1st Rule of Policing: Police have the right and the duty to go home at the end of each watch. It does not matter how many non-law enforcement personnel are injured or killed or have their “rights” violated to achieve this goal as Police are entitled to impunity for their violence and protection from harm above all others.
Grand Jury Report Rips Police, FOP President Over Officer-Involved Investigations In 2017 By PATRICK DOYLE, MEGAN HARRIS & LUCY PERKINS • DEC 7, 2018
MEGAN HARRIS / 90.5 WESA An Allegheny County grand jury report released on Friday says the Pittsburgh Police command staff failed to properly conduct investigations following two officer-involved shootings, and stood by as Robert Swartzwelder, the president of Pittsburgh’s Fraternal Order of Police union, interfered with those investigations.
The first shooting detailed in the report occurred on January 22, 2017, when police officers shot and killed Christopher Mark Tompkins during an incident at 129 Finley Street in Larimer.
The grand jury report ultimately concluded that the officers “acted in accordance with their training” and were justified in the shooting of Tompkins, but that officers’ lack of initial cooperation “led to an inference that officers were ‘covering up’ what had happened and raised questions regarding the integrity of critical incidents within the city of Pittsburgh.”
At the time, Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office detectives were charged with investigating shootings involving Pittsburgh Police officers. The DA detectives expected to get first-hand accounts from the police officers involved. The report says “the protocol at the time called for the Pittsburgh police to conduct the interviews of any of its officers who were involved in, or witnesses to, the critical incident. District Attorney Detectives were supposed to sit in and observe these interviews as they took place.”
But in this case, the report says the detectives weren’t able to do so. FOP president Swartzwelder actually removed the involved officers from police headquarters, preventing DA detectives from participating “in any interviews of officers conducted on the night of the incident.”
Swartzwelder did not immediately return calls for comment. The FOP's official response to the grand jury report said that "several of the factual claims are not accurate" and that it strongly objected to the report's "conclusions regarding the impropriety of Mr. Swartzwelder's conduct at the incidents."
The report notes that the “command staff from the City Police acquiesced to many of Swartzwelder’s demands and did not enforce long-standing policies on conducting critical incident investigations.”
Following another officer-involved shooting at an East Liberty Sunoco gas station on April 29, 2017, the grand jury report says that Swartzwelder interfered again, while police leadership stood by.
The report says Swartzwelder doubled down on his methods in a podcast appearance later that year, criticizing top brass, the district attorney’s office, the U.S. Attorney, federal judge, investigators, FBI agents and fellow local law enforcement officers who he believed mishandled a separate officer-involved incident, but never addressed the actions of the officer himself. “[Swartzwelder] casts wild aspersions upon others regarding their competency and ethics,” according to the report, and then goes on to insist criminal investigations be carried out quickly and thoroughly with access to all involved parties. The report states, “It is hard to ignore the obvious hypocrisy between these words and his obstructive behavior following the Finley Street and Sunoco critical incidents.”
In 2018, the protocol around officer-involved shooting was changed with a new memorandum of understanding (MOU), removing the responsibility from the Allegheny County District Attorney Office and placing it with the Allegheny County Police Department, which now has “full investigative and supervisory authority” following officer shootings. The grand jury report was supportive of that policy update.
While the grand jury report did not recommend criminal charges against Swartzwelder, it notes that his interference in the investigations “created a suspicion of wrongdoing.”
Furthermore, the report notes, “We are also hopeful that the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police Fort Pitt Lodge #1 recognizes the need for a full investigation into critical incidents while respecting the constitutional rights of the officers involved. Only a full, fair and transparent investigation can lead to a determination of whether an officer was justified in his or her use of force. We expect that should the FOP continue its practice of manufacturing obstacles to such investigations their actions will be subject to a criminal investigation.”
In the future, the grand jury says, “we expect that the men and women of the Pittsburgh Police Department will follow the protocols adopted, rather than putting up unnecessary roadblocks at the behest of Union leadership.”
