Can Police Unions Be a Force for Reform?

Efforts to curb—or even abolish―police unions would not only undermine the principle of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, but remove a potential channel for reform, according to a Columbia Law Review paper. 

In an era of declining labor power, police unions are a rare success story, as they expertly negotiate beneficial working conditions, middle-class salaries and pensions for their members.

At the same time, they are seen as agents of obstruction, whose automatic defense of police misconduct and political lobbying for tough-on-crime policies has become a barrier to changing the justice system.

Many reformers have therefore lobbied for curtailing the power of police unions or, in some cases, their outright abolition.

That would be a “mistake,” writes the paper’s author, Benjamin Levin, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School.

“Police unions have fought to shield their members from public scrutiny and legal accountability (and they) repeatedly have rallied behind politicians hostile to criminal justice reform, racial justice, and labor rights,” acknowledged Levin.

“But embracing these critiques uncritically would be a mistake.”

Photo by Renee Rendler-Kaplan via Flickr

Levin argued that criticism of police unions, while compelling, risks becoming subsumed in an “anti-union” argument that would not achieve the changes in policing behavior critics hope for.

“Attacking police by arguing for stripping organizing rights legitimates anti-union arguments,”  Levin writes. “Adopting these arguments when faced with an unattractive industry or  objectionable union helps bolster a set of arguments against unions in all cases, or at the very least in cases when workers perform controversial labor.”

More significantly, he adds, “reducing these problems to a critique of union power would effectively let politicians off the hook.”

Issues such as accountability, reducing the use of force and qualified immunity have been at the core of police unions’ often bitter opposition to any attempt to change police behavior.

But no one should be surprised that police unions are standing up for their members’ rights as they see them, Levin points out.

Instead, he suggests, dealing with police at the collective bargaining table should be seen as part of a continuum of broader efforts to reform the criminal justice system.

“Police unions are an important lever of power in policing reform,” says the paper. “And, given the challenges inherent in addressing judicial protections for police, perhaps police unions are the right lever on which reformers should focus their attention.”

In other words: treat police unions as labor organizations capable of granting concessions in return for benefits, rather than political entities reformers need to struggle against, or work to destroy.

“Implicitly, there appears to be an assumption that were it not for police unions, activists would have achieved the desired (police) reforms,” Levin wrote.

“But notably absent from this discussion or these critiques tends to be an acknowledgement of the role of ‘management’ (e.g., legislators, mayors, etc.) in these labor negotiations.”

Levin added that “ignoring management’s place in the bargaining process risks letting actual elected officials pass the buck.”

“There’s certainly a lot of space to reduce police powers and to make their legal rights and liabilities more closely resemble those of their civilian counterparts,” he continued. “But at what point does stripping rights remedy concerns about abusive policing?”

Levin argued that efforts to expel police unions from the labor movement, as demanded in a 2015 resolution presented to the AFL-CIO on the grounds that they perpetuate racial bias and officer brutality, are counterproductive.

“A critique of police unions that isn’t coupled with a deeper critique of (police) governance would do little to shift the balance of power,” he concluded.

Benjamin Levin is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School. Levin studies criminal law and policy, while researching and examining criminal justice reform and its relationship to other movements for social and economic change. Prior to joining the Colorado Law faculty, Levin served as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

The full paper can be accessed here. 

TCR staff writer Andrea Cipriano contributed to this summary.