"If there is any group for whom unions and job actions seemed unlikely, it was the police personnel. Their job is to preserve law and order; they have traditionally been the strike breakers; and they have been subject to the harshest restrictions against their unionization." Margaret Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency: The Case ofPolice Unions (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977), 2.
Robert M. Fogelson, Bingity Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 196. FOPs were also organized geographically, rather than by department. And they sometimes formed auxiliaries including people from outside of law enforcement. William Bopp, "The Police Rebellion," in The Police Rebellion, ed. William Bopp (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, Publisher, 1971), 13.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 196-197.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 81; and Richard L. Lyons, "The Boston Police Strike of 1919," The New England Quarterly (June 1947): 164. In June 1919, the AFL announced that it would begin chartering police unions. By the end of August, thirty-eight such charters had been issued. Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 151; and Francis Russell, A City in Terror-1919-The Boston Police Strike (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 25.
Russell, City in Terror, 50-51 and 73; and Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 148-149. Of the 1,544 patrolmen, 940 voted for the union; no one voted against it. Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 155.
Russell, City in Terror, 78.
Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 148. Boston was not actually the country's first police strike. That honor goes to a successful walkout among the Ithaca police in 1889. The city council voted to lower police pay, the police struck, and the council immediately rescinded their decision. Russell, City in Error, 233.
Of 1,544 officers, 1,117 went on strike, leaving the force at about one-quarter strength. Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 160.
Russell, City in Terror, 131, 133, and 137-138.
Russell, City in Terror, 122-125.
Russell, City in Terror, 151-152. Additionally, 100 of the 183 state-controlled Metropolitan Park Police were put at Curtis's disposal. (But fifty-eight of these refused the duty and were suspended.) Private companies armed their employees or hired guards, Harvard was patrolled by the university police and ROTC, and federal property was protected by the army. Russell, City in Terror, 119, 127, 150, and 166.
Russell, City in Terror, 149 and 159.
Russell. City in Terror, 162-163 and 167-170.
Russell, City in Terror, 181-182 and 217; and Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 165. Meanwhile, Governor Calvin Coolidge, who had initially refused Mayor Andrew Peters' request for National Guard deployment, positioned himself to take credit for breaking the strike, issuing an executive order placing himself in control of the Boston Police Department. He eventually used the strike to leverage himself into the presidency. Russell, City in Terror, 173-174 and 196-198; and Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 159.
Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 166. After the strike, it took the police department a while to reform itself. For one thing, it had lost most of its officers and, with the stigma of strikebreaking so fresh, faced considerable difficulty finding recruits. To make matters worse, tailors refused to make new uniforms. Lyons, "Boston Police Strike," 165.
Russell, Cityin Terror, 234 and 239;and Fogelson, Big-City Police, 195.
Russell, City in Terror, 48-49 and 183.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 81-82.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 13 and 28-29. Carl Parsell referred to this mode of operation as a "collective begging." Quoted in Fogelson, Big-City Police, 200.
Additionally, the FOP had 169 local chapters. Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency 7.
The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, for example, fired thirty-six officers for organizing with an AFL affiliate. Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 132.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 30-31.
Quoted in Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 31.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 91-92.
Quoted in Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 93.
Quoted in Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 31.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 43. This dynamic was in effect in cities throughout the country. See: Fogelson, Big-City Police, 204.
Quoted in Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 45.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 49-51.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 54-55.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 210.
Rodney Stark, Police Riots: Collective Violence and Law Enforcement (Belmont, CA: Focus Books, 1972), 202.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency; 135.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 140.
These strikes occurred in 1974, 1977, 1978, and 1979, respectively. Richard Lundman, Police and Policing: An Introduction (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980), 41.
"The authorities sharply denounced these job actions; but they were so anxious to get the officers back on the street and so reluctant to tangle with the union that, instead of invoking the legal sanctions, they usually gave in to the demands and granted amnesty to the strikers." Fogelson, Big-City Police, 213.
William Bopp, "The Detroit Police Revolt," in The Police Rebellion, ed. William Bopp (Springfield, IL Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1971), 165.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 112.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 113; and Bopp, "Detroit Police Revolt," 170.
Quoted in Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 114.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 113, 115, and 117; and Bopp, "Detroit Police Revolt," 172.
Bopp, "Detron Police Revolt," 172.
