In light of George Floyd's death and the protests that have occurred, policing reform is front and center of political debate. The political climate against police officers is strong enough where affiliates of the AFL-CIO have severed their ties with the International Union of Police Associations. This is a conflict for both the Left and the Right alike. The Left wants to be tough on policing reform, but would have to recognize the role that collective bargaining has played in the systemic issues. The Right is in a pickle because they have a problem with the collective bargaining aspect, but do not want to be perceived as anti-police or soft on crime.
What I argue here today is that much like with other public-sector unions, police unions create perverse incentives that contribute to the problems pointed out by critics of police abuse. Before I begin, I want to say that the system is not completely inept. As the Washington Post pointed out in its 2017 analysis, 37 of some of the largest police municipalities had collectively fired 1,881 officers between 2006 and 2017. That being said, there are still major inefficiencies when it comes to police unionism. For one, one out of every four officers part of the Washington Post analysis were found to have been rehired. If you want some shocking anecdotal evidence, you can read this Atlantic article here. To add onto that, Reuters analyzed 82 major cities and their police union contracts. Two of the major abuses as a result of provisions within the police officers' contracts are the ability to erase disciplinary records and giving officers access to all investigative materials.
There is a limited amount of research on the topic, but let us take a look at some of the academic literature on the effects of police unions:
- Increased rates of misconduct and increased death. Police unions have contributed to misconduct since the 1960s (Bies, 2017). A paper from the University of Chicago looked at "moral character violations" of police officers in Florida from 1996 to 2015. Their main takeaway was that the collective bargaining of police officers resulted in a 40 percent increase of police violence (Dharmapala et al., 2018). University of Victoria economist Rob Gillezeau preliminarily found that collective bargaining of police officers is responsible for 60 to 70 deaths annually.
- Limited accountability measures. A article from Duke Law Review shows how collective bargaining of police officers limits officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, indemnifies police officers [similar to qualified immunity], limits the length of internal investigations, and de facto bans civilian oversight (Rushin, 2017).
- Collective bargaining of police officers is a de facto tax. Taxpayers indirectly cough up the cost for public-sector collective bargaining, whether in the form of paying for a public-sector worker's higher-than-market-value wages, more inefficient allocation of resources, or a lower GDP. In the case of police unions, there are not simply the general costs of negotiating. Police unions have a tendency to push back on internal misconduct reforms, which can be quite costly to handle in court (Harmon, 2012).
Existing research and findings conclude that collective bargaining of police officers results in greater obstacles to disciplinary actions and greater misconduct. There needs to be accountability and discipline of bad apples because public safety is otherwise in jeopardy. The current collective bargaining practices of police unions permits too little accountability and too much abuse. By removing enabling provisions and eliminating [or at least minimizing collective bargaining power in the form of something such as a limited form of minority union bargaining (see Fisk and Richardson, 2016), we would be a step closer to the policing reform that the citizens of the United States deserve.
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