Listen, I’m a fucking syndicalist, but there’s a reason we don’t think cops should have strong unions. A strong union at a business making too high demands just tanks the business, especially if it’s union owned. Because of this union owned businesses tend to prioritize stability over benefits and discourage taking too much for not enough benefit to the whole.
Police are an arm of the municipality. When their union is strong enough to demand whatever it wants the city has to find the money from somewhere else, often through rent seeking applications of civil offenses and misdemeanors. You wind up in a situation where laws are enforced based on how profitable or easy they are to enforce to the cops. What does that look like? Decades of unexamined rape kits sitting in a back room, a 50% murder solve rate, and nobody bothering to investigate your home invasion if you don’t have a surveillance camera, but traffic and parking tickets galore with lots and lots of whatever the cops want. But the library is broke and there’s no money for infrastructure.
And that’s before we get into the fact that this is the people who use violence on behalf of the state. Police and prison guard unions both are incentivised to fight for less restrictions on use of violence by the state. Less consequences for police misconduct or unjustified killing, longer prison sentences, less enforcement those pesky rights that get in their way.
Listen, I’m a fucking syndicalist, but there’s a reason we don’t think cops should have strong unions. A strong union at a business making too high demands just tanks the business, especially if it’s union owned. Because of this union owned businesses tend to prioritize stability over benefits and discourage taking too much for not enough benefit to the whole.
Police are an arm of the municipality. When their union is strong enough to demand whatever it wants the city has to find the money from somewhere else, often through rent seeking applications of civil offenses and misdemeanors. You wind up in a situation where laws are enforced based on how profitable or easy they are to enforce to the cops. What does that look like? Decades of unexamined rape kits sitting in a back room, a 50% murder solve rate, and nobody bothering to investigate your home invasion if you don’t have a surveillance camera, but traffic and parking tickets galore with lots and lots of whatever the cops want. But the library is broke and there’s no money for infrastructure.
And that’s before we get into the fact that this is the people who use violence on behalf of the state. Police and prison guard unions both are incentivised to fight for less restrictions on use of violence by the state. Less consequences for police misconduct or unjustified killing, longer prison sentences, less enforcement those pesky rights that get in their way.