Quoted in Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 120. Levi describes the city's acquiescence: "The effect of the Detroit riot on the police labor dispute was immense.... Officials set about appeasing patrolmen and policewomen in order to make them willing to carry out the work that had to be done. It became imperative to rebuild rank and file morale, ensure department unity and discipline in case of emergency, and develop the means of squelching community discontent without engendering protest from either the police themselves or the subject population. The first step was to reward the patrol force for their participation in putting down the black uprising. [Police Chief Ray] Girardein rescinded the earlier suspensions and pay withholdings. Two weeks after the end of the racial conflict, the Common Council rushed through its approval of the DPOA contract." Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 119.
Bopp, "Detroit Police Revolt," 172.
Levi describes this relationship in New York: "In the next several years, the PBA leaders learned to work closely with the department hierarchy and to negotiate more effectively with the city. Issues of management prerogative remained formally outside the scope of collective bargaining. But, as one legal advisor to the association once remarked, 'What's bargainable is determined by strength, essentially.' Certainly new questions became available for discussion, and the PBA exerted greater direct influence on department policy. At the same time, the city and department learned to demand more for their money. They expected acquiescence to policy innovations in exchange for contract benefits." Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 77. See also: Nicholas Alex, Black in Blue: A Study ofthe Negro Policeman (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), 61-62.
For example, in January 1971, a six-day wildcat strike by 85 percent of New York's patrol officers ended when each striker was fined $600. Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 88-89. The police faced similar reprisals when they acted in solidarity with other workers during the Baltimore AFSCME strike of 1974. The strike began among garbage collectors, demanding higher pay. Soon, the strikers were joined by other public employees, including jailers, park workers, zoo keepers, highway workers, and sewer engineers. After several days, on July 11, the police joined the strike, in violation ofMaryland law.
Looting ensued, and one rioter was killed by an on-duty officer. The next day, Governor Marvin Mandel sent in the state police, with an armored car and police dogs. The National Guard was placed on alert. By July 15, most of the city workers were back on the job, and the strike was defeated. The police union in particular was fined $25,000, and the union president was personally fined another $10,000. Russell, City in Terror, 242-244. See also: Pamela Irving Jackson, Minority Group Threat, Crime, and Policing: Social Context and Social Control (New York: Praeger, 1989), 81. E;
For more on the political machines, see chapter 3.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 72.
The machines were not well equipped to defend themselves. "In short, by virtue of their extraordinary decentralization the machines could not as a rule compel the politicians, policemen, gangsters, and other members to ponder the organization's long-term interests before pursuing their own short-run opportunities." Fogelson, Big-City Police, 73.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 53-54. In areas other than policing, the business model was in the forefront. This predominance was anything but accidental. While governments were undergoing a period of rationalization, corporations were engaged in a similar process. Each set of changes sought to increase the institution's legitimacy by eliminating the appearance ofpartial and personalized control, replacing it with control according to "impartial" and formalized laws - legislative and administrative rules in the case of the government, the dictates of the market for corporations. "For the illusion now appears that not capital but bureaucracy, not capitalists but managers control the large corporations.... 'Rewards' are distributed by 'society' according to ability, or the scarcity of the skill involved and the occupations 'functional importance." Maurice Zeitlin, "On Classes, Class Conflict, and the State: An Introductory Note," in Classes, Class Conflict, and the State: Empirical Studies in Class Analysis, ed. Maurice Zeitlin (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers, Inc., 1980), 9. See also: Sidney Harring, Policinga Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, [865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 30.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 56-58.The crime-prevention focus was paired with a renewed enthusiasm for proactive tactics. "The reformers also thought that, so long as the police forces only responded to civilian complaints, they could not stamp out gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes or keep tabs on trade unions, radical parties, and other left-wing groups. Hence they supported departments that tempted bartenders to sell liquor after hours, enticed women to engage in prostitution, tapped public telephones, infiltrated labor organizations, employed agents provocateurs, and otherwise ignored long-standing restraints on police power." Fogelson, Big-City Police, 90.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 178-180 and 184.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 97.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 74-77. One place where the chief was granted a permanent position was Los Angeles - with disastrous results. See: Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department [The Christopher Commission], Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department (July 9, 1991), 186.
"Most police departments... assumed the additional responsibility to control narcotics, censor motion pictures, curb juvenile delinquency, and infiltrate trade unions and left-wing groups." Fogelson, Big-City Police, 106.
Weber describes an ideal bureaucracy: "Only the supreme chief of the organization occupies his position of dominance (Herrenstellung) by virtue of appropriation, of election, or of having been designated for the succession. But even his authority consists in a sphere oflegal 'competence.' The whole administrative staff under the supreme authority then consists, in the purest type, of individual officials... who are appointed and function according to the following criteria:
They are personally free and subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligations.
