The ongoing history of police anti-labor action seems at odds with the growth of militant police unions in the latter part of the twentieth century [1]. Nevertheless, the police have organized unions, and in many cases their unions occupy a central place in the constellations of local political power. In addition to advocating improved wages and working conditions, prosecuting grievances, and forestalling (or sometimes preventing) discipline against individual officers, the unions also have a strong hand in the creation of public policy, inside and outside their respective departments. Few changes in public safety or security policies can be made without the tacit approval of the police unions, and the officers' associations are routinely consulted on changes in the criminal code, or in city policies that might indirectly affect police work. When controversies arise concerning the police, their actions, or their role in society, it often falls to the unions to detail the "law and order" perspective. The organization's agenda may then dominate the debate, or even define its terms.
This influence has been hard-won and always controversial. The police union's development, between the end of the nineteenth century and today, has been tightly braided with changes concerning standards of public morality, the shape of municipal government, race relations, and, of course, class conflict. Embedded within every strand of this cord, exposed with every tangle and snare, lies a question about the nature of democracy, and about the role of police power in a democratic society.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, police in many cities belonged to social organizations, called either "Patrolmen's Benevolent Associations" (PBAs) or "Fraternal Orders of Police" (FOPs). The two types of organizations functioned along similar lines, providing their members insurance and promoting their overall health and well-being. The main differences were that, whereas the PBAs were only open to patrolmen and were strictly independent, the FOPs were open to any officer and were affiliated nationally [2]. Both groups petitioned for better working conditions, an effort that the authorities tolerated so long as there was no move toward unionization [3]. The rank and file crossed that line during World War I, when a steep rise in the cost of living pushed several organizations to apply for charters from the American Federation of Labor. In a break with its previous position, the AFL granted the charters, and the police unionized in several cities, induding Cincinnati, Washington, Los Angeles, St. Paul, Fort Worth, and, most famously, Boston [4].
Unhappy with long hours, low pay, favoritism, and the sorry condition of their stationhouses, on August 15 , 1919, members of the existing police association, the Boston Social Club, voted to affiliate with the AFL [5]. They thus created the Boston Police Union of the American Federation of Labor [6]. Less than a month later on September 8, Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis responded by suspending nineteen union supporters. The strike began the next day [7].
Approximately three-quarters of the Boston Police Department joined the strike, creating a politically uncomfortable situation made worse by rampant crime and widespread disorder. Almost immediately, small crowds gathered around craps games on the Boston Common. By the evening of September 9, the disorder had escalated to the point of looting. Rioters overturned parked cars, and numerous gang rapes were reported [9]. Some rowdies took the opportunity to settle scores with striking police. Crowds gathered at stationhouses and pelted the strikers with mud, rocks, bottles, and rotten fruit as they left the building [10]. A South Boston Vigilance Committee was formed and tried to keep order, but its volunteers were savagely beaten [11].
The rioting ended when 3,000 State Guard troops, scab police, and a provost navy guard unit broke up the crowd [12]. The State Guard killed three people in the process - including one bystander and one person who was fleeing. A fourth was killed as the soldiers broke up the craps games on the Common, and two more died when the militia attacked a group of boys trying to steal a manhole cover. By September 11, eight were dead and more than seventy injured - twenty-one seriously, several of them children. More than $300,000 in property had been damaged or stolen [13]. On September 12, the striking patrolmen voted unanimously to end the strike if only their suspended colleagues would be reinstated. Instead, Curtis fired all the striking police [14]. The State Guard patrolled until December 12 [15].
Following the strike's defeat, many states passed laws forbidding police unions, and the AFL revoked the charters of all its police locals [16]. Isolated from the rest of the labor movement and lacking political support, the new unions were crushed in city after city. Local governments then raised wages so as to remove any incentive for re-forming the unions. Immediately after the strike, the starting salary for $1,400 per year. (Only a few months before it had been as low as $730) [17]. Between 1919 and 1929, police wages increased by 30 percent in Detroit, 50 percent in Chicago, 70 percent in Los Angeles, and 100 percent in Oakland. By 1929, patrolmen earned between $1,500 (in Cincinnati) and $2,500 (in New York), which put them on par with most skilled laborers [18].
This strategy worked to neutralize rank-and-file organizing throughout the 1930s, restricting their activity to the lobbying tactics of the early PBAs [19]. But in the 1940s, unionization was again on the agenda, and by 1944 the AFL had police unions in 168 cities [20]. In the name of preserving their neutrality, police departments generally responded to this new wave of organizing in the same way they had before - barring the organizations and firing union supporters [21].
