domestic extremism. Most investigations apparently involved veterans, some of whom had unfavorable discharge records.3 The January 6, 2021, events at the U.S. Capitol raised additional concerns, since one reservist, one National Guard member, and at least 31 veterans were charged with conspiracy or other crimes.4 In addition, at least four police officers and three former officers faced federal charges for their involvement in storming the Capitol.5

Robert O'Harrow Jr., Andrew Ba Tran and Derek Hawkins at WP:

Domestic terrorism incidents have soared to new highs in the United States, driven chiefly by white-supremacist, anti-Muslim and anti-government extremists on the far right, according to a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The surge reflects a growing threat from homegrown terrorism not seen in a quarter-century, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more deaths, the analysis shows.

The number of all domestic terrorism incidents in the data peaked in 2020.

Since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 plots or attacks and 91 fatalities, the data shows. At the same time, attacks and plots ascribed to far-left views accounted for 66 incidents leading to 19 deaths.

Botched Response to the 2020 Riots

 Mike Allen at Axios:

More than a dozen after-action reports on police handling of last summer's racial-justice demonstrations provided "a damning indictment of police forces that were poorly trained, heavily militarized and stunningly unprepared," the N.Y. Times reports (subscription).

• Why it matters: "[T]he problems highlighted in the reports are fundamental to modern American policing, a demonstration of the aggressive tactics that had infuriated ... protesters to begin with."

Go deeper: 115-page investigation of NYPD response ... 102-page investigation of LAPD response (both free).

"Defund the Police" and African Americans

 Michael Javen Fortner has a paper at the Niskanen Center titled "Reconstructing Justice: Race, Generational Divides, and the Fight Over `Defund the Police.'"

Key Takeaways

• The fate of defund measures in Minneapolis, Atlanta, and New York City document the ways in which the fight over “defund the police” is as much a conflict between young and old and left and center as it is between Black and white.
• The expansion of the carceral state was a bipartisan affair. Interpretations that put all the weight on white political interests unduly minimize the impact of violence on Black communities. The younger generation, however, bore the brunt of  aggressive,discriminatory policing. 
• National polls demonstrate that there is a great deal of confusion around the word “defund,” and most African Americans see it as something other than completely ridding cities of cops.
• Most Americans, especially Blacks, see room for community groups and non-law enforcement professionals, such as social workers and doctors, in a broader public safety strategy. The evidence recommends the same.

Police Unions and Teacher Unions

 J.D. Tuccille at Reason:

Labor Day is a celebration of the labor movement and its representation of the interests of workers in American society. Unions have historically been a force for good as workers fought for better conditions. But 2020 has brought us a reality check about just how toxic organized labor—in the form of police and teachers unions—can be. These organizations aren't solely responsible for the ongoing disaster that is this year, but they've done their best to make it worse.

...

New York City's Police Benevolent Association, which represents rank-and-file officers, opposes standardized penalties for police misconduct. In July, it joined in a lawsuit with unions representing firefighters and corrections officers to block the release to the public of records of police officers who have been disciplined.

The union representing New Jersey state troopers similarly sued to keep disciplinary records secret. San Francisco's police union filed a lawsuit challenging the city's right to revise its use-of-force policy. California police unions joined together to defeat a bill that would have barred officers guilty of serious misconduct from further police work.
... 

Teachers unions, too, bear responsibility for worsening the catastrophe known as 2020. It's a union's job to protect the health and safety of its members. But teachers unions consistently went far beyond that mandate, choosing to play politics and push an unrelated anti–school choice agenda rather than focusing on reasonable accommodations in the middle of a national crisis.

As New York City officials struggled at the end of August to get schools reopened with precautions in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the United Federation of Teachers engaged in brinksmanship, leaving parents uncertain as to when, or whether, their kids would be able to resume educations cut short in the spring. The next day, city officials caved and school reopening was pushed back 11 days, subject to union conditions.

...

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) demanded wealth taxes, police reform, and a moratorium on charter schools as necessary preconditions for reopening public schools. The union settled for concessions that were more job-related.