They are organized in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices.
Each office has a clearly defined sphere of competence in the legal sense.
The office is filled by a free contractual relationship. Thus, in principle, there is free selection.
Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifications. In the most rational case, this is tested by examination or guaranteed by diplomas certifying technical training, or both. They are appointed, not elected.
They are remunerated by fixed salaries in money, for the most part with a right to pensions....
The office is treated as the sole, or at least the primary, occupation of the incumbent.
It constitutes a career. There is a system of 'promotion' according to seniority or achievement, or both. Promotion is dependent on the judgment of superiors.
The official works entirely separated from ownership of the means of administration and without appropriation of his position.
He is subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of the office." Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. (Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1978). 220-221. Emphasis in original.
Fogelson. Big-City Police, 60.
Fogelson, Big-City Police. 59.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 169.
Though centralization undercut the foundation of the machine system. it can also be read as an extension of the earlier process of consolidating municipal power the very process that established the citywide machines.
Fogelson. Big-City Police, 78-79 and 177.
Fogelson. Big City Police. 58-59.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press. 1974). 125.
In 1923, Berkeley's reform-minded police chief August Vollmer was brought to LA. to clean up the embarrassingly corrupt department. Vollmer's plan concentrated on removing the department from political influences, but he failed to persuade the rank and file not to exploit everyday opportunities for corruption. Lundman, Police and Policing. 178.
Fogelson. Big-City Police. 80-81.
James F. Richardson. Urban Police in the United States (Port Washington. NY: National University Press and Kennikat Press. 1974), 85.
New York Police Commissioner Howard Leary invited such complaints: "If there is any criticism of the department's policies, administration, or operations, it should be directed toward the Police Commissioner, because he is the commander." Quoted in Ed Cray. "The Politics of Blue Power." in The Police Rebellion, ed. William Bopp (Springfield, IL. Charles C. Thomas. Publisher. 1971), 58.
James Richardson notes the political advantages ofthis arrangement for mayors: "A hands-off policy means that the mayors can disclaim any responsibility for police operations... Thus 'no political interference may not always be self-sacrificing. A mayor may give up police patronage or influence, but by so doing he also gives up any political responsibility for the police." Richardson. Urban Police, 131.
Egon Bittner, "The Quasi-Military Organization of the Police," in The Police and Society, ed. Victor E. Kappeler (Prospect Heights. IL: Waveland Press, 1999), 176.
"Available evidence indicates that the source of support reform in municipal government did not come from the lower or middle class, but from the upper class. The leading business groups in each city and professional men closely allied with them instituted and dominated municipal movements..."
Moreover: "These reformers, it should be stressed, comprised not an old but a new upper class. Few came from earlier industrial and mercantile families. Most of them had risen to social position from wealth created after 1870 in the iron, steel, electrical equipment. and other industries, and they lived in the newer rather than the older fashionable areas.... They represented not the old business community. but industries which had developed and grown primarily within the past fifty years and which had come to dominate the city's economic life." Samuel P. Hays, "The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era," Pacific Northwest Quarterly (July 1964): 159 and 160.
"From the common background and experience the reformers derived a common outlook, at the core of which were three distinct yet clearly related assumptions about American society. First, they believed that social mobility was an economic, private, and individual process, as opposed to a political, public, and collective one, and that success was a result of industry, frugality, integrity, and occasional good luck. Second. they held that political legitimacy was a function of the public interest, the common objectives of the entire community, and not of the parochial interests of particular neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and social classes. And third. they thought that American morality was based on a commitment to abstinence and respectability, an abhorrence of self-indulgence and deviance, and a willingness to employ the criminal sanction to distinguish the one from the other." Fogelson, Big-City Police, 47.
Ironically, the Progressives failed to recognize the biases inherent in this perspective. Reformers identified the interests and objectives of their own class as those of the public at large. The ability to sustain such a view, of course, relies on one's own position in the dominant group; it may be that we can ascertain when a class begins to achieve dominance by the emergence of just such a perspective.
Both quoted in Hays, "Politics of Reform," 160. See also: Fogelson, Big-City Police, 37; Sidney Harring, "The Development of the Police Institution in the United States," Crime and Social Justice: A Journal of Radical Criminology (Spring-Summer 1976): 58; and James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 100-104.
Fogelson, Big»City Police, 42.
