Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

the power and rewards of the upper classes and in the alienation of the workersthey control.147 This basic fact requires elites to treat police differently than otherworkers, seeking through ideology and material incentives to separate them fromthe mass of workers (and the labor movement especially), tying the interests of thepolice to those of capitalism and the state.148 This trick is accomplished throughpeculiar means, using what is ostensibly a labor organization-the police union.POLICE UNIONS AREN ' T UNIONSThe status of police unions, and their relationship to the labor movement as awhole, has always been troublesome. When the NYPD challenged the legalityof the Patrolman's Benevolent Association in 1951, the court ruled that the PBAcould organize police and could negotiate contracts precisely because it wasnot a union. According to the court, the police could join "associations" like thePBA and FOp, but not any organization that had either non-police leadershipor affiliation with non-police unions.149 This ruling represented something of acompromise position, seeking both to preserve the "neutrality" of police actionagainst strikes and to respect the officers' right to free association.As legal reasoning goes, that's not very impressive. New York City PoliceCommissioner Stephen P. Kennedy, who strongly resisted the PBA's demandsfor recognition in the late 1950s, argued that the distinction between an independentassociation and a union was meaningless: "When an organizationacts like a union, talks like a union, makes demands like a union and conductsitself like a union, it cannot be heard to say that it is not a union."15o But thelegal status of police associations is at most a secondary matter. The practicaleffect of the ruling was to privilege the PBAs and FOPs over the Teamstersand AFSCME. Police managers were then quick to recognize (in some cases,to create) associations-especiallv when facing a Tf'am>;tf'1"" organizLrlg drive.The associations gave police management a means of establishing agreed-uponconditions while still discouraging autonomous rank-and-file action and solidaritywith other workers. 1 j 1Police associations thus developed in relative isolation from the rest of thelabor movement, while building close ties with the command hierarchy withinthe departments. This fact points to two related reasons why police unions arenot legitimate labor unions. First, as is discussed above, the police are clearlypart of the managerial machinery of capitalism. Their status as "workers" istherefore problematic.152 Second, the agendas of police unions mostly reflectthe interests of the institution (the police department) rather than those of theworking c1ass.153When the PBA organized in New York, collective bargaining rights weretraded for no-strike agreements and a bar from affiliating with other unions.During the same period, police unions around the country were defecting fromAFSCME to form police-only locals.154 Almost twenty years later, in 1970, theNY PBA took this dissociation further than the law required, moving to breakparity with other city employees, including firefighters, corrections deputies,and sanitation workers.1» This is telling, and not just because it shows the lackof solidarity between police associations and the rest of the working class. Itindicates that police associations organize more along institutional rather than138