Police Unions and Race

Abstract

8 | International Union Rights | 24/2 FOCUS | UNITED STATES Police Unions and Race Over the past several years, public outrage over accounts of black men, women and children dying in encounters with police has increased. This mounting outrage has given rise to calls for reforms in policing and the criminal justice system as a whole. Community and street protesters call for ‘justice’, and few American institutions have been spared from at least condemning the deadly acts. Religious organisations, educational organisations as well as local, state and government bodies have entered the fray of discussion. These discussions invariably are forced to take into account the challenges of America’s race and racial disparities. On 14 August 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, white police officer Darren Wilson fires 12 rounds and kills Michael Brown an unarmed 18-year old black man. This killing with its images and details widely carried in national media, sparked outrage that simply would not go away. The killing of Michael Brown came at a time when there was an uptick in the notoriety of such encounters since the highly publicised death of Trayvon Martin. Responding to public outcry from within its membership, in February of 2015, the AFL-CIO (the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), a federation of 55 national and international labour unions representing 12.5 million organised workers, launched its Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice, stating: ‘America’s legacy of racism and racial injustice has been and continues to be a fundamental obstacle to workers’ efforts to act together to build better lives for all of us. Racism has always been a key tactic of employers seeking to divide us. But we also have an ugly history of racism in our own movement…. The demand for racial justice cannot be divorced from the fight for economic justice’1. Ensuing discussions witnessed some union members offering expressions of solidarity with Michael Brown’s grieving mother, a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), while others called for equal or greater solidarity with the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA). Some of these discussions have raised the question of whether police unions should exist and whether they should be in the AFL-CIO. To the extent that police officers organise themselves to fight for better wages, hours and working conditions, they should form unions and join with other workers who are fighting for similar advances in their employment situations. This is equally true for the millions of other workers who are employed in America’s correctional and security systems. From Overseers to Officers The current discussions about police, policing, police reform and criminal justice reform in general flow from the egregious and callous acts of brutality and life ending situations carried out by police and inflicted upon primarily people of colour and African Americans in particular. Such actions are increasingly captured on camera, challenging the viewer to authenticate what they saw. Given the racial character of such brutality, and where the perpetrators are often white and the sufferer is black, again calls into question the lingering racist practices to be found in United States society. Both racist practices and policies have their origins and continuance in slavery and have not been formally acknowledged as being wrong by government, or other major institutions. The union movement has not acknowledged or stated unequivocally that slavery was wrong! Such lack of acknowledgement lends itself to safe haven for those who do not fully accept the equality of all workers, and manifest it in their institutional structures and practices. To varying degrees, unions carry the ideological and practical weight of 246 years (1619–1865) of slavery’s history, when Africans in America were not seen as part of the human family in the body politic. An additional 77 years of Jim Crow [a body of segregationist law] did little to counter murderous ideas, nurtured in the American psych over decades. Thus it was easier to accept police as workers than it was to accept housekeepers and farm hands as workers, the majority of whom were people of colour. Police and police organisations are not creations of workers, brought about by workers’ struggles. They...