The reformers emphasized the representative aspects of government at the expense of its participatory aspects. "According to the liberal view of the Progressive Era, the major political innovations of reform involved the equalization of political power through the primary, the direct election ofpublic officials, and the initiative, referendum, and recall. These measures played a large role in the political ideology of the time and were frequently incorporated into new municipal charters. But they provided at best only an occasional and often incidental process of decision-making. Far more important in continuously sustained day-to-day processes ofgovernment were those innovations which centralized decision-making in the hands of fewer and fewer people." Hays, "Politics of Reform," 163.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 47 and 62-63.
Edward C. Banfield and James Wilson, City Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and the MIT Press, 1963), 127. Parentheses in original.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 111-112.
Gramsci, famously, distinguished between "domination" and "intellectual and moral leadership," identifying hegemony with the latter. He argued: "A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to 'liquidate', or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred or allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise 'Ieadership' before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to 'lead' as well." Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks ofAntonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 57-58.
Femia argues along similar lines, suggesting that hegemony operates "by mystifying power relations, by justifying forms of sacrifice and deprivation, by inducing fatalism and passivity, and by narrowing mental horizons." Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 45.
Bernard Shaw, "The Doctor's Dilemma." in The Doctor's Dilemma, Getting Married, & The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, act 1 (London: Constable and Company, 1911).
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 136 and 138.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 143; and Seymour Martin Lipset, "Why Cops Hate Liberals - And Vice Versa," in The Police Rebellion, ed. William Bopp (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1971), 30.
Richardson, Urban Police, 137-138. By 1940, half of the new recruits to the NYPD had bachelor's degrees. This marked a significant change since the time before the Depression, when many policeman had never been to high school (6 percent in New York). Richardson, Urban Police, 138 and 135.
Robert F. Wintersmith, Police and the Bbzch Community (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1974), 65-66.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 144-146.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 150-152.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 154-155. Sociologists identify professions by six characteristics: (1) skills based on theoretical knowledge; (2) education and training; (3) competence ensured by examinations; (4) a code of ethics; (5) provision of a service for the public good; and, (6) a professional association that organizes members. In Nicholas Abercrombie et al., The Penguin Dictionary ofSociology(London: Penguin Books, 2000), s.v. "Profession."
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 158; and Richardson, Urban Police, 131.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 223-225.
Lundman, Police and Policing, 180.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 225.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 227.
Fogelson, Big-City Police. 271; and Lundman, Police and Policing, 181.
During the 19605 and 19705, African Americans and Puerto Ricans sued departments in Boston, Philadelphia, and Oakland, arguing that the entrance requirements were discriminatory. Fogelson, Big-City Police, 230.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 227.
The insistence that commanders be drawn from the ranks greatly limited the pool of applicants, reduced the possibilities for innovative leadership, and institutionalized the existing police culture. The arrangement also solidified the sense of unity between beat cops and their supervisors, with predictable results for discipline. See: Fogelson, Big-City Police, 229.
Lundman, Police ana'Policing, 181.
Carl B. Klockars. "The Rhetoric of Community Policing." in The Police and Society, ed. Victor E. T' Kappeler (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. 1999), 433.
98 Richardson, Urban Police, 148-149.
Fogelson. Big-City Police, 223-225.
Fogelson. Big-City Police, 226.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 187 and 231.
Fogelson. Big«City Police. 188.
Fogelson, Big-(.'ity Police, 241-242.
Quoted in Fogelson, Big-City Police, 207. Emphasis in original.
In April 2001, Cincinnati vice mayor Minette Cooper complained: "Unfortunately. over the years, City Council has made many important concessions to the police union, creating an atmosphere of autonomy within the police division." Quoted in Kevin Osbourne, "Council Wants Police More Accountable." Cincinnati Post. April 10, 2001. http://www.cincypost.c0m/2001/apr/1O/change041001.html (accessed April 25, 2002).
At a June 18, 2002, meeting of the Fort Worth Police Officers' Association, President John Kerr explained the union's relationship with the district attorney and its stake in his reelection: "We're going to support Tim Curry because Tim Curry will not prosecute a police officer who commits a crime." Quoted in Betty Brink, "A Pass for Bad Cops?" Fort Worth (Texas) Weebly, October 3. 2002, http://www.fwweekly.c0o/issues/2002-10-031metropolis.html (accessed February 28. 2003).
Margaret Levi argues that this is an aspect of all public service worker unions. She notes that public employees "organize, as do privately employed workers, when they perceive their pay to be low. their working conditions poor, and the job pressures intolerable. In addition, civil servants sometimes are motivated to form lobbies and unions when the stated aims of administrators are disagreeable." Levi. Bureaucratic Insurgency, 8-9.
