Breaking Rank (47 page)

Whether victims of police wrongdoing die or live out the rest of their lives physically disabled or brain-damaged, you've got to call it the way you see it. Police liability cases are horrible enough—the pain, the suffering, the money. It only makes matters worse when the chief of police gets timid and fails to do the right thing.

It's a horrible cross to bear, keeping your mouth shut when your heart tells you to speak up. Looking back, I believe I did speak up—most of the time. But there's one thing I never did, and it haunts me to this day. I never went to the home of a person we wrongfully injured or killed to accept responsibility and to apologize to his or her family. I would have been given hell by my cops, and by a battery of city lawyers and risk managers. But it would have been the right thing to do.

*
If you want to call a thirty-year prison term impunity, which is what NYPD officer Justin Volpe paid for his
criminal
actions in the Louima case.

CHAPTER 22

UP WITH LABOR, (NOT SO FAST, POLICE UNIONS)

I
WAS PART OF
“management” for twenty-nine of my thirty-four years as a cop, but I'm a labor man at heart. No matter how often I listen to them, I get chills when I hear Woody Guthrie's “Union Maid” or Joan Baez's version of “Joe Hill” (“From San Diego up to Maine / in every mine and mill / where working men defend their rights / it's there you'll find Joe Hill . . .”). Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle,
which I read as a teenager, filled me with a passion for social justice that developed during my twenties. And Barbara Koppel's 1976 film
Harlan County USA
gave me a glimpse into the ancestral home of my father, reminding me of how greed and power corrupt, and why it's imperative that workers everywhere unite in the cause of economic and social justice. Whatever its modern-day faults, American labor comes from a proud history. But there's one sector of “working men” that cannot lay claim to anything remotely resembling a glorious history, certainly not in modern times: the nation's cops. Or, more accurately, their labor unions.

Police unions are, with noteworthy exceptions, a pernicious embarrassment to law enforcement. They've fought ferociously against equal employment opportunity for women, people of color, gays and lesbians. They've opposed citizen review initiatives, and undermined existing accountability measures. They've whined their way to a second set of “due process” protections for brutal or dirty cops. They've done public fund-raising for corrupt, violent, criminal police officers. They've even engaged in systematic exploitation of, and theft from, their own members—and lied about it. And they've resisted even the most rudimentary reforms in community policing, promotions, internal discipline, and other efforts to professionalize the service.

All of which would be tolerable if they lacked clout.

But police unions pack big heat. How they established that power is a fascinating case study. Ironically, they owe a good deal of their political muscle to police management and to citizen critics with whom they waged acrimonious battles throughout the second half of the twentieth century. In San Diego, for example, the union resisted for decades the mere mention of a citizen review board. But in the mid-eighties, learning that some of us in management were researching citizen review possibilities, and spurred on by a ballot initiative, the union pulled a neat trick: They put their
own
civilian review scheme on the ballot. They spent a lot of money, politicked hard for it, and got it passed—the only police union—sponsored citizen review initiative in the country.
*

Police unions fought, and continue to fight, management- or community-pressured reforms such as citizen review boards, the inclusion of citizens on internal shooting review panels, citizen participation in policy councils, the creation of “early warning” systems designed to curb abuses among individual officers. But where they've come to pass, these reforms have improved the public's image of rank-and-file cops—improvements that the unions then convert into constituent pressures on elected officials for higher pay and enhanced benefits.

Union leaders exploit this
unearned
political capital to woo (or frighten) state and local politicians. In the sway of police union power, many politicians, mostly Democrats, have accorded the unions unprecedented access and influence.

One example of the muscle of police unions, cited in an op-ed piece by Anndel Llano of ACLU Texas in the
American-Statesman
(February 4, 2004): “The Austin Police Association operates a political machine that . . . can single-handedly elect or defeat any city council member. The
Statesman
editorial board rightly concluded that the APA's power needs weakening.”

And there's little doubt that police unions in Detroit and Los Angeles, unhappy with their reform-minded chiefs, used their considerable clout to
force two prominent African-American chiefs (Jerry Oliver and Bernard Parks, respectively) out of the business.