The report makes 10 recommendations. Among them, that the bureau review its existing internal policy to make it “abundantly clear” that officers involved in critical incidents – including those that involve the discharge of a weapon or injury – know their rights independent of FOP advice, and asks all officers to re-train on Miranda and Garrity rights, which cover self-incrimination.
Future obstruction or interference by the FOP or any individual office will be reviewed for criminal charges by the DA’s office or by the U.S. Attorney, according to the report.
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto released a statement following the grand jury report, saying his administration fully cooperated with the grand jury investigation, “and was pleased with the Grand Jury’s findings that the City’s move to engage the Allegheny County Police Department to oversee independent investigations of police shooting incidents has made great strides in addressing such matters.”
Peduto said “many” of the grand jury’s ten recommendations “were already implemented by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police before the report was issued.”
Peduto went on to say, “Claims in the Grand Jury’s report about Police Bureau command staff ‘passivity’ at critical incident scenes before the MOU was implemented – when the investigations were then overseen by the Allegheny County District Attorney’s office – are addressed in the Bureau’s answer to the report. It must be noted that at any time the supervising detectives from the District Attorney’s office could have intervened to stop the FOP President’s interference at the scenes, but did not do so.”
The police bureau’s response to the grand jury report indicated that while the bureau supports of many of the grand jury recommendations, it disagreed with the claim that the command staff passively stood by or that the DA’s detectives put them “on notice” that Swartzwelder “was preventing them from carrying out their duties.”
WESA's legal analyst David Harris is an endowed professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. He calls this report a shot across the bow.
“I think what the grand jury is saying is that it saw the behavior at these critical incidents to be not zealous representation by a union officer, but behavior that came perilously close to obstructing an investigation,” said Harris.
“The really unusual thing is that this was written at all,” he said. “It takes to task not only the conduct of the head of the union in very specific ways – nearly accusing him of obstructing justice with a criminal charge – but it takes on the top brass of a police department and finds fault with them, too. I can't think of another situation where an official body or another public agency has taken on both of those things and basically said 'Don't do these things again. We are watching you.'"
PBA President calls it “very bad news for New Yorkers who want more police-community engagement and less government surveillance.”
Today, at the request of the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the
case, the Federal Monitor overseeing the settlement in the stop,
question and frisk lawsuits against the City of New York submitted a
proposal for a court-ordered pilot program. The program requires police
officers to document Level 1 and Level 2 street encounters (i.e.,
encounters not rising to the level of a Level 3 "reasonable suspicion"
stop) using body-worn cameras. The proposal must be approved by that
same judge before going into effect. See a copy of the Monitor's proposal.
PBA President Patrick J. Lynch said:
"The proposed pilot is very bad news for
New Yorkers who want more police-community engagement and less
government surveillance. It would require police officers to switch on
their body-cameras almost every time they speak to a member of the
public, even when they have zero suspicion that criminal activity is
afoot. Even worse, they would have a third-party 'observer' tagging
along for the duration of the pilot program. The results will be a
colossal increase in police officers' administrative workload, a drain
on NYPD resources and the production of countless of hours of
government-controlled video footage of individuals who are not criminal
suspects. New Yorkers who want their cops to be real members of the
community — not automated surveillance drones — need to speak out
against this misguided and wasteful proposal."
SALT LAKE CITY -- Just over a year ago, Jeff Payne became instantly
infamous when body camera footage of him arresting University of Utah
nurse, Alex Wubbels, turned into a viral sensation.
“People think I just walked in and lost it,” said Payne.
However, to really understand it, we need to start with dash cam
video of a fiery crash in Cache County. A man running from Logan police
hit a semi-truck driven head-on. The suspect died on scene and the truck
driver, Bill Gray was rushed to the University of Utah Hospital. Logan
Police asked Payne, one of Salt Lake City Police Department’s few
phlebotomists, to collect Gray's blood.
“They wanted blood from this person just to verify that he was not impaired in any way,” said Payne.
When Payne arrived at the hospital he spoke with the nurse in charge, Alex Wubbels and told her what he was there to do.
“She was telling me that she wasn't sure if I could or not. She would have to check with her superiors,” said Payne.