Fogelson, Big-City Police. 212-213.
Jerome H. Skolnick, The Politics of Protest: Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation; A Report Submitted by Jerome H. Skolnick [The Skolnick Report; Report of the Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence] (Washington, D.C.: Supt. of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office. 1969). 205. See also: Robert Reiner, The Blue-Coated Worker.' A Sociological Study of Police Unionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). and, Stark, Police Riots, 210. For a related discussion on the influence of prison guards' unions. see Clayton Szczech, "Beyond Autonomy or Dominance: The Political Sociology of Prison Expansion" (bachelor's thesis, Reed College, 2000), 78.
Stark goes on: "Indeed, in their new mood the police reject their historic role as the enforcers of established political and social policies. They now seek the power to determine these policies.... [This pursuit] causes them to challenge radically the authority of their own commanders, the courts, civil authorities, and constitutionality." Stark, Police Riots, 192-193.
In 1995. California Common Cause observed: "If legislators vote against bills supported by police interests, they know they run the risk of being labeled as 'soft on crime.' even if the legislation has nothing to do with public safety. The last thing a legislator wants in an election year is to lose the endorsement of police groups, or worse yet, end up on their hit list." Quoted in Lynne Wilson, "Cops vs. Citizen Review," Covert Action Quarterly (Winter 1995-96): 11. See also: Max Gunther, "Cops in Politics: A Threat to Democracy?" in The Police Rebellion, ed. William J. Bopp (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1971).
Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 206-207.
Fogelson, Big-City Police, 208.
Stark, Police Riots. 212; and Fogelson, Big-City Police, 208.
Quoted in Gunther, "Cops in Politics," 62.
Stark, Police Riots. 209; and Skolnick, Report, 210.
Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 252.
Skolnick, Politics of Protest, 209; and Algernon D. Black, The People and the Police (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 211.
Quoted in William Bopp, "The New York City Referendum on Civilian Review." in The Police Rebellion, ed. William J. Bopp (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1971), 129-130.
Quoted in Skolnick, Politics of Protest. 209. Emphasis in original.
Quoted in Black, People and the Police, 210-211.
Quoted in Stark, Police Riots, 194.
Bopp, "New York City Referendum," 133.
Fogelson. Big-City Police, 286.
Lynne Wilson, "Enforcing Racism," CouertAction Quarterly (Winter 1995-96): 9. The efforts of lack police associations demonstrate the possibility of police support for liberal causes. But these organizations, while stark critics of department policies and a sincere voice for civil rights, always embody something of a compromise. They represent the contradictory positions occupied by Black cops. A Black officer must be constantly aware of his second-class status, even (or especially) within the department. And when he takes off his uniform he merges again, almost wholly, into the mass of people whom it is the cops' job to regard suspiciously, and sometimes to attack, and always to control. These dual roles mark the boundaries of the Black officers' political activity. If, for example, Black police associations only represent the "policing" perspective, there is neither any way to differentiate them from the other (White) police associations, nor any need to. But, if they represent only the "Black" perspective, then they exist only as social or civil rights groups - and as rather conservative ones at that. The result will always be half-measures, which seem radical only by comparison to the department as a whole, and to their White counterparts.
Quoted in Alex, Black in Blue, 167. See also: W Marvin Dulaney, Black Police in America; (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 73.
Quoted in Stark, Police Riots, 197. A similar controversy occurred in Boston when Dick MacEachern, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, instructed members to "uphold the law and disregard any order not to do so." Quoted in William Bopp, "The Patrolmen in Boston," in The Police Rebellion, ed. William]. Bopp (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1971), 182.
The maneuver was calculated to present Cassese as a tough leader and preserve his position in the PBA. Cassese was himself facing a right-wing revolt within the organization, a revolt led by the Law Enforcement Group. Skolnick, Politics ofProtest, 207.
Quoted in Skolnick, Politics of Protest, 213.
Quoted in Stark, Police Riots, 197.
Quoted in Skolnick, Politics of Protest, 213.
Quoted in Fogelson, Big-City Police, 304.
Quoted in George James, "Police Dept. Report Assails Officers in New York Rally," New York Times, September 29, 1992. Elsewhere the language is stronger: "The demonstrators' actions were a clear violation of the law." Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. The New York Times noted that: "In one example, an officer encouraged misconduct. More commonly, [on-duty] oflicers appeared to stand by and observe without taking action." "The Police Demonstration: What the Internal Investigation Found," New York Times, September 29, 1992.
