Today, Explained - The problem with police unions

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

Even after Derek Chauvin was captured on video killing George Floyd, he could still get his job back. BuzzFeed’s Melissa Segura explains how. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. When I think about unions in America, I think about issues like abortion or gun control. You're either for abortions or you're not. You're either in favor of gun control or you're really not. And you're either in the camp of people who like unions or in the camp of people who think unions are destroying America. Except for police unions. Police unions throw a wrench in the ideological divide. Melissa Segura, you just wrote a piece about

police unions for BuzzFeed. Do I have that wrench in the ideological divide right? That's 100% correct. It's even difficult and a little bit of a mind bender, I think, even for people within the union movement themselves. So what we have, at least in the U.S. in our political landscape, is typically we think of union supporters. Those people tend to identify more on the ideological left of our political spectrum. We'll see that, you know, through our maintenance workers unions, through teachers in particularly that represent a larger portion of the union landscape than ever before. And then you have this one particular outlier, even within the union movement, and that's that of the alphabet soups that sort of make up the various unions representing police. And what's crazy about it is that the right,

particularly from Republicans, this is one of the only unions they actually support. What we have is a paradox in that Republicans typically are working to weaken unions with the exception of police. Whereas on the left, you have a party that's been dedicated to labor and they are actually the ones pushing for reforms, particularly when it comes to police. Well, I want to get into like the politics of police unions more, but before we do that, I kind of just want to get a sense of how these unions work and how they may or may not get in the way of reforms. So just let's start with what a police union does. So on its face, a police union functions very much the way that any other union would work. Their primary goal is, of course, to get the very best deal that they can for their memberships,

whether that applies to working conditions, to hours to pay, to sick leave. All of these things are very much within the confines of what we think of as just a regular union. The thing that has really emerged, and particularly over, I'd say, the last two decades, and we could talk about the reasons why, where police unions have really departed from their other labor brethren, is in the sense of their political clout. And the police unions themselves and their membership have done a very good job of convincing us that we who are not officers have absolutely no idea how difficult and how stressful the situations in which they find themselves. And by pushing that narrative that we, you know, as the general population,

can't understand how difficult their jobs are, it's created a culture that says that they are unquestionable. So how does that situation enable police brutality, the kinds of things we've seen this week? You know, officers the size of fridges pushing over elderly men in Salt Lake City or young women in New York City or pulling down a protester's mask just to pepper spray him while his hands are up. Or, you know, even putting their knees on the back of taken this notion that our jobs are so hard that you as a population actually shouldn't question what we do because you've never had to show up to a domestic violence call. You don't know what we do. And that sort of culture has permeated and mutated to the point where it now also extends to our jobs are so difficult that you shouldn't question what we do. And that's created what a lot of people will say is a culture of impunity.

And, you know, there was a study that was done recently by some researchers out of the University of Chicago that looked at a data set from 1996 to, I believe, 2015. So in 2003, we saw a whole bunch of jurisdictions in Florida join unions. And what the researchers out of the University of Chicago found was fascinating. And that was that the number of complaints had skyrocketed during that time. And their ultimate conclusions were that with the unionization and a lot of labor protections that it had created, that there was a culture of impunity that then followed. Yeah, tell me more about how the contracts police officers have themselves get in the way of police reforms or even firing the officers who have records of brutality. I think one of the best examples I can give you actually might be, you know, Derek Chauvin himself. What we saw with him is we saw what we think are 17 complaints against him. 17 complaints.

Yes. That's what we think. And let me tell you why I say that that's what we think, because there's another record on a Minneapolis city database that lists 12. This is not unique to Minneapolis in any way. For example, in the city of Chicago, where I've worked extensively, it's very difficult to get an accounting of police complaints because the union contracts in many instances allow for the erasures of complaints. Say what? And then it gets even stranger in the sense that a lot of us who are familiar with policing procedures, you know, have looked at the chief firing immediately the four officers who were involved in the George Floyd murder. And a lot of us can't be sure that that

decision by the police chief will actually stick. And that's because these unions have created very strong contracts which prevent the firing of their officers, even by the chiefs themselves. Are you saying Derek Chauvin might get his job back? It's not beyond the realm of possibility through an adjudication process. Totally. So these contracts keep the public from knowing exactly how many complaints have been filed against officers. They don't even tell you what the complaints specifically are.

And then they have built-in protections that sort of make it really hard to discipline the officers. Is that fair? That's 100% correct. How did police unions end up with such cushy contracts? It's a complicated answer, but I sort of throw it into two buckets. There's the first part, it's sort of the hero narrative, right? We go out and handle dangerous situations, which is absolutely true. And so that means that any elected official who takes a stance that might quote unquote limit or somehow infringe upon what the police say that they need in order to do their jobs is almost political suicide because nobody in political life wants to be seen as obstructing what our local heroes need.

The second bucket is a little bit more concrete and easy to understand in the sense that a lot of these unions, particularly in bigger cities, is that these organizations are incredible fundraisers. And so that means that they are contributing quite heavily to candidates who support their agendas, who are going to be reliable votes when their contracts come up for ratification again. And so we've seen this, for example, in San Francisco, there was a public defender by the name of Chessa Bowden, who was running for the city's district attorney position, and he was running on a reformer's agenda. He was promoting a lot of the ideas that a lot of the people who are in the streets right now want to see enacted. A coalition of

police unions from across the state of California cobbled together $700,000 in campaign contributions to oppose his election. They were supporting other candidates and they're also running ads against him. Chesa Bowden, for context, had barely out-raised the amount of money that the police unions themselves had raised against him. So the candidate was almost matched dollar for dollar by the unions alone. The Police Officers Association has spent about $400,000 on TV ads alone against candidate Chesa Boudin, an attorney with San Francisco's Public Defender's Office who they say is soft on gang members and drunk drivers. After days of vote conning in a very close race, election officials announced San Francisco's new district attorney

Chesa Boudin. Right now Chesa Boudin is inside El Rio celebrating his victory. There was a very large crowd here. So there are real financial consequences when it comes to the ballot box that, you know, these unions present. And so that's definitely something that I think has led to a lot of politicians really cowering in the face of these police unions. More with Melissa after a break. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.