In the 1950s, after the NYPD defeated a Transport Worker's Union drive by offering the officers concessions [22], Commissioner George Monaghan established Rule 225: "No member of the police force of the city of New York shall become a member of any labor union." He reasoned that the rule was necessary
to protect the policemen from influences or commitments which might impair their ability to perform their duties impartially and without fear or favor, or might tend to weaken or undermine the discipline and authority to which they must necessarily be subjected [23].
Appeals to the "neutrality" of the police are questionable, given their historical use against strikes and unions. Monaghan's second reason probably comes closer to the truth: unionization was seen as a threat to the authority of police commanders.
Whatever the justification, restrictions against unionization proved ineffectual, and some commanders were forced to try other approaches in order to preserve their control. In 1941, the AFL supported an FOP organizing drive in the Detroit Police Department. The department harassed officers who supported the drive, fired its leaders, and procured court orders barring unionization, but half of the patrolmen joined the organization anyway. The next year, however, the FOP lost ground when the Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA) was formed with the backing of police commanders [24]. Carl Parsell, who served as the DPOA president in the late sixties, explained: "It started out basically a company union under their guidance, under their control. They gave you the rights at their pleasure [25]."
Things took a different turn in New York, though a similar strategy was in evidence. The PBA sued to protect itself from Rule 225, and won. The court found that the department could bar "organizations of policemen affiliated with nonpolice labor associations or officered by non-policemen," but could not interfere with the PBA's activities [26].
The distinction became relevant in June 1958, when the Teamsters publicly announced an effort to unionize the police. The announcement put pressure on the PBA leadership to produce results [27], and it also gave police managers an incentive to cooperate with the PBA rather than face the stronger muscle of the Teamsters. A Journal-American editorial suggested:
The surest way of slapping down Hoffa would be for Mayor Wagner, Commissioner Kennedy, and the representatives of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association to begin exploring methods by which such grievance machinery would be set up with proper safeguards all around [28].
This is, more or less, what occurred. After the Teamsters' drive was defeated, PBA president lohn Cassese set about winning gains for his organization's members. By 1961, lobbying, lawsuits, and job actions (including ticket speed-ups and slow-downs) had won the PBA a dues check-off, protections against management retaliation, and a formal grievance system [29]. Two years later, Mayor Robert Wagner (whose father had authored the National Labor Relations Act) extended collective bargaining rights to police officers, and the PBA won better wages and retirement benefits as a result [30]. In exchange, the PBA agreed to a no-strike clause and a bar from affiliating with other unions [31].
The leaders of the police associations (PBA and FOP alike) were only too glad to protect their positions from the competition of the Teamsters or American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), but no-strike provisions proved more difficult to enforce. The authorities learned this the hard way in 1967 when the Detroit police staged a sick-out (nicknamed the "Blue Flu"). A year later, the Newark police did the same, and the Chicago cops threatened their own Blue Flu epidemic [32]. In 1969, the Atlanta FOP organized "Operation No Case," in which the police issued fewer tickets and overlooked minor offenses [33]. The next year, Atlanta officers repeated the tactic without union approval, initiating a ten-week slowdown [34]. The trend continued throughout the seventies, with strikes in Baltimore, Cleveland, Memphis, and New Orleans [35]. When faced with a walkout or slowdown, the authorities usually decided that the pragmatic need to get the cops back to work trumped the city government's long-term interest in diminishing the rank and file's power [36].
The Detroit sick-out provides an interesting illustration of the forces at work in these conflicts. The action began on May 16, 1967, with a ticket slow-down. The police continued to pull over speeding motorists, thus technically enforcing the law. But they issued warnings rather than citations [37]. Overnight the number of traffic tickets dropped to one-half its previous level. Between May 16 and June 14, the number of tickets was down 66.9 percent compared to the previous thirty days, and 71.5 percent relative to the same period a year before. It's estimated that the effort cost the city about $15,000 each day [38]. On June 6, the DPOA escalated the conflict when its members voted to stop volunteering for overtime. The following week, police commanders responded to the disruption by suspending 61 officers. Then, on June 15, 323 cops called in sick [39].
DPOA president Carl Parsell denied that the action constituted a strike, but said: "Policemen for the first time are joining the labor movement. They are beginning to think and act like a trade union [40]." "The city filed a lawsuit against the DPOA, instituted emergency twelve-hour shifts, and alerted the National Guard. The strike not only continued, but grew. On June 17, 800 of the city's 2,700 officers were absent. Of these, 170 had been suspended, 459 were "sick," and fifteen cited family emergencies. As the conflict escalated, each side grew increasingly eager to find a resolution, and on June 20, a tentative agreement was reached. The next day, the police returned to work [41].
