Their profession is heavily unionized. Culturally, they have more in common with bus drivers than business executives. Many come from working-class backgrounds.
Yet on the beat, police come in contact with — to question, to arrest, to brutalize — the most disadvantaged. This presents a problem for radicals. If the Left stands for anything, it’s worker emancipation and labor militancy. But police and others in the state’s coercive apparatus, workers themselves in many respects, are the keepers of class society. Their jobs exist to maintain social control and protect the status quo.
The introduction of unions to this portion of the state raises additional concerns. Can “coercive unions” ever advocate for the broader working class, rather than members’ narrow self-interests? Or are police unions irredeemably reactionary?
I found a lot of this article mostly pointless. Is it really that hard to decide which side the police are on? But the middle section, on black, ostensibly progressive police unions/groups in apartheid South Africa and the US, is interesting.
There are counterexamples — including, ironically, among police in apartheid-era South Africa.
In the 1980s, black police officers in that country were enforcers of their own subordination. Internally, they were mired in low-level positions and lacked collective-bargaining rights; externally, they couldn’t arrest whites, yet had to quell unrest that threatened to topple the racist Afrikaner government. Economically desperate and typically lured from rural areas by the promise of a paycheck, some, having coarsened once on the force, patrolled restive townships unsympathetically.
Revolutionary organizations and community members urged black police to join the struggle for liberation. In September 1989, they got their aggrieved dissident — Gregory Rockman, a slim, mustachioed lieutenant in a Cape Town suburb. The thirty-year-old lambasted the riot police — “a pack of wild dogs,” in his estimation, that “feasted on the people” — and said he sought “a whole new era of police in South Africa [and] to assure the public they are not enemies but protectors.”
The next month, Rockman presided over the establishment of the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU)–the first real trade union in South Africa, according to the sociologist Monique Marks.
Their first demonstration resulted in the arrest of Rockman and twelve others. Membership mushroomed, but so did management repression. Cops who tried to join were suspended or fired, meetings were broken up by tear gas, and members were bludgeoned with batons. With resistance came solidarity. “The sight of policemen in uniform singing freedom songs and shouting anti-apartheid slogans touched off popular demonstrations of support,” scholar Gavin Cawthra wrote in his 1993 book Policing in South Africa.
Intimately linked to the African National Con-gress, conceived in the crucible of anti-apartheid struggle, the POPCRU’s infancy was a study in social-movement unionism. On their website, they still trumpet their devotion to “advancing the working-class struggle within the criminal justice system.”
But there’s cause for skepticism. Can an established amalgamation of police and prison guards really advance the working-class struggle? Collective bargaining has been won, apartheid has been vanquished. No longer is the POPCRU, in Marks’ words, a “dissident grouping.” What, then, distinguishes this “civil rights union” from a standard US police union? For Marks, this seems to be the wrong comparison. Just as the POPCRU functions as a “watchful eye” that propels the attenuation of police authoritarianism, so too can black political associations drive reform.
The US equivalent group would be the National Black Police Association. They oppose the death penalty, support affirmative action, and condemn police brutality. They aim to “to be the conscience of the criminal justice system, and to enhance the quality of life in the African-American community.” But the group does not unequivocally oppose the unconscionable War on Drugs, a caging frenzy so colossal that the US now imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa during apartheid.
Founded in 1972, just a year after Nixon launched the War on Drugs, the NBPA has been an anemic force for pacification. Over the same decades, the war has ravaged communities of color, the number of racial minorities and women on the beat has increased substantially, and the NBPA has been the “conscience of the criminal justice system.” That the increased presence of women and minorities on the force — laudable, no doubt — hasn’t fundamentally lessened the country’s system of social domination should sober enthusiasts of police reform.
To its credit, the AFL-CIO staked out a strong position against mass incarceration this year. In September, at the federation’s quadrennial convention, federation president Richard Trumka called it “a betrayal of the American promise.” He said, “the practice hurts our people and our communities, it keeps wages low, it suppresses democracy, and we can’t afford to imprison so many people. Nor can our families, our communities, or our country afford the loss of productivity of these people.” Trumka’s forceful statement, and the related resolution, were notable in that the federation’s largest union, AFSCME, counts prison guards among its members. No doubt mindful of this tension between social justice and narrow self-interest, the resolution chiefly indicted the private prison industry, charging “our nation’s profit-driven justice system [with] producing a level of mass incarceration that is anything but just.”
Admirable as the resolution was, it’s likely purely rhetorical, at best a suggestion that locals linked to the prison industrial complex change their tack. The AFL-CIO’s organizational structure is such that the federation has about as much power to compel an obdurate affiliate to change its behavior as a parent does with a grown child. As the AFL-CIO’s constitution states, member unions “are affiliated with, but are not subordinate to, or subject to the general direction and control of, the Federation.” The late journalist Robert Fitch believed this inscribed corruption in the very structure of organized labor. Corrupt or not, the independence of locals unquestionably constricts the federation’s ability to steer coercive unionism in a more constructive direction.
Not to mention they enforce the criminalization of whole sections of labor such as marijuana production and distribution and sex work.