Police Unions · 11:03pm Apr 25th, 2021
It's in the Twitter feed again that The International Workers of the World, aka the IWW or ‘Wobblies’ , do not consider police unions as unions, and will not show solidarity with them. Thing is, they’re totally right, but apparently it's not being explained very well.
Even if you are for defunding the police, most people are of the opinion that you still need policing of some kind, and that police deserve rights and protections like anyone. Why, then, should their union be considered as illegitimate?
There is also the more cynical belief that having the police on-side would be beneficial, and this would be a way to encourage it.
The problem with most explanations I’ve run into is that they rely on statements that are true, but do not go into why they are true, or why it is important that they are true. Even if you agree "all cops are bad" now, it’s not going to convince you if you believe in reform, or if you believe that police are still workers.
What’s important is that it is irrelevant whether cops are bad or not for police unions to be fundamentally different from, more dangerous than, and inherently opposed to labour unions.
1: Why are unions?
“Why” is a different question to “what”, and the more interesting one here.
Unions exist to empower their members following the most basic idea that ‘apes together strong’. Unions understand that individuals have vastly less power than the groups they’re a part of, and that includes workplaces.
This is important in workplaces, because the amount of power employers have over employees is pretty overwhelming. The power to hire, to fire, to set wages, to promote, to demote, to set your hours - all of that gives employers a ton of both formal and informal - official and unofficial - ways to punish and reward people.
As an individual, you can be screwed by this arbitrary power imbalance. However, a workplace union can step in and say - all for one, one for all, and all that. ‘You can’t fire everybody’. This allows individuals protection from employers.
So far, so simple. As long as we understand that a police station can also be an abusive workforce with this power imbalance, we can see a fair argument for police unions in this.
What’s important, though, is I’ve just described a relationship where the higher power is an employer, and the employee has no power as an individual. Neither of those things are strictly true when we talk about police.
2: Why are police different?
Police are the state’s legitimate tools of violence. Which is to say, they’re the people your government says are allowed to hit you, and they’re the ones that decide whether you need to be hit, with courts only able to act as referees after.
This immediately changes what an individual police officer is, as opposed to an individual worker. They are arguably the most powerful individuals in most situations anyone will experience.
It also changes who their employer is - namely, the state, ideally a democracy. While that power imbalance is still relevant to individual police officers, it means that protecting police means preventing any democratic means to punish bad actors.
This means that while a worker’s union empowers otherwise powerless employees, a police union empowers already very powerful individuals and unshackles them from democratic accountability.
In the United States, there have been reports of police officers who will refuse to answer calls if they hear that there is an impending budget freeze - not even cut, freeze. They will answer the calls instead with; “We are short staffed at the moment, and if this upsets you, contact your local congressman”.
Because there is no alternative to the police - they’re the only legal solution available - they hold immense political power.
If police realize that power and decide to abuse it - power that can mean breaking into your home and shooting you - who can stop them?
Empowered police can swing elections, or even prevent elections, in ways that other unions can’t.
3: No Solidarity with Cops
The final note is what the IWW is, and their broader strategy. The idea is for one big union, a union of unions, so that there can be sympathetic and solidarity action.
If there is a strike at, say, a grocery store, then the grocery store is still able to hire scabs and temp workers to try to outlast its striking workforce. However, a solidarity strike with the truck drivers union could mean that no produce gets delivered to the striking stores, preventing this workaround, empowering the grocery workers even more.
If the police are showing up to your strike, it cannot be in solidarity, because they will have been sent to break it.
Here are some cops running down striking firefighters in Paris - notice that a lot of the firefighters are confused, a few even had their backs to the cops when they charged:
Most union action, by its nature, is extra-legal or outright illegal, because if legal protections were sufficient to protect the individual, union action would often not be necessary. This is not an innate law of the universe, and will not always be true in all times, but it is currently true, and it has been deliberately made true.