I'm not against police unions. On the contrary. Working cops unquestionably need their own labor organization. Before the emergence of true unions in the early years of the twentieth century (as opposed to purely social or fraternal associations—which lasted on the West Coast well into the 1950s and 1960s), cops were systematically used and abused by elected and appointed officials (see sidebar).

Police officers through the 1960s were grossly underpaid (they still are, for my money), and their working conditions were abysmal, and more dangerous (owing to a lack of training and equipment) than necessary. Their bosses often treated them like third-class citizens.

Some chiefs and commanders went out of their way to make life a living hell for their cops: middle-of-the-night transfers for no reason, and with no explanation; involuntary overtime, at no additional compensation; endless, illegal interrogations in internal investigations; nitpicking, demeaning discipline; promotional systems that advanced the chief's cronies; arbitrary assignments to detectives; and on and on. Police unions emerged for the same reason the AFL-CIO, the NEA, and the Teamsters were formed: to redress legitimate grievances, and to demand fair pay and fair play for their members.

As an SDPD sergeant in 1969 I wore a black armband with the number “22” on the left sleeve of my uniform, to signify our pay standing in the state. While I'd taken a firm stand against “blue flu” or other job actions that would jeopardize public safety—I supported Coolidge's dictum that public safety must not be compromised, ever—I had no such scruples when it came to symbolizing, conspicuously, the miserable salaries allocated to the policemen of the second-largest city in California.

But there remain many unattended problems with America's police unions. Let's start with money. Coincident to their rise in power in local and PD politics, many police union leaders developed a pattern of financial abuse. A few recent examples:

       
•
  
In 2003 the former president and treasurer of the Dallas Police Patrolmen's Union was indicted on two counts of stealing from his fellow members. Seems he never left home without his union-issued American Express card, which he used to make the down payment of $2,420 on his new Ford F-150 pickup.

       
•
  
In Hackensack, New Jersey, the treasurer all but gutted his union's benefit fund for the families of deceased officers when he ripped off $180,000.

       
•
  
In Miami, a crooked accountant bilked the Miami Police Relief and Pension Fund, diverting monies to the “Florida Fund.” It was your classic Ponzi scheme, the kind detectives work all the time. When a U.S. judge found out that the cops, who'd learned early about the scheme, had failed—criminally—to report the crime to the FBI for two months (thus recovering their own money at the expense of other bilked investors), he ordered them to repay the other twenty-seven creditors of the bankrupt estate of the Fund, along with $137,243 in back interest. The MPRPF recovery strategy had been orchestrated by its president, who has since been convicted of an unrelated charge of stealing from a police children's charity.

       
•
  
Crooked union officials do seem to like going after funds earmarked for underprivileged kids and families of deceased police officers. Witness the Harris County (Houston area) Deputies Organization. Union officials there pocketed money they'd raised for the Marine Corps' Toys for Tots drive. They wound up repaying the fund a total of $274,756 (including attorneys' fees).

       
•
  
A former Santa Clara County (California) Sheriff's lieutenant and ex-union president has been indicted for grand theft, tax evasion, and money laundering—money he'd raised for, you guessed it, police widows. The tab on this one: $1.4 million.

       
•
  
A past treasurer of the Denver Sheriff's Union skimmed and embezzled from fellow members, and pled guilty to two misdemeanors. Then he ran for the Denver city council (he lost).

George F. Will, a columnist I read only when my blood pressure dips too low, made rare common sense in his May 12, 2003,
Newsweek
column (“The Stiletto's Sharp Idea”). He took on the duplicity of union leaders who demand “transparency” in management practices, including particular budgets and other fiscal matters, but who themselves behave like cabals, withholding critical information from their own members. He quotes Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, cautioning big business not to “ ‘look like you don't want to disclose because you have something to hide.' Said the kettle, calling the pot black.” (Question: How were the police union crooks cited above able to steal so freely from their members? Answer: They hid the dough before they stole it.)