Police Unions Produce Rules That Protect Bad Actors, That’s How Public Unions Work

One of the important points to
keep in mind as the protests over the killing of unarmed
18-year-old Michael Brown  in Ferguson, Missouri, over the
weekend, is that many of the privileges now afforded the unnamed
officer who shot him (such as the very fact that his identity
remains undisclosed) come from the contracts police unions are able
to negotiate with local governments. The officer likely wasn’t
required to make a statement for 24 to 72 hours after the shooting.
Such a courtesy is extended in many police contracts. The argument
goes that cops are not flight risks and would provide more accurate
testimony outside of the “fog of war” of the moment. Almost every
union-negotiated police contract in the United States includes
rules preventing police chiefs and mayors from summarily dismissing
problem cops. Instead, these “public servants” are offered an
administrative “due process” pretty much unheard of in the public
sector. Appearance of impropriety alone becomes insufficient cause
for termination.

This is the way cop, and all unions, work. The union negotiates
on behalf of employees, seeking higher pay, better work conditions,
and more job protections. In the private sector, on the other side
of the negotiating table is the employer, who is seeking, generally
speaking, lower costs and higher profits. Both sides need each
other in a specific sense: employers need capable employees to keep
their businesses running, employees need profitable employers so
that they can continue to have jobs. Absent government
intervention, these two sides almost always reach a mutually
agreeable conclusion.  A decent contract benefits the
employees and the employers.

That relationship is fundamentally different in the case of
public sector unions. As is its role, the public union negotiates
for higher pay, better work conditions, and more job protections.
But on the other side, the “employer” (theoretically local
residents/taxpayers) is represented by the local government. The
local government may be interested in a modicum of fiscal restraint
because it has a budget to more or less balance. But local
government officials have other interests, like securing the
support of politically powerful public unions to raise money and
win elections. Public unions and government officials, then, don’t
have the kind of adversarial but mutually-beneficial relationship
that makes private union negotiations work. Instead, they are
incentivized to cooperate to each other’s benefit, at the expense
of taxpayers, who foot the bill for the contract goodies and later
from any wrongdoing the contract demands is defended.

And so police chiefs and political leaders, like those in
Ferguson, are powerless to fire cops who through their actions
wreck community relations and compromise the perceived integrity of
the police force. Whether Ferguson’s police chief or mayor are
actually interested in firing this cop is hardly known. But in the
current situation, their hands are tied by an intricate system of
legal protections built for cops around the country. Firing Michael
Brown’s killer would not make him guilty of murder. That’s what
jury trials are for in this free country. But cops, who are
authorized by the government to use violence to attain their goals,
ought to be held to a higher standard than everyday criminals, not
lower ones. A job is a privilege, not a right. Much of the left has
been pushing the opposite idea, especially about public sector
jobs. The corruption and abuse of power that’s cultivated ought to
come as no surprise.