The easiest way to show this is to point out that the total value of all wage theft, in most developed nations, far outweighs the amount lost to property crimes like theft, arson, burglary, etc. In the US, it is more than three times higher.
You will not see a police officer showing up to your workplace to arrest your manager for not counting the hours you were made to work overtime, off-the-books, even though that is a very real theft that has occurred.
A police force that routinely supports sympathy strikes will be replaced, much faster than a police force that occasionally kills an innocent person. This is the difference between a police force failing to perform its role, and mistakes made by individual performers.
The police, like the military, are not traditional workers. While they operate under similar labour contracts, they are enforcers. They are the means and the method that a distinction between ‘owners’ and ‘workers’ can be made at all, and groups like the IWW would like to remove that distinction.
That being said, there’s one way that any police officer may join the IWW:
Get a different job.
Damn good blog post!
Do you think there has been active push by people in power to glamorize cops and make them out to be heroes as you see in movies and other media?
That was one of the clearest explanations that I've seen.
Damn good blog. Very good explanation, very concise, very clear, very well-written. It's a great way to put it, really.
Did you know the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that a cop hitting a suspect for trying to run away does not count as torture? Not talking about using violence to catch them, mind. I mean catching them, and then, while the suspect is tied up and can't move, beating them up.
"Vindictive torture" is the legal term when an authority or government worker [1] causes physical or mental suffering on a person as revenge for something they did, or is assumed that they did. Beating up the suspect was ruled as something that was perfectly fine. So. It's fine. It's fine. It's legal. It's fine.
[1] The Spanish definition of "torture" only applies when the torturer is an official or an authority of some kind. If you're just a person torturing another person, it's simply aggravated assault with some modifiers thrown in there for inhumanly and deliberately increasing the victim's pain, but the technical name is not "torture". "Torture" by definition here implies abuse of power.
Quite right.
5506570
when was this? Is this a recent ruling? Also Is Spain going the way of India, France, Italy in terms of Fascism?
Well put, many thanks.
Public sector unions were a mistake.
5506584
Not all public sector employees are empowered in the same way. Teachers unions, for instance, are pretty vital, and absolutely need to be supported.
One thing I like to think about is how you look at footage of the civil rights movements in the 60s, right? You see the old black-and-white footage of cops beating the shit out of protestors and siccing dogs on them and using firehoses and you realize not a single one of those cops ever faced consequences for any of that
Literal Cop Warlordism is a very distinct possibility when you just let the police do whatever the fuck they want and never face consequences for it. This already happens in a lot of parts of the world.
Thanks for helping to put what I knew instinctively into words.
5506588
I've been thinking a lot recently that if we suffer a major power upset in the US (such as a civil war), it's going to look a lot like feudalism with cities and towns wielding their police forces as defacto "soldiers" in a rural-vs-urban conflict.
Oh yeah, hadn't thought of police unions like this. Explains why they feel so different.
Unfortunately due to "defunding the policee" we are heading towards the day when the police is privatized
5506657
Private security companies have to be very particular about their policies and training, because they can’t just wave the sovereign immunity flag and kick lawsuits out the door the way a government can. Any misconduct can get them sued by the victim, the third party they were providing security for, and other people affected by that misconduct.
So your attempt to drum up a scary bogeyman isn’t all that effective. We want the police held to higher standards than the status quo, after all.
Of course, private policing won’t work for the same reason private fire departments weren’t very popular: the idea that they might just stand around watching people commit crimes because the victims weren’t on the customer list, or on a property that was, isn’t gonna fly.
But you do need to hold the government accountable when it violates its own laws, and that most definitely includes the individuals said government employs to violently enforce those laws. Preventing that accountability helps nobody but a would be criminal.
5506680
The police beating everyone up with impunity doesn't actually help people the police are intended to beat up.
5506680
I said private police, not private security. Private police are more akin to private military except they don't have the big guns. While private security has to follow the laws. What will happen when said "private security" (your words, not mine) has to enforce said laws?