That’s when Payne says he called his watch commander, Lt. James Tracy.
“If I couldn't get the blood draw at that point, he was going to
order me to arrest her for interfering with a criminal investigation. I
sat in the waiting room for about an hour and a half with no word from
anyone,” said Payne.
When nurse Wubbels came back and said he couldn't draw the blood, Payne says he got up to leave.
“As I was walking towards the elevator, nurse Wubbels was behind me and she asked for my business card,” said Payne.
He didn't have a card on him, but said she could come with him to his
patrol car to get one. In the elevator, he called Lt. Tracy and handed
her the phone.
“She spoke for several minutes to Lt. Tracy,” said Payne.
Citing implied consent and exigent circumstances, Lt. Tracy told
nurse Wubbels that if she prevented detective Payne from withdrawing
blood, he would order him to arrest her.
“She says she's just doing what her bosses tell her to do and I acknowledged that and said that's what I'm doing,” said Payne.
Payne said at one point, nurse Wubbels asked a University of Utah
police officer, who was standing nearby, to step in, but he told her he
couldn’t get involved.
“She also got security to show up and when she asked them for help
she was told that it's a police matter and they cannot get involved,”
said Payne.
After more than two hours going back and forth, Payne decided to go forward with the arrest.
“The decision was made to arrest her. I had to do something and unfortunately, a lot of people didn't like what I did,” he said.
Payne said when he went in to make the arrest, Wubbels resisted.
“When I reached out to take her wrist and she pulled back, whether
people want to admit it or not, that's being physical. She at that point
is physically resisting,” said Payne.
Payne says he followed police training.
“You use force one step higher than the person you are arresting, so
if they’re compliant and put their hands behind their back, you put
handcuffs on them and you go. If they pull a knife, you got to go one
step higher. She kept struggling with me so that I had to use that
little bit of force to get her out the door so that I could get this
situation under control,” said Payne.
When Lt. Tracy arrived on the scene, he decided to release nurse Wubbels and screen charges later.
The next day, Payne was told internal affairs was investigating the incident.
“I felt that I had done everything within the law and within policy,” said Payne.
Before the internal investigation was complete, nurse Wubbels'
lawyer, Karra Porter, released the body camera footage to the media.
“Everybody who hates cops had something negative to say,” said Payne.
When the video gained international attention, Payne was put on administrative leave. A month later he was fired.
“He did everything he could to make me look horrible enough to justify the termination,” said Payne.
Payne said he believes Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown
succumbed to public pressure, especially after his boss, Mayor Jackie
Biskupski, got involved.
“The social media went wild, and those are people who have the chance
to vote for the mayor or vote against her so she's going to do what she
needs to do to get votes. I was the sacrificial lamb,” said Payne.
Nurse Wubbels got a half-million-dollar settlement. Payne's watch
commander, Lt. Tracy, was demoted but is still employed and the police
department's policy regarding blood draws on unconscious patients was
changed a few weeks after the incident.
“I thought it was very ironic that I was following a policy that was
in effect. They didn’t like it, so two weeks after the incident, they
changed the policy and still fire me,” said Payne.
"What do you think the proper form of discipline would’ve been?” asked Fox13’s Dora Scheidell.
“I think terminating me was extremely excessive. They were not happy.
They said it was an embarrassment, you know, what I did. Okay. If I
don`t know the proper way to handle that situation, then that`s a
training issue,” said Payne.
Even though Payne was the senior phlebotomist, he said the department never trained him on the laws regarding blood draws.
“I felt that I knew everything that the department had given us, and I
even did a lot of the training to other phlebotomists,” said Payne.
“In the arrest, there was a large degree of physicality. What is your
reason, why did you think that level of physicality was necessary to
make that arrest?” asked Scheidell.
“You say a large degree. I got ahold of her and I escorted her
outside. To me, I'm going above what her resistance was, just enough to
get it done,” said Payne.
Payne said when nurse Wubbels resisted the arrest, he followed his training by taking his level of force one level above hers.
