For many critics police unions are the chief obstacle to fighting police abuse, and Kroll and Mullins exemplify the worst of police unionism: a proud willingness to defend even the worst agents of police violence at any cost, and to gum up investigations and lawsuits and prevent penalties when abuse occurs. Critics’ solution: Abolish police unions.
Others, however, worry that union-busting the police invites broader attacks on public-sector unionism. Many critiques of police unions — that they are too powerful, that they bargain for compensation that costs cities too much and that their interests intrinsically contradict the public interest — have been leveled against other public-sector workers like teachers and nurses. How can we remedy the harms police unions have promoted and perpetrated for decades without undermining public-sector unionism as a whole?
The history of police unionism offers one solution: strict limits on when police can acceptably resort to violence.
For the first half-century after police began organizing around 1900, police unions were illegal in most of the United States, especially after the suppressed Boston police strike of 1919. City governments feared the negative political repercussions of permitting the independent organization of the agents of state violence. In some cities, these de jure bans did not prevent police associations from lobbying over compensation and working conditions. But overall, these associations were relatively weak.
This picture changed in the 1950s and ‘60s, when police unions first won widespread recognition and collective bargaining rights, organizing in response to political reformers who worked to rein in police corruption and the police abuse that fell heaviest on the backs of black communities. For instance, under Mayor Richardson Dilworth in Philadelphia, a hotbed of mid-century police reform, scores of officers were fired for corruption, and the city established the nation’s first civilian review board.
Mayors like Dilworth were not “anti-police” — they believed they were making departments better at fighting crime, and they often paired reforms with increased funding — but police unions aggressively opposed these measures as the meddling of overbearing reformer-managers who misunderstood or actively undermined their work. They bristled at civilian oversight, seeing it as uninformed, inappropriate and demeaning.
Like Kroll and Mullins today, postwar police unionists framed themselves as victims, “second-class citizens” “handcuffed” by politicians more interested in stripping them of their rights than in letting them fight crime. They claimed to have their hands tied during the urban uprisings of the 1960s, prevented by civilian authorities from restoring order.
Both feeding and riding the rising wave of law-and-order politics, police unionists used this framing to win contracts, legislation and court decisions that shielded their members from oversight and discipline. Some provisions limited the window to file a complaint and blocked public access to personnel files, preventing the reporting or investigation, let alone disciplining, of abuse.
Police unionists claimed to need the protection of these unions and these laws to effectively safeguard “law-abiding citizens” from the threat of crime. Crime, however, was always a nebulous and flexible concept. It could be manipulated to justify almost unlimited police authority.