In truth, a private police officer will assault a public police officer solely because his employer, the person who is paying for his services, told them to because he knows that whoever is paying him has enough money to bail him out.
Would you really trust someone whose Allegiance is not to the governing law but to any Corporation or politician lining their pockets?
We've already seen politicians attempt to abolish the police, only to hire private security for themselves and their families when things get violent. Will these private security protect the Commonwealth? No! That is not what they're paid to do.
I believe in police reform, to hold those guilty accountable regardless of who they are. Unfortunately, nowadays, lawsuits are being filed because the police are doing their jobs.
My biggest fear is that we fall back into a mob Justice. Where he's guilty because we say he is and if you disagree, we'll burn your house down. That should never happen. Or should I say never happen again.
What protections do the police have against mob Justice? What is there to stop a mob from burning down a police station? If Union is the wrong word, what is the right word?
NOOOO MRNUMBERS DONT SAY BAD THINGS ABOUT POLICE UNIONS >:(
NO POLITICS IN MUH PONY >:(
WHY ARE U BEING SO DIVISIVE >:(
I really like this explanation and I was nodding my head along to your points a lot. It is terrible to think that police are able to gamble with citizens' lives as a bargaining chip. Thank you for writing this.
Could you point me to where this has happened? I know there have been instances of police leaving someone to die for bad reasons but I would like to know more about these instances.
5506562
People certainly glamorize cops, or at least see their jobs with very rose-tinted glasses. Reality TV shows obviously cut out the bad moments for the job so I know many believe police work is mostly honest work and that police brutality and violence is just the minority, caused by "bad apples", in popular terms. A large part of it too is that most people never have neither good nor bad experiences with police officers, so they may default to what they see online or on TV. Not necessarily an issue, but the problem is that when you read something good about police, it's an officer buying groceries for a family but when it is something bad, it is an officer killing an innocent man for having his hands in his pockets or something. People can then remain ignorant if they choose, and choose to believe that "if you just be polite, they won't shoot you" and finish it off with a "I ain't ever had a problem!"
5506570
I have seen way too many videos of people on the ground getting beat and kicked by officers who scream "stop resisting!" while red in the face and clearly angry. I did not know that was a term, that's helpful to know. There was a video of a protestor in my city being punched repeatedly in the head last week while being held down by other officers for "resisting". I could not help but wonder if it was in part because the officer just simply decided to take his anger out on the man for being a protestor.
5506776
Honestly, if I could find the source on that, I'd have hyperlinked it in the text itself. It was something that came out when discussing previous attempts to defund police on the podcast Citations Needed - but going through the time period I remember hearing it from, it's not in their public episodes list, meaning I either misremembered where I heard it from, or it's from their subscriber locked content.
I'll instead point to a more recent article about the tactic: The Washington Post reporting on "Blue Flu" police strike tactics
5506562
There's been glamorizing of police for forever. Look at... basically any police movie, where every criminal is "The Unambiguously Bad Guy" and rogue police officers charging in everywhere guns blazing are the Heroes Who Get The Girl.
It seems worth noting that a LOT of countries have unionized military. The US isn't one of them, but much of NATO is.
Thank you for this blog post, as this is a question I've been trying to work out my abstract, general position on for some time (that is, not about current actual cases of action by police unions but about whether there is some plausible set of reforms under which they're a good thing; the idea that there's some group X of workers who should laudably and justifiably be denied the legal right to collective bargaining under any and all circumstances doesn't sit well with me). And to be honest, I'm still not sure, but you've at least given me more to think about.
5506721
That’s... my point?
Great post, as always.
5506844
Well, read the sentence I quoted again. What I'm saying is that it doesn't help would-be criminals either.
5506570
I can't find your source can you link it to me?
5506948
Read the sentence you quoted again, yourself. The would be criminals I am talking about there are the police in question.
