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

less blissful social arrangements: if the police continued to patrol, make arrests,and otherwise conduct surveillance and distribute violence but do so withoutdirection from the local government, this would amount to a transfer of powerfrom the one institution to the other. It would portend the possibility of directrule by the police.In 1919 it was thought, clumsily, that this was a threat to be repressed.And such repression has occurred since then, when police excesses create theconditions for unrest or otherwise threaten the status quo. But police ambitionscannot be permanently repressed if the cops are to continue in their capacity,reliably suppressing the unruly portions of the population. And so, through along series of reforms and negotiations, a strategy of co-optation developed, andwith it emerged the instrument for balancing police loyalty with the demands ofa semi-autonomous organization.These instruments are generally called unions, though that misnomer (likeso many others in "police science") relies on a false analogy to other, dissimilarorganizations. Police unions provide the means by which the officers can collectivelynegotiate with the civil authorities, determine together the conditionsunder which loyalty may be ensured-loyalty to the police commanders, civilauthorities, and the ruling class, respectively. It is not the loyalty of the individualofficers that is at stake: they are not freelancers or mercenaries negotiatinga fee for service. Rather, it is the loyalty of the institution that the officers collectively,through their union, may not control but can disable. Interestingly,this not only increases the power and autonomy of the union, but of the entiredepartment, relative to the rest of the city government. The officers may, underrare conditions, even use their associations to compete with the civil authoritiesfor control. Such power struggles are generally of short duration, but theireffects can be long-lasting. They demonstrate the limit of police loyalty and thethreat of mutiny-really, the usurpation of the institution-and in so doing theyhelp to set the price for that loyalty. When that price is agreed on, the policeagain become fully available for the uses to which the ruling class, the stateauthorities, and their own commanders would put them.As police organize, lobby, and strike, it seems that their negotiations have asmuch to do with the elites' access to, and the smooth functioning of, the policeinstitution itself as with wages and working conditions. In this, police bargainingresembles less the struggles of exploited workers than the agreements formedbetween sovereigns and their intermediaries in the creation or expansion ofstates.172 In fact, in at least one sense, police associations are best conceived of assemi-autonomous, but constitutive, parts of the state.THE POLICE UNION AS A SEMI-AUTONOMOUS COMPONENT OF THE STATEThe independent organization of police officers has done a great deal to protectboth individual cops and whole departments from meaningful oversight.Unionization has thus served to preserve patterns of abuse and discrimination,while at the same time advancing the agenda of law enforcement on the socialand political fronts. This development represents, as per William Westley'sanalysis of police brutality, the collective usurpation of governmental authorityand the means of violence.143