Quoted in James C. McKinley, "Officers Rally and Dinkins Is Their Target," New York Times, September 17, 1992.
Quoted in McKinley, Jr., "Officers Rally."
Quoted in James, "Police Dept. Report."
Giuliani's policies and police-state aspirations are discussed in chapter 9. Ironically, the love affair between Giuliani and the PBA went sour when, as mayor, he insisted on a wage freeze for public employees. Sidney L. Harring and Gerda W Ray, "Policing A Class Society: New York City in the 19905," Social Justice (Summer 1999): 72-73.
In 1959, The Nation gleefully reported that a unionized police force could still be effectively employed against striking workers: "Members of the Bridgeport [Connecticut] police local have also proved themselves capable of enforcing the law in cases involving their brethren in other unions. Police quelled picket-line disturbances during two bitter industrial strikes in 1955, in both cases receiving expressions of thanks from the plant managers. There have been no significant picket-line battles in Bridgeport since." Edmund P. Murray, "Should the Police Unionize?" The Nation,June 13, 1959, 531.
David H. Bayley and Harold Mendelsohn, Minorities and the Police: Confrontation in America (New York: The Free Press, 1969), 14.
See, for example, Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805-1889 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 53.
In fact, in many ways the police enjoyed more favorable conditions than other workers. "These [police] jobs were quite attractive. Patrolmen earned from $600 in Kansas City to $1,200 in San Francisco, more than laborers, weavers, miners, and factory workers and about as much as painters, carpenters, teamsters, blacksmiths, and street railway conductors." Fogelson, Big-City Police, 19. See also: Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston 1822-1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 76.
The use of law enforcement to manage the work force is nothing new. Under the rule of Edward VI (1547-53), English law called on constables and justices of the peace to force laborers to work on farms suffering labor shortages, to wake them early in the morning, and to hurry them through mealtimes and breaks. Cyril D. Robinson and Richard Scaglion, "The Origin of the Police Function in Society: Notes Toward a Theory." Law and Society Review 21:1 (1987): 147.
Braverman offers a clear description of the middle class: "[L]ike the working class it possesses no economic or occupational independence, is employed by capital and its offshoots, possesses no access to the labor process or the means of production outside that employment, and must renew its labors for capital incessantly in order to subsist. This portion ofemployment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks ofsupervision and management, the considerable numbers ofspecialized and 'professional' employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration and so forth." Braverman, Labor, 403.
Braverman, Labor. 405.
"This 'new middle class' takes its characteristics from both sides. Not only does it receive its petty share in the prerogatives and rewards of capital, but it also bears the mark of the proletarian condition." Braverman, Labor, 407. Emphasis in original.
Harring identifies several tools for dividing the police from the working class, including: stratification within the lower classes, ethnic differences, the cops' organizational culture, discipline, and the criminalization of working-class activities. Harring, Policinga Class Sorieqy. 144.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 31.
Quoted in Fogelson, Big-City Police, 207.
These limits are significant, but they sadly do not distinguish police associations from proper labor unions. The American labor movement has often fallen far below the ideals of inter-union solidarity, rank-and-file leadership, and direct action militancy.
Think about it this way - if the slave patrollers had formed a union, making demands about wages, hours, discipline, and so on, would conscientious supporters of workers" rights be obliged to support them in those demands? No. And why not? Because the nature oftheir work was to repress and control part of the working class - the slaves. This puts the slave patrollers, and now the police. clearly on the side of the bosses, in roughly the same class position as any other manager who does not own capital, but earns his keep by acting as the proxy for the ruling class. It should be noted that this is not intended as a legal argument abut the right of the police to organize. I would not defer to the state the authority to decide who does or does not have that right. But the demands of solidarity are another matter entirely. It is these with which I am chiefly concerned.
For a contrary position, see: Bruce C. Johnson, "Taking Care of Labor: The Police in American Life," Theory and Society (Spring 1976): 89-1 17. Johnson argues that police sympathize with workers (and vice versa), but he never supports his strongest claim - that the police do actually defend the interests of workers (specifically White workers) as workers. To the degree that White workers have an interest in racist inequalities, it is obvious that the police defend their interest in that regard - which is to say, the police defend the privileges White workers enjoy as White people in a racist society. Perhaps the article would be more pimped, titled "Taking Care of Whitey."
