How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts

Mr. Kroll, who is himself the subject of at least 29 complaints, has also chided the Obama administration for its “oppression of police,” and praised President Trump as someone who “put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

In other instances, unions have not resisted reforms outright, but have made them difficult to put in place. Federal intervention is often one of the few reliable ways of reforming police departments. But in Cleveland, the union helped slow the adoption of reforms mandated by a federal consent decree, according to Jonathan Smith, a former U.S. Justice Department official who oversaw the government’s investigation of policing practices there.

Mr. Smith said union officials had signaled to rank-and-file officers that the changes should not be taken seriously, such as a requirement that they report and investigate instances in which they pointed a gun. “I heard this in lots of departments,” Mr. Smith said. “‘Wait it out. Do the minimum you have to do.’” He said he believed that the reforms have since taken hold.

Steve Loomis, the Cleveland police union president at the time of the consent decree, said he and his colleagues saw some of the mandated rules as counterproductive.

“Every time a kid points a gun, he has to do a use-of-force investigation,” Mr. Loomis said of his younger colleagues. “Now guys aren’t pointing their guns when they should be pointing their guns.”

Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, posited that many police officers see themselves as authority figures who equate compromise with weakness. Other experts said it was rational for police unions, which are often regarded with suspicion by others in the labor movement and see themselves as distinct from it, to protect their members so relentlessly.

“A major role for police unions is basically as an insurance policy,” said Dale Belman, a labor relations professor at Michigan State University who has consulted for police unions. “The feeling of a lot of officers is that it’s very easy to sacrifice them. Something goes wrong and boom.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapolis-kroll.html