“Do you feel in retrospect, that arrest was necessary?” asked Scheidell.
“Absolutely necessary, no, but still she was doing what I believe, was interfering,” said Payne.
Payne says he only recently watched the body camera footage.
“When you look at the video, you don't see anything wrong with it?” asked Scheidell.
“Not that wrong. Could’ve been done different, yeah but was it wrong?
No, but a lot of people will disagree with me,” said Payne.
He's suing for wrongful termination and asking for $1.5 million in
damages, but mostly, the veteran of 27 years wants his job back.
“I’m working at a job that pays a little above minimum wage and still
trying to keep my household together. My life is destroyed because of
this and I don't know how many years it’s going to take to have some
sort of peace,” said Payne.
Despite the damage, Payne says he has no hard feelings towards the nurse who held her ground and changed the course of his life.
“I don't hold any animosity towards her. She was doing her job. I was
doing my job. Unfortunately, it conflicted and I'm the one that bears
most of the burden from it,” said Payne.
The Salt Lake Police Department responded to Fox13’s interview with
former detective Payne. Dora Scheidell sat down with Salt Lake City
Police's Public Information Officer, Brandon Shearer, who responded to
some of Payne’s claims directly.
“Although Lt. Tracy did tell him that, Lt. Tracy was not provided with all the information that Jeff had,” said Shearer.
Sgt. Shearer is referring to a detail outlined in Chief Mike Brown's
decision to terminate. After the arrest, Payne told Lt. Tracy he had
spoken to the Logan Police Department twice and they weren't upset by
his inability to obtain the blood sample.
“The Logan police department had said to you, if you can’t get the
blood it's okay. Why didn't you communicate that to Lt. Tracy?” asked
Scheidell.
“I called Lt. Tracy, handed the phone to her, and the dynamics of the
incident changed. At that point, I wasn't thinking about the phone call
to Logan. It was a very casual, nonchalant phone call that at that
point, it wasn`t even on my mind,” said Payne.
Payne also mentioned several times, as the department's senior
phlebotomist, he was never trained on the laws regarding blood draws.
“When we specialize in certain areas sometimes it’s incumbent upon us
to understand the laws for which we are required to enforce,” said
Shearer.
As for Payne’s claim that Chief Brown succumbed to public pressure, Shearer says there’s no truth to it.
“I think he was under orders to get rid of me,” said Payne.
“The chief stands behind this decision and it was his decision. It's his decision to make,” said Shearer.
Payne is still in the process of appealing his termination with the
civil service commission and moving forward with his wrongful
termination suit.
We also reached out to nurse Wubbels and her attorney, but haven't heard back from them yet.
You can read chief brown's full 17-page decision to terminate here: Redacted decision from Chief Mike Brown
You’ve likely seen the video. A Salt Lake City detective wrestling a
screaming nurse out of the University of Utah emergency room more than a
year ago. And you may know he lost his job over the incident. But you
haven’t heard what Detective Jeff Payne has to say about his
confrontation with nurse Alex Wubbels, which made headlines around the
world.
He wants you to know that he doesn’t think he did anything wrong and he
isn’t sorry. He’s planning to sue the city for $1.5 million and he
criticizes the police chief, who he thinks should have defended him.
But Payne said he doesn’t have any ill will toward Wubbels.
“She was doing her job,” he said. “I was doing my job. And
unfortunately, it conflicted. And I am the one who bears most of the
burden for it.”
On July 26, 2017, Wubbels refused to allow Payne to draw blood from an
unconscious patient who had been involved in a fiery crash in Cache
County earlier in the day.
Wubbels pointed out that the crash victim was not under arrest, that
Payne did not have a warrant to draw the blood and that he could not
obtain consent from the patient because the man was unconscious.
Payne insisted he had implied consent to get the blood and eventually
arrested Wubbels. He handcuffed her and placed her in a police car
outside the hospital, then released her after about 20 minutes. Charges
were never filed against Wubbels.