Murray, "Should the Police Unionize?," 532. In an ironic postscript to the infamous strike of 1919, the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association was founded in 1965, and won a contract in 1968. But when, that same year, the legislature lifted the prohibition on affiliation with other unions, the BPPA declined to attach itselfto the AFL-CIO. Russell, City in Error, 232.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 89.
On February 27, 2003, a San Francisco grand jury stunned the city when it issued indictments against three officers involved in an off-duty beating and seven commanders who helped cover it up. Among those charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice: Police Chief Earl Sanders, Assistant ChiefAlex Fagan, Sr., Deputy ChiefGreg Suhr, and Deputy Chief David Robinson. Chuck finnie, "SFPD Indictments Shock the City," San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 2003 [database: NewsBank Full-Text Newspapers, accessed March 4, 2003].
Stark, Police Riots, 203-204.
Quoted in Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 20-21.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 145.
Colin Crouch and Ronald Dore, "Whatever Happened to Corporatism?" in Corporatism and Accountability.' Organized Interests in British Public Life, ed. Colin Crouch and Ronald Dore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 3. Parentheses in original.
Crouch and Dore, "Whatever Happened?" 344. Parentheses in original.
Michael T. Florinsky, Fascism and National Socialism: A Study of the Economic and Social Policies of the Totalitarian State (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936). For more on corporatism, see: Philippe C. Schmitter, "Still the Century of Corporatism?" The Review ofPolitics 36 (1974): 85-131.
If this analysis is sound, then it suggests a particular picture of the state and the role of the police union in maintaining its power. Rather than standing as a unitary sovereign with various subordinate agencies at hand to enact its will, the state would consist of a complex network comprising these agencies, and dependent on their cooperation for its power. This idea will be expanded in the pages that follow. For now, let's just note that this View complicates Crouch and Dore's definition of a "corporatist arrangement," since they identify "the state" as one party in the arrangement, and overlook the possibility that the state itself may in part consist of such corporatist relations.
Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 9; and Center for Research on Criminal Justice, Iron fist, 146. Levi examines the difference between private and public employees, but not between cops and other public workers. In fact, she takes the police to be paradigmatic. But as long as the police represent the coercive apparatus of the state, they must be understood as fundamentally different than, say, sanitation workers, firefighters, and teachers. Robert Reiner explains: "The determinants of the policeman's economic situation are to an extent diametrically opposed to those (1) for other workers. This is because, when governments attempt to implement policies of wage restraint against union opposition, the police assume a peculiar importance due to their role in situations ofindustrial conflict, Then they will have to be treated as a most 'special case' in pay negotiations. Furthermore, their work situation, in particular when it involves confrontations with trade unionists at pickets, inclines them towards a conservative world-view and a sense of alienation from the labour movement. This conflicts with pressure towards forms oforganization of a more or less unionate nature, deriving from their own concerns as employees." Reiner, Blue-Coated Worker, 4. Emphasis in original.
"[T]heir efforts to serve 'the public' often reveal how divergent conceptions of 'the public' can be. Police employee organizations demand the material and laws which enable them to protect working- and middle-class homeowners [sic]; they are far less concerned with the protection of ghetto dwellers, hippies, and political activists. The radical caucuses of social worker and teacher unions tend to make the opposite choice; they are less interested in defining and containing a problem population than in providing the impoverished and the rejected with new opportunities. The effect of battling over who is to be served - and how - is to undermine the ideology of government as a neutral servant of the citizens, able to bring together various interests under a common and equally available set ofservices. Instead of acting [as] the arbiter above the political struggles, the state becomes part of the fray." Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 154.
Former Atlanta police chief Herbert Jenkins described that city's police union as "not a union at all, but in fact a thinly veiled cover for Klan membership." Herbert Jenkins, Keeping the Peace: A Police ChiefLooks at His/ob (New York: Harper 8C Row, 1970), 23.
The Miami Police Benevolent Association had a constitutional provision requiring that membership be open only to "white members of the police force." That clause was removed in January 1970, but when five Black officers applied for membership in December of that year, their applications were rejected. Dulaney, Black Police, 145. Black people were not the only group subject to discrimination like this. New York's Police Benevolent Association excluded women until 1968. Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 27.
Dulaney, Black Police, 21.
Quoted in Wilson, "Enforcing Racism," 9.
"Shooter Cop Reinstated; What's Wrong with This Picture?" People's Police Report 6 (1995): 1-2.
Wintersmith, Police and the Black Community, 66-67.