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is very much tied to a conservative ideology. I mean, those two things are just married, right? Yeah. But what we've seen, particularly, I'd say, since the early 2000s, we started to see a little bit more questioning rising up from the grassroots. The next thing we know is the Obama administration steps in and they come in with the Department of Justice that is particularly interested in executing police reform. President Obama's promising change in police departments across the country. His comments come ahead of two soon-to-be-released reports on the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Today, I'm here to announce that the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether the Chicago Police Department has engaged in a pattern or practice of violations of the Constitution or federal law.

And that really draws the ire of these unions to be scrutinized so deeply. And then that happens in tandem with the rise of Black Lives Matter. And those two forces are just, you know, gasoline on that fire. And the unions really, really take what we see as a hard right turn at roughly the same amount of time. So like everything else that's ever happened to this country, this is Barack Obama's fault? Absolutely. I mean, Barack and that tan suit really put it over the edge. They're like, real men wear blue. What did this shift to the right for police unions look like?

I mean, during the Obama years, obviously it wasn't sort of a shift to Donald Trump, but was it a shift to Republican candidates at a local level, at a state level? At least during, you know, the initial Obama years, it was just voicing their discontent at really, really loud, boisterous levels. Look, President Barack Obama has been a one-man wrecking crew as it relates to safe communities. He's declared war on the police. He's dismantled effective law enforcement with this 21st century task force of emphasizing de-escalation.

He's been a criminal perpetrator's dream and a nightmare for the American police officer. This is also happening at the time of, like, the explosion of social media, right? It might not be that necessarily that these views have changed so much. It's just that we're able to hear them talk to each other in ways that we never have before. And what we've seen, you know, most recently is there was an organization out of Philadelphia called the Plainview Project. And what they did is they scraped the data from many of these social media posts from officers, and they were able to present some of these conversations that officers are having

with one another that shows images of a big rig driving through protesters in Ferguson, and the front is bloodied, and it has superimposed images of, like, you know, body parts of protesters and a meme that says, just drove through Ferguson, didn't see a problem there. Check out these social media posts. It's a good day for a chokehold. Or hope that this piece of S is dealt with by street justice or just plain karma quickly, hopefully by police gunfire. Or F these Muslim, well, you can read it.

How much power do these unions have over the actual day-to-day politics of a given city or state? I mean, what influence do they have over a city's budget or a state's budget, for example? It's sort of the way that the contract negotiations work ends up having a day-to-day influence on everything that we in our communities touch. I have told some friends of mine just recently that the most influential person in your city, you most likely don't know the name of, and that's the union head in your particular city. And that's because police oftentimes are driving the entire city budget discussion. The entire budget, not the police budget, but the entire budget? The police make up the single biggest line item on the budget of so

many of these municipalities. For example, in Los Angeles, you see out of a $10 billion budget, the police represent, say, a little over $3 billion of that particular budget, and the mayor is still proposing increases of 7% to that particular budget. And it's important to realize that this is happening in the context of a COVID economy, right? Where the city of Los Angeles is proposing major furloughs to most of its other city employees while refusing to touch the budget of, not only refusing to touch it as in terms of cutting it, but is saying that these 7% raises

that the officers are due is sacred. We cannot touch those. We see that also in New York, where the city budget is going to have to cut educational expenses by 3%, whereas the New York Police Department budget is going to see a hit of 0.3%. Right. I mean, the sort of state of what we saw from healthcare workers in city hospitals comes to mind. These were people wearing literal garbage bags to protect themselves from COVID. And then you see these cops coming out now this week and last week in New York with World War III style military gear. And you're just like, where's all the money going? I wonder, is there like a

city that's taken on police budgets and won in recent years? We have one sort of tiny glimmer of hope, and that's coming out of Austin, Texas. Austin, a few years back, became what we think to be the first city to convince its city council to reject a union contract. And that happened through grassroots efforts in which particularly Black advocates had come to the fore. They attended every city council meeting that they could in which this was going to be addressed to make sure that the city council knew that the community wanted real reform. And they finally convinced their city counselors that there were enough people watching and who were willing to take them to task at the ballot box if they didn't actually include more reform,

and they won. There's a grassroots effort called Campaign Zero that's collecting and coding a lot of these police contracts so that people in various communities can go back and say, hey, this is what we want. We know this is what your contract includes, and this is unacceptable to us as a community. Strangely, I've received more reader mail on this story than almost any I've written, you know, in the two decades I've been a reporter. And I think that that's because police contracts are a tangible way to be able to sort of channel this energy about systemic racism into concrete action. So if somebody in a community were to ask me, what would you do? One of the things that's obvious is these police contracts are still public record. So anybody can log online in most municipalities and get a copy. You can

see when those contracts expire and you can look at the major provisions and see like, how do they account for discipline? How are they paid? Do they get to choose their own assignments, which has been a major issue in Minnesota, for example. I think the average citizen is able to sort of decipher what's reasonable, what's not. Melissa Segura is a fellow at New America and a reporter at BuzzFeed News. You can find her piece on police unions at BuzzFeed.com. It's titled, There's One Big Reason Why Police Brutality Is So Common in the U.S., and that's the police unions. We shared a link with it at our Twitter, at today underscore explained. You can find it there, too.

I'm Sean Ramos for them. It's Today Explained. Thank you.