5507127
Right, but joining the police in order to commit crimes is absurdly counterintuitive. Like, I'm annoyed there's no writer I can insult for coming up with the system where that would work.
5507138
And yet we live in a world where police can be video taped vandalizing buildings—in uniform, no less!—in order to later blame it on protesters that had already left the area, and have people lap it up and ask for more.
5507148
As I said, if a writer submitted this shit he'd be fired on the spot. Or as close as the union would let them get to doing that. (Ooh, surprise segue back to the original topic!)
5507010
Supreme court ruling of December 11, 2002 -- but keep in mind it's the Spanish one. I've no clue if it's available in English, tbh.
5507186
got it, thank you so much
I recently realized, after getting annoyed at yet another pro 2nd amendment post on Facebook...that the current state of police violence is a reason to REPEAL the 2nd amendment. After all, everyone who clamors "RIGHT TO BARE ARMS" seems to forget the 'well regulated militia' part...and what else are the police if not a government trained militia?
I HATE Westerns for much the same reason-seems to glorify the WHITE MAN AUTHORITY GOOD motif that perfvades the thinking of those that grew up watching the drek.
Could you elaborate on this?
The way I'm picturing it, cops - on paper - have a police departments or chief of police or something as employer (or something like it. Person in charge of hiring, firing, shifts, and stuff.)
But in practice, comparing those to employers in the usual sense doesn't seem to be all that fitting. Cops becoming victims of abuse by these employer-ish people seems by far rarer than in classic employer-employee relationships. The only cases I can recall are of cops getting fired/retired after standing up to colleagues who abuse citizens. And I've never heard of a police union stepping in in such a case.
Basically, I agree with your broader statement that police unions primarily shield the police from oversight by the state. And no matter who any single cop's employer is, police unions generally seem not to act like regular unions: they show less interest in protecting individual cops from employers/superiors who abuse their position, and more interest in protecting the entire police force's ability to abuse its powers.
This seems to be a systemic issue, but I don't really understand where it comes from.
Just little 'thank you for great explaination'!
5506780
In regards to police-praising media, The Wire is probably the closest antidote to that. Even the shows that have crooked cops tend to make them so cartoonishly evil that any believability that a real police officer could end up like that. More specifically, it’s that there’s such a hard line between the good cops and the stereotypical corrupt officers that even if you believe that there are cops who are that bad on the force, there are no plausible routes shown as to how they got on the force in the first place other than they’re a bad apple who has always been that way and never should have been hired in the first place. The Wire is the only cop show I can think of that shows the same officer exemplify both good and bad police behavior and is also gives examples of characters who start bad and clean up their act and others who start idealistic and end up hatching the kind of scheme that the normie public would have dismissed as fictionally criminal if it were reported on before this past year.
I do not know what the police are like where you live, but in my hometown, a common cause of “but I’ve never had police problems” is that the different departments in the different jurisdictions are legitimately different in terms of how much of a threat they present to the public. Some (somewhat fictionalized) examples:
My gut instinct is that this diversity in badness is the primary reason why ACAB is such a needlessly contentious slogan. A proud “fuck the police” can easily be contextualized by someone who “never had it happen to me” because they can see that the residents of the other jurisdiction do have reasons to fear the cops. On the flip side “ACAB” proclamations often inspire an indignant retort of “that’s a real problem for you but it’s clearly not all because this behavior does not happen in my suburb and I have the stats to prove it”.
5507227
The fight against tyranny can sometimes include your own government.
5508960
And wasn't that what the Founding Fathers did in the first place?
Presumably because their employer told them to do that? Like in case of those truck drivers immediately before their employer told them to deliver goods.
Striking truck drivers would probably be replaced faster than ones who just broke something either, unless there's something to prevent that (like union). I kinda feel that arguments from part 3 aren't supporting the conclusion and I'm not sure how to fix that. Maybe looking into asymmetry between how police union may be useful to truckers union and vice versa may be worthwhile?