The former detective told FOX 13 reporter Dora Scheidell that he had
been at the hospital for about three hours trying to sort out the
situation. He insists he was only following orders that day — his boss,
Lt. James Tracy, had ordered that he arrest Wubbels if she didn’t let
him draw the patient’s blood.
Wubbels was also following her boss’s instruction. It was when a
hospital administrator, who Wubbels had called and put on speaker phone,
told Payne he was “making a huge mistake” that the officer said he felt
he had no choice.
“I didn’t want it to go that route,” Payne said. “The reason it took as
long as it did to get to that point, I was hoping I could do anything
to avoid arresting her. But when the barrier was put up by her boss, I
felt there was no other alternative than to do what I had been ordered
to do.”
So he told Wubbels she was under arrest. Payne’s body camera video
shows her backing away as Payne reaches out to grab her wrist. The
detective then drags Wubbels out of the hospital as she screams, “Help!
Help! Somebody help me! Stop! Stop! I did nothing wrong!”
Asked about whether he felt the arrest was too forceful, Payne said he
was just following his training: Use force one step higher than the
person you are arresting. He believed Wubbels was “resisting arrest” as
she backed away, so he had to grab her.
“She kept struggling with me,” he said. “So I had to use that little
bit of force to get her out the door and get this situation under
control.”
Backlash
As soon as the video was made public on Aug. 31, 2017, Payne and the
police department became the focus of a barrage of criticism and anger.
The footage was watched millions of times around the world, and the
department received hundreds of emails and thousands of emails. Some even called 911 to complain.
“I couldn’t believe this incident went worldwide,” Payne told FOX 13.
“I still don’t understand why it would go worldwide for this. There’s a
lot more serious cases out there that you don’t hear about. Mine
happened to hit the internet and it went worldwide and all of the social
media jumped in and everybody who hates cops has something negative to
say.”
In
this image provided by the Salt Lake City police department shows
Detective Jeff Payne. Payne, a Utah police officer who was caught on
video roughly handcuffing a nurse because she refused to allow a blood
draw was fired Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2017, in a case that became a
flashpoint in the ongoing national conversation about police use of
force. (Salt Lake City Police, via AP)
Payne said as the fervor grew last summer, an attorney who had
represented him told reporters that Payne wanted to apologize. He thinks
that lead to the city giving Wubbels a $500,000 settlement so she would not file a lawsuit.
But he said he never intended to say he was sorry.
“I don’t think there is anything that I need to apologize for,” he said.
Wubbels’ attorney did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
‘The sacrificial lamb’
After nearly 30 years at the Salt Lake City Police Department, Payne’s career was over. He was also fired from his part-time job as a paramedic.
He felt betrayed, especially by Chief Mike Brown. The chief should have
stood up for his department, Payne said, but instead he felt Brown
vilified him. And once the mayor got involved, Payne felt the situation became political — and he became “the sacrificial lamb.”
He lost his livelihood and his career as a police officer. He struggled
to find a well-paying job — ”Nobody even wants to consider me,” he said
— but has found a job that pays just above minimum wage.
“My life was destroyed because of this,” he said. “And I don’t know how
many years it will take to have some sort of peace to rebuild my life
because of this incident.”
Sgt. Brandon Shearer, a police spokesman, disagreed that Payne was
punished because of public outrage. He pointed to the chief’s letter
where the discipline is outlined, saying Payne made questionable
decisions when other avenues could have been taken.
“He could have asked her to step outside,” Shearer said. “Or step into
another room, rather than arresting her in the middle of the emergency
room.”
Shearer said Payne also should have informed his supervisor of one
critical development: that he had called Logan police, who had been
investigating the crash, and officers told him not to worry if he
couldn’t get the blood. That might have changed Tracy’s decision to
order an arrest, Shearer said.
Payne said that while he was in the moment, he had forgotten to pass on the information from Logan police to Tracy.
Shearer said Brown still stands by his decision to fire Payne.
“It was the chief’s decision,” he said. “And no one else’s.”
Payne in September filed a notice with the city that he planned to sue,
according to documents obtained by FOX 13. He plans to seek $1.5
million associated with lost wages and benefits, emotional distress and
defamation of character.
