Black Activists Are Taking On Racist Police Unions

The DC and NYC chapters of Black Youth Project 100, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, and Black Lives Matter shut down the National Fraternal Order of Police and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association yesterday.

Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) and Million Hoodies locked down the NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) to call attention to the lack of accountability for city police and to demand the immediate firing of the officer who murdered Delrawn Small. Meanwhile, BYP100 and Black Lives Matter D.C. halted traffic in the Northeast quadrant of Washington, D.C in protest of the Fraternal Order of Police’s (FOP) actions to criminalize protests against police brutality and negotiate union contracts that shield officers from accountability. (You can learn more about the protests at #StopFOP.)

In describing the rationale for the action, Clarise McCants, an organizer with BYP100 D.C., drew an important parallel between campus anti-violence organizing and the movement to end police brutality:

The FOP acts like a college fraternity and is responsible for maintaining the harmful, lethal, unethical, and unaccountable culture of policing while the families and communities impacted when officers brutalize civilians are left to mourn with little, if any, semblance of justice. Just like college frats that further rape culture by closing ranks to protect members who are sexual assailants, the FOP has proven that their primary commitment is to protect the worst of their members behind the ‘Blue Wall of Silence’ – even in the most heinous of circumstances. The FOP is the most dangerous fraternity in America and they need to be stopped.

But when activists make these important critiques, police unions argue that they, too, are representing marginalized members of the working class (officers make forty-nine thousand dollars a year, on average) and that they are entitled to ask for strong grievance procedures on behalf of their union membership.

Through collective bargaining, police unions have secured due process protections for severe misconduct that exceed protections given to other workers. For example, as the Chicago Tribune reports, the contract negotiated by the Chicago FOP allows cops to delay making statements for days after they kill a civilian, which facilitates cover-up efforts.

Furthermore, cities are often required to provide legal representation to officers accused of misconduct while on duty and to pay court damages that arise from civil actions. In Chicago, the city has spent half a billion on police misconduct settlements since 2004; this massive drain on city resources has helped justify Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s cuts to teacher salaries and school closures in low-income communities of color.

It’s true that protection against arbitrary termination is a central goal of labor organizing. But the actions of organizations like BYP100, Black Lives Matter, and Million Hoodies have consistently underscored the extremity of the police unions’ grievance procedures; if the FOP and PBA valued Black lives, they would not push for officers to avoid accountability after they murder civilians. Nor would they repeatedly smear the reputations of victims of police brutality, resist calls for civilian oversight, and drain billions of dollars from public coffers that could have otherwise gone to investments in city services that would benefit working-class people.

Furthermore, the efforts of police unions to position themselves as protectors of working-class interests are dangerous, as they mobilized class rhetoric in defense of anti-Black racism. Accordingly, Black labor organizers in California have issued a formal request for the AFL-CIO to end its relationship with the International Union of Police Associations, which defended the actions of Darren Wilson when he murdered Michael Brown:

Historically and contemporarily, police unions serve the interests of police forces as an arm of the state, and not the interests of police as laborers. […] Instead, their ‘unionization’ allows police to masquerade as members of the working-class and obfuscates their role in enforcing racism, capitalism, colonialism, and the oppression of the working-class.

In order to advocate for working-class people, unions must be sites of anti-racist resistance. Some labor unions have taken up this call: the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 101 halted work on May Day in 2015 in order to protest police brutality in Oakland. The Chicago Teachers Union has repeatedly adopted explicit stances in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement and pushed against school closures in low-income communities of color. And in an action that was heavily criticized by the PBA, the United Federation of Teachers marched alongside civil rights leaders after Eric Garner was murdered.

But so long as police unions espouse anti-Black racism and police brutality, there should be no place for them within the labor movement.

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