"Teachers won newfound respect at the start of the pandemic as parents learned just how difficult it was to teach their kids at home," Politico noted of the flurry of union arm-twisting across the country. "But teachers unions now risk squandering the outpouring of goodwill by threatening strikes, suing state officials and playing hardball during negotiations with districts."

Views of Race Relations

Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Americans' already tepid review of relations between White and Black Americans has soured since 2018 and is now the most negative of any year in Gallup's trend since 2001. The majority of U.S. adults say relations between White and Black Americans are very (24%) or somewhat bad (31%), while less than half call them very (7%) or somewhat (37%) good.

Most Americans were upbeat about White-Black relations from 2001 through 2013, with the percentage calling them good to any degree ranging from 63% to 72%. The sharp decline in positive perceptions to 47% in 2015 followed numerous high-profile incidents in the prior year of unarmed Black citizens being killed by White police officers.

After improving slightly in 2016 and 2018, ratings of race relations have fallen to a new low in a Gallup telephone poll conducted June 8-July 24, 2020. The nationally representative survey of 1,226 U.S. adults includes an oversample of Black Americans weighted to their correct proportion of the population.

The latest poll was taken after the start of widespread protests on racial justice sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, but before the recent shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and political conflict in Portland, Oregon, that have led to deaths among protestors and counterprotestors.

Attitudes on Policing and Police Unions

Steve Crabtree at Gallup:

In the wake of widespread protests sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a majority of Americans (58%) say major changes are needed to make policing better. An additional 36% say minor changes are needed, while 6% say no changes are needed. There are substantial differences by demographic groups. Almost nine in 10 Black Americans (88%) say major changes are needed, compared with 63% of Hispanic Americans and 51% of White Americans.

...
Abolishing police departments. This is the most extreme proposal in response to police misconduct: disbanding police departments in favor of different public safety models. The Minneapolis City Council voted in June to go this route, saying the problems that contributed to George Floyd's death are too deeply ingrained to reform the existing department. For most Americans, the idea of abolishing the police goes too far: 15% overall say they support it, with Black Americans (22%) and Hispanic Americans (20%) somewhat more likely than White Americans (12%) to do so. Almost no Republicans (1%) support the idea, versus 27% of Democrats and 12% of independents. However, there is also a sharp distinction between younger and older adults on this question; one-third of those younger than 35 (33%) support the idea, compared with 16% of those aged 35 to 49 and 4% of those aged 50 and older.

...

Eliminating police unions. In recent years, some who advocate police reform have accused police unions of blocking efforts to increase officers' accountability for their actions, such as forming independent offices to investigate allegations of misconduct. A majority of Americans, 56%, support eliminating police unions, with results relatively consistent among Black (61%), Hispanic (56%) and White (55%) adults. Despite much higher approval of labor unions in general among Democrats than Republicans, Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to favor eliminating police unions (62% vs. 45%, respectively). Political independents fall closer to Democrats, at 57%.

See Dan DiSalvo's reflections on public employee unions more generally. 

AFL-CIO and a Police Union

 Carolyn Giardina at The Hollywood Reporter:

After two weeks of nationwide protests sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, the Writers Guild of America East took an unprecedented step — confronting a powerful law enforcement union. On June 8, the WGA East became the first member of the AFL-CIO to call on it, the largest labor group in the U.S., to disaffiliate from the International Union of Police Associations, the only law enforcement group represented by the federation. (The largest police union, Fraternal Order of the Police, operates outside of the AFL-CIO.)

Born primarily out of its media members' interest in the issue — reporters were arrested and, in some cases, injured during demonstrations — the WGA East resolution has brought into focus the tangible ways unions may choose to fight for racial justice. "The AFL-CIO cannot, in good faith, represent the best interests of the police and also represent the best interests of all the other working people who are out here getting arrested, beaten up and abused by the police," says Hamilton Nolan, a member of the WGA East council that passed the resolution and a labor reporter for In These Times magazine.