He believes the situation could have ended much differently if only the
police department had given him better training on blood draw laws. And
he called his firing “extremely excessive,” saying department leaders
instead could have offered him training to correct any mistakes they
felt he made.
“This is a day I never thought I’d see in America, where 12 ordinary
citizens were duped into saving the asses of self-serving politicians at
the expense of a dedicated public servant,”
“This sham trial and shameful verdict is a message to every law
enforcement officer in America that it’s not the perpetrator in front of
you that you need to worry about, it’s the political operatives
stabbing you in the back. What cop would still want to be proactive
fighting crime after this disgusting charade, and are law abiding
citizens ready to pay the price?”
"The cases that were indicted recently in Llano County involve complicated constitutional and legal principles that lawyers, judges and constitutional scholars cannot even agree on…When you start prosecuting police officers for official oppression based on grey or unsettled areas of law; they are not taught that law in the academy or subsequent training, or there are no policies or procedures available you are soon going to run into a situation where officers will hesitate to act - this will result in an innocent victim or Officer being seriously injured or worse." - Travis Williamson, Officer Grant Harden's Attorney" ... "Chief Ratliff guilty of all three counts against him in the Nutt case. The jury determined Ratliff omitted the facts related to Nutt's case. The chief had originally pleaded not guilty to the charges. He was then sentenced to six months in jail but the judge probated his sentence for a year so he won't have to serve any jail time.
“My attorney is working on an appeal now, so I can’t say anything just yet,” Ratliff told KXAN when contacted this week. “When it’s all said and done, I have a lot to tell. There’s case law that justifies what we did."
“It’s not about the First Amendment, not about weapons or open carry,”
Salvaggio said. “This is all about money. These people make money
posting videos to YouTube or suing local government. They have Go Fund
Me and PayPal sites. They’re all anarchists.
“There’s no chain of custody with these videos,” Pasco
says. “How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know
what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard
cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law
enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of
evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.”
“You have 960,000 police officers in this country, and millions of
contacts between those officers and citizens. I’ll bet you can’t name 10
incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied
on a police report,” Pasco says. “Letting people record police officers
is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it
might as well not exist. It would be like saying we should do away with
DNA evidence because there’s a one in a billion chance that it could be
wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our
authority figures.”
Manhattan: Your editorial “Body cam blackout” (May 15) got it
wrong. Neither the appellate judge’s ruling nor the existing law
governing the release of body-cam footage would “bury the videos
forever.” Instead, they will force the NYPD and City Hall to follow a
clear process before releasing the videos, one that protects the rights
of everybody involved. The current law allows a judge to release videos
after hearing from and considering the rights of all interested parties,
including both police officers’ safety and the public’s undeniable
right to privacy in many situations. Police video sometimes captures New
Yorkers’ most embarrassing or painful moments — should they or their
family be forced to relive those moments over and over?
The federal court ruling mandating the NYPD’s body-worn camera
pilot program said nothing whatsoever about the public release of
videos. But the NYPD and City Hall, in their rush to roll out the
cameras ahead of the federal monitor’s study, have treated the program
as a political and public relations tool, ignoring the law and
arbitrarily releasing videos to suit their own ends. Nobody should feel
comfortable with that approach, especially when a clear and fair process
already exists in law. Patrick J. Lynch, president, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assoc.
Police officer who "unlawfully" entered a man's mobile home, tased then arrested a man who told him to "fuck off."for parking his cruiser
in the man's parking spot being sentenced to
27 months after saying "I don't need no warrant". The courts mistakenly rule he very, very clearly did
In serving the interests of cops and prison guards, they hinder
criminal-justice reform and encourage irresponsible public spending.
The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the
City of New York, the largest union representing NYPD officers, took a
bold step toward reform this week: It cut the number of “courtesy cards”
members can give to their friends and family from 30 to 20. If you’ve
never heard of these cards, you’re not alone. They allow their bearers
to skate on speeding tickets or other low-level offenses, and they’re
something of a closely guarded trade secret among officers, perhaps
because of the petty corruption they obviously evince. Unsurprisingly,
not all PBA members were pleased that this particular privilege was
curtailed: “They are treating active members like sh**,” a retired cop
told the New York Post.