"Before the seventeenth century, every large European state ruled its subjects through powerful intermediaries who enjoyed significant autonomy, hindered state demands that were not to their interests, and profited on their own accounts from the delegated exercise of state power. The intermediaries were often privileged members of subordinate populations, and made their way by assuring rulers of tribute and acquiescence from these populations." Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 104.
William A. Westley, "Violence and the Police," in Police Patrol Readings, ed. Samuel G. Chapman (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1964), 289-290. This analysis is considered in chapter 1.
The degree to which this is true may be indicated by union efforts to authorize the use of force where it was prohibited by law or departmental policy. The most famous case, Cassese's rule to "enforce the law 100 percent" (quoted in Gunther, "Cops in Politics," 65) has already been discussed, but other examples are available. For instance, in 1970, the Atlanta FOP voted to illegally carry their own guns while on duty. In Detroit, at around the same time, the DPOA was encouraging its members to use hollow-tip bullets. Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 141.
Martin J. Smith, Pressure, Power and Policy: State Autonomy and Policy Networks in Britain and the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 2. This analysis has clear implications for our understanding of other concepts, including "state autonomy," "state interests," and "reasons of state." Clayton Szczech points out that "the state cannot effectively pursue its self-interested agenda because no such unified agenda exists.... For example, what the Department of Defense wants and needs may not always coincide with what the Department of Commerce wants and needs, and both of them must utilize networks with social groups, elected officials and other bureaucracies to realize any goals at all." Szczech, "Beyond Autonomy or a Dominance," 17.
Smith concurs: "It is also difficult to identify the boundaries of the state.... Many parts of civil society are given institutional access to the state and play a role in the development of public policy. The state also funds a number of groups within society which, although in principle a autonomous, are highly dependent on the state. In addition, the boundaries of the state are continually changing through privatization, the hiving off of parts of the civil service and the creation of new regulatory bodies." Smith, Pressure, Power and Policy, 2, The absence of clearly demarcated boundaries (defining the limits of the state) seems to me a theoretical advantage. It allows us to replace a binary opposition, in which an agency is always either identified with the state or not, with a continuum in which it should be considered a part of the state to the degree that it is incorporated into the relevant power networks. Privatized services, subsidized research and development, and police unions are thus more a part of the state than are church-run charities, family farms, and the IWW but less a part of the state than Congress, the Army, or the courts.
Szczech, "Beyond Autonomy or Dominance," 19. Emphasis in original, Again, Smith: "With policy networks, power is a relationship based on dependence and not a zero-sum. Power is something that develops within relationships between groups and state actors, and a policy network is frequently a mechanism for enhancing mutual power rather than taking power from one or the other." Smith, Pressure, Power and Policy, 7.
Again, the tendency toward corporatism is discernible. "Monopolistic and hierarchical groups have the resources to negotiate with governments because they have the ability to implement any decisions which are agreed. Under corporatism, the role of groups is regulatory as well as representative. They are responsible for ensuring that their members accept agreed policy decisions." Smith, Pressure, Power and Policy, 31.
Szczech's thesis studies one manifestation of this process, the 1990s wave of prison expansion: "The expansion of the U.S. prison system has clearly augmented the power of criminal justice institutions and actors considerably. This came about however, through a political process of networking that has also increased the power and resources of social actors: prison guards) and police unions, firms that contract with prisons, and rural communities that would otherwise have faced economic depression. Likewise, prison expansion has not increased the power or autonomy of the state as a whole. The fiscal costs of imprisonment have entailed severe fiscal cutbacks and reduced capacity in nearly every other governmental sector, especially social welfare." Szczech, "Beyond Autonomy or Dominance." 85.
"Unions, as so many authors have noted, are a source of personal mobility. Union officialdom becomes a career in itself, and union officials act to preserve their privileges, Collusive bargaining offers a number of advantages to union leaders in this position. By engaging in collusive bargaining, association leaders win concessions for their members without engaging in strikes (which are always costly and problematic in the public sector where strong prohibitions still persist). Union leaders are also likely to increase personal mobility further through access to public figures, newjob opportunities, and consultantships. But those benefits are not free. In trade, the union leaders must become 'responsible' in the eyes of the city government. This means that they must be able to assure the relatively uninterrupted delivery ofservices and agree to some programmatic innovations." Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 21.
Tilly, Coercion, 117.
George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War," in A Collection of Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 208 and 212-213. "No group of Chileans supported the coup as strongly as did the business community, which felt its very survival to be at stake." Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation ofEnemies: Chile Under Pinochet (New York: WW Norton, 1991), 200.