But other Hollywood AFL-CIO members, in talks with WGA East leaders, have signaled that they're split over whether they can aid police reform more effectively by keeping the IUPA close or by disassociating from it (moreover, other unions in the federation also have police members, just not exclusively). For its part, SAG-AFTRA shared June 11 that its president, Gabrielle Carteris, who is also an AFL-CIO vice president, had called on police unions to change practices that protect officers who have engaged in racially charged misconduct from discipline, even if that means retooling collective bargaining agreements. SAG-AFTRA also signed on to a letter, delivered to the House of Representatives on June 23, in support of the proposed Justice in Policing Act, which, in part, would ban police chokeholds and no-knock warrants.

Highways and Protests

Hadley Meares at LA Curbed:

When Angelenos gathered downtown to protest the murder of George Floyd, they started at City Hall and eventually made their way toward the 101. Pastor Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie from the Row Church led the first group of protesters onto the freeway, which they occupied for roughly 30 minutes.

Ever since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, uprisings protesting police brutality and racism have blocked freeways throughout America. The freeway and highway systems in the U.S. are part of “a long, long, long history of looting our communities, looting our lives,” Pastor Cue explains.

Nowhere is this truer than in Los Angeles, where several generations of Angelenos, mainly people of color, have been displaced or trapped by the construction of freeways in the name of progress and ease of movement for white residents, many of whom moved outward to the suburbs of L.A. and Orange counties as the postwar era dawned.

“Communities of color, or black folks, were not permitted to live in the suburbs through land covenants made between white homeowners, through racism, through redlining,” Pastor Cue says. “The whole narrative that black folks would bring down the value of the communities … that narrative is lingering in our society, even today.”

Though racially restrictive land covenants were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1948, years of Jim Crow policies had already institutionalized racist housing practices that relegated black people and other people of color to certain neighborhoods — and labeled those neighborhoods as slums.

Those “slums” were the first places on the chopping block when freeways began to be routed across America in earnest in 1956, the year in which construction on 41,000 miles of interstate highways were authorized at a cost of $27 billion.

In 1957, one Urban Land Institute official celebrated that “inner belt expressways” would “inevitably slice through great areas of our nation’s worst slums,” writes UCLA professor Eric Avila, in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.

Not just Los Angeles.  Alana Samuels at The Atlantic:

The urban planner Robert Moses was one of the first to propose the idea of using highways to “redeem” urban areas. In 1949, the commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads, Thomas MacDonald, even tried to include the idea of highway construction as a technique for urban renewal in a national housing bill. (He was rebuffed.) But in cities across America, especially those that didn’t want to—or couldn’t—spend their own money for so-called urban renewal, the idea began to take hold. They could have their highways and they could get rid of their slums. With just one surgery, they could put in more arteries, and they could remove the city’s heart.

Democrats and Police Unions

Alayna Treene and Dan Primack at Axios:

Democrats are in a political bind. They want police reform, but as advocates of public sector unions, they've also been trying to help police unions — which have been some of the biggest obstacles to police reform.

Driving the news: The politics of police unions have gotten so difficult that House Democrats are shelving a bill, first introduced in 2019, that would strengthen the ability of police to unionize, Axios has learned.

That was then: The bill, H.R. 1154, would enable all state and local public safety employees — including police — to collectively bargain for wages, hours, and other conditions of employment.

• It was introduced by Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), with a group of 225 other co-sponsors.
• The vast majority of those co-sponsors were Democrats, including Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), who leads the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).

This is now: Many of these same Democrats co-sponsored legislation introduced on Monday called the Justice in Policing Act, which has not yet been endorsed or opposed by major police unions.

• The bill would, among other things, limit qualified immunity for police officers, which makes it practically impossible to sue them successfully. A senior Democratic aide says this issue remains a sticking point for police unions, and the White House has called it a nonstarter.

Kildee's spokesman says that he is a "strong supporter" of the Justice in Policing Act, and that he has asked House Democratic leadership to not bring his earlier bill up for a vote in its current form because of "valid concerns with how H.R. 1154 could potentially contribute to acts of police brutality."