Public-sector employees who belong to unions are used to special
treatment, and police officers, apparently, are no different. There are
little or no private alternatives to the services schoolteachers,
air-traffic controllers, police officers, and prison guards provide.
Their unions negotiate directly with politicians, and can demand
policies that benefit them — if not the taxpayers who foot the bill —
because no elected official wants to risk a catastrophic strike. The
result is a tacit, unsavory bargain in which politicians and civil
servants join together to direct public funding and exclusive privileges
to the most favored of all interest groups: politicians and civil
servants.
Republicans typically cite these arguments to justify their efforts to
dismantle such unions. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made this the
centerpiece of his career, and prevailed over counter-campaigns by
Madison’s public sector and its political allies. But support for law
enforcement has become a polarized culture-war issue, and Republicans —
Walker among them — tend to leave unions representing criminal-justice
workers alone as a result.
This is a shame. Law-enforcement unions shape our criminal-justice
policies for the worse and encourage irresponsible public spending to
achieve their own ends. “Take prison guards,” says John Pfaff, a
professor at Fordham Law School who researches criminal justice.
“They’re always going to fight efforts to decarcerate, because if you
start emptying out prisons, you’re going to get demands to close
facilities.” In New York, for example, the prison population fell by
more than 20 percent in recent years, yet the state struggled to close
any prisons, wary of putting unionized corrections officers out of work.
These unions also support the laws that contribute to incarceration in
the first place. California’s correctional-officers union is infamous
for having wielded its political clout on behalf of the state’s
three-strikes law. To a certain kind of conservative, that law was a
triumph at the time, but in the long term it fueled government’s growth
at the expense of defendants.
Nor are police unions supportive of reform. They insist that their
members have special “bills of rights” that shield them from
accountability for misconduct. With a voting base that traditionally
respects first responders, such concessions can be a political winner
for Republicans. But they also have pernicious effects which ought to
worry conservatives not comfortable with increasing the power of the
state at the expense of the citizenry. According to a police-union-watchdog group,
at least 50 cities and 13 states have union contracts that delay
interrogations of police officers accused of wrongdoing. Forty-three
cities, meanwhile, have contracts with local police-union chapters to
erase officers’ misconduct records. Researchers at the University of
Chicago have even found that allowing law-enforcement officials collective-bargaining rights increases the risk of misconduct.
Citizens must recognize the insidious influence these unions wield.
So there’s a compelling case that the negative effects of police unions
extend beyond bloated spending and criminal-justice policy. As Cato’s
Julian Sanchez argues,
union courtesy cards, “bills of rights,” and other such contractual
handouts reflect and reify a view among public officials “that the law —
or at least, some ill-defined subset of it — isn’t a body of rules
binding on all of us, but something we impose on others.”
In unionizing, police officers and prison guards send a message that
they have interests separate from those of the body politic, especially
when the demands they make conflict with market realities or policies
backed by democratically elected leaders.
A push for criminal-justice reform is reportedly in the works at Jared
Kushner’s Office for American Innovation, and there are a few ideas the
federal government could consider to weaken the grip of these unions.
Pfaff points to a policy in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo
offered upstate counties millions of dollars in aid to offset the jobs
they would lose by closing their prisons. Providing subsidies to states
that decarcerate in order to help prison guards find work is “the kind
of thing the federal government could look at,” Pfaff says.
But it would be foolish to suggest that federal policies can solve what
is ultimately a local problem. “It’s hard for the federal government to
have a big impact on incarceration,” Pfaff points out, because the
criminal-justice system is really an amalgamation of disparate state and
local policies. Changing those policies would be more effective in
weakening the power of law-enforcement unions. But first, citizens must
recognize the insidious influence these unions wield. So don’t be too
hard on the officers of the New York PBA for letting slip that they
expect special treatment: They may just have done Americans an
unintentional favor.
