Governors and Mayors: Dissolve Police Unions NOW, for the safety of us all! (sincerely, a union president)

Workers having a united body that fights for job security, works to ensure a living and fair wage, and worker rights should not be controversial. All workers in America deserve a fair workplace no matter the profession, and if employers are not willing to ensure workers are treated with dignity and respect manifested in their pay, health benefits, and respect, every worker should have a union ready to go to war on their behalf. Indeed, the time in America where the middle-class ranks grew the most, when workers’ wages grew the most, and where social mobility was most apparent, were in the days where union membership was at its highest just after WWII. The efficacy of unions to ensure a fairer workplace is, and has been, proven. And where it should be generally accepted that worker unions have been a benefit to most of America’s labor force, America’s citizenry should give serious thought to how we view police unions as they clearly are an outlier in the labor movement. More clearly: all police unions should be dissolved as they serve no discernible good to the public, public safety, or good policing.

As a Black socialist-educator and teacher union president, I know the importance of having an empowered and protected workforce. Indeed, for Black educators specifically, gaining access to teacher union membership allowed many, primarily Black women, access to a career path where they could educate, care for, and love on, their community’s children – while earning a respectable wage complete with health benefits and a pension. To be sure, teacher unions have exhibited extraordinary racism against educators of color and communities of color in the past that ought not be glossed over or forgotten. The racism that existed yesterday and lingers still in teacher unions was, and is real. That said, progress, though slow, is being made. Teacher unions in urban areas filled with near exclusively Black and Latino students, to teacher unions in lily-white suburban districts are recognizing the need to, at the very least, acknowledge persisting systemic and structural racism and its impact on all children, but especially Black children. And while it may not seem like much, the initial acknowledgement and proclamation that, yes, Black Lives do Matter, and that racism and discrimination within society and education compromised the potential of too many children for far too long, coupled with meaningful professional development for educators to confront their hidden and not-so-hidden biases are baby-steps in the right direction. Baby steps. And the fact that the largest union in the country, the National Education Association, elected a Black woman to its highest office, Ms. Becky Pringle of Philadelphia, points to new potential to make even greater changes for students of color and by extension, their communities.

During the Arne Duncan as US Secretary of Education and Governor Christie years, here in New Jersey as well as around the country, teachers and their unions were blamed for “underperforming” schools and students as evidenced by their performance on standardized tests – especially educators who worked in urban NJ and urban America. Teacher unions were called recalcitrant, obstructionist, and willing to settle for urban student failure in order to protect “bad teachers”. In reality, most urban teacher unions were resisting the inherent unfairness by which teachers, students, and schools were being targeted which, at the time was primarily through student performance on “standardized” assessments. Both education praticitoners and education researchers knew long before NCLB and RTTT that there was no such thing as a “standardized” test where students from culturally diverse and economically tenuous backgrounds were competing on the same level playing field as white middle-class students. Educators and their unions knew how unfair this metric was. They also knew urban students, urban schools, urban teachers, and urban communities were being targeted by the standardization/accountability movement and tried to give voice, and mount resistance, to that which was deemed harmful. It seems only now, after nearly two decades, that message is beginning to resonate…quite possibly too little, too late.

As we juxtapose the behavior of teacher unions’ advocacy pertaining to their profession during those treacherous Duncan years, with the historic and current behavior of police unions, it becomes clear how disgusting, and a threat to the public, police unions are. Unlike the claim lodged against teacher unions that they exist “to protect bad teachers”, police unions actively work to shield criminal officers from accountability. Across the country, police officers just recently have shown a willingness to run protesting civilians over with their cars, knock the elderly to the ground cracking their skulls, kneel on Black men’s neck in Minneapolis, Aurora (CO), and Rochester until they die; shoot autistic children, sexually assault women while in police custody, sexually assault men while performing “routine” searches, illegally seize civilian property, befriending white right-wing murders, murdering Black women while sleeping in their beds, murder Black children playing with toys, murder Black men selling CDs, shoot black men seven times in their back, all while preventing the public from accessing officer complaint histories. At every corrupt and evil turn, police unions are omnipresent in protecting corrupt officers and ensuring they dodge justice and accountabilty. Helping me make this case, just last week the national Fraternal Order of Police endorsed the most corrupt, compromised, and criminal sexual-assaulter-in-chief, Trump, exposing for all to see that police unions place no value on justice for the public, or service to it. Police unions are, in a word, shit; a steaming, smelly pile of rot that needs to excised from our national body politic much sooner than later.

Where other unions exist to protect laborer’s rights and ensure a baseline salary for workers who could be easily exploited by management, police officers face no such counterforce. The American public, save for recent uprisings for civilian justice in the face of police abuse, are still overwhelmingly pro-police despite all the evil police officers get away with. Middle-class white America wholeheartedly believe the police to be honest public servants who put their lives on the line everyday to protect the vulnerable. The reality, however, is that policing is actually a pretty safe profession with 36 police officers being killed in the line of duty so far this year, compared to the 694 persons killed by the boys in blue. Additionally, being a police officer is less dangerous than being a worker on a contruction site or a supervisor of mechanics, but slightly more dangerous than being a maintanence or repair worker. Still, the mythology of police as the brave maintainer of an orderly, civilized society persists.Further police budgets nationally have soared over the past two decades from $13.1B in 2000 to unreported, yet higher amounts today along with the explosion of the prison industry.

Without an existing countering force to mitigate or curtail police officer rights, what is the need for police unions? Who, with official power, has ever attacked policing as a profession? When have legions of vulnerable police officers been targeted for large-scale dismissal? What have police unions added to the labor movement? What have police unions added to public safety?

These questions aren’t intended to be rheotircal, although they are in that we already know the answer. Police unions serve no public good, but instead endanger the safety of the public by protecting officers who hold the power of life-and-death in their hands, as well as shield them from public culpability. The continued existence of police unions put all of us at risk, and must be dismantled to restore dignity to the profession of policing, as well as protect the safety of us all. Afterall, any one of us, or our loved ones, could be Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Linden Cameron, Jacob Blake, Trayford Pellerin, LaQuan MacDonald, Michael Brown, Michael Bell Jr., Sean Bell, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Stephan Clark, Botham Jean, Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tony Timpa, Daniel Shaver, Tamir Rice, James Scott, Elijah, McClain, Andrew Thomas, Dylan Noble, the unamed teenage girl in NYC raped by two NYPD officers, Abner Louima, Mariah Lopez (NYC), the unamed woman beaten by California Highway Patrol, James Boyd, Aflred Redwine, Mary Hawkes, John Crawford, Jona… you get the picture.