As is their Right.
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.