The proposed agreement granted the DPOA changes in policy and discipline, and established a grievance procedure, but it was not at all clear that the fight was over, or which side would prevail. All "non-economic" issues were settled, but there was still the matter of wages, and the deal had to be approved by the city council [42]. The tension persisted. Commanders had only a tenuous grasp on the loyalties of their subordinates. But then a funny thing happened - the Detroit riot of 1967. With the Black community in open revolt, the cops, the city government, and local elites very quickly rediscovered their previous affinity. In bringing the labor dispute to a close, the specially appointed Detroit Police Dispute Panel noted: "Far more than the interests of the police officers themselves is involved. As has become obvious in recent months ... the police force is the first line of defense against civil disorder [43]." The cops got their raises [44].
In contrast to the defeated strike of 1919, the labor skirmishes of the 1960s and 1970s solidified the positions of the police associations and had the somewhat paradoxical effect of buttressing the top-to-bottom unity of the departments. The unions asserted increasing levels of influence over departmental policy, and the police management used the unions to win rank-and-file cooperation [45]. Such management-union partnerships reinforced the institution's cohesion, allowed disparate parts of the organization to develop a community of interests, and provided a means for settling disputes and resolving grievances. But they retained traditional taboos against autonomous rank-and-file action and meaningful expressions of solidarity with other labor organizations [46].
Whereas the Boston strike had been ignominiously defeated, the Detroit strike was resolved in a way that strengthened both the department and the union. Clearly, a lot had changed during the intervening half-century. The relevant differences were not limited to shifts in policing and labor organizing, but also concerned the overall character and function of municipal government.
During the early-twentieth-century Progressive Era, police departments were subject to a battery of reforms, changing the institution's structure, aims, and personnel. These reforms were not motivated by concerns about racism or brutality so much as they constituted one part of a general effort to re-invent urban government.
It is not hard to see why reform was needed. Under political machines, there was little to distinguish an official's personal attachments, interests, loyalties, and obligations from the duties, responsibilities, powers, and benefits of his office. Authority rested as much in the informal and decentralized ward networks as in the government itself or the offices of the various municipal departments. Positions were filled strictly along partisan lines or as personal favors; there was no pretense of professionalism or impartiality. Discipline was lax, corruption was sanctified, and bribery was a major source of income at every level of the hierarchy. In this context, it was the job of the police to protect illicit businesses, extort money from honest citizens, rig elections, and otherwise enforce the will of neighborhood bosses. So long as they were successful in these central tasks, it made little difference to the machine bosses whether the cops engaged in petty crime, neglected their legal duties, were rude in their encounters with the public, or used violence unnecessarily [47].
As a result, police legitimacy was sorely lacking. This problem was aggravated by a long series of scandals implicating departments around the country in organized crime and other types of corruption. For example, at the turn of the century, Los Angeles mayor Arthur Harper, police chief Charles Sebastian, and a local pimp formed a syndicate in order to monopolize prostitution in the city; the police were used to suppress competition and protect the syndicate's operations. In 1912, Herman Rosenthal, a professional gambler, accused the New York City Police of protecting gambling houses; he was murdered on his way to meet with the district attorney. The next year, San Francisco papers revealed that a group of detectives had recruited a gang of con-men, offering protection in return for 15 percent of the total take (an estimated gross of $300,000 annually). And during Prohibition, dozens of Cincinnati cops sold confiscated liquor and offered protection to bootleggers in return for a share of the profits [48]. Such scandals largely discredited the police departments and the machines to which they were attached [49]. But the Progressive agenda offered a map toward legitimacy.
Seeking to replace the machine system, Progressive reformers looked to business and the military for organizational models. Schools, for instance, were reorganized on a corporate model, whereas the police were structured according to a military design [50]. This military analogy provided a positive ideal of what the police could be-a disciplined, hierarchically organized force, with the chief holding nearly absolute power. More specifically, the reformers offered three recommendations for change: departments should be centralized; the quality of personnel should be improved; and police operations should be narrowly focused on crime control, with an emphasis on prevention [51].
Toward these ends, police departments were divided, as far as possible, into specialized units with a streamlined chain of command and an articulated hierarchy. Chiefs were given more control and discipline was moved from external boards, which were deemed "political," to internal "professional" mechanisms. Civil service procedures were instituted, age and education requirements were established, and character checks and psychological exams were introduced [52].
But the success of the Progressive movement was uneven overall. Despite the trend toward centralization and rationalized management, little changed in the areas of policy or procedure, and neighborhood precinct stations retained much of their autonomy [53]. Police chiefs did not, on the whole, receive the lifetime tenure Progressives proposed [54]. And the police still had a broad range of duties, even after specialization. In fact, contrary to the rhetoric of the time, the police function did not so much narrow, as it shifted to meet new demands for social order [55].
Yet modest successes had a profound impact on the character of government. Around the country, political machines were beginning to decay. The localized, personalistic, and unabashedly corrupt machine system was giving way to a new kind of public administration. In theory, the new system was very nearly the opposite of the old - it operated legalistically, acting according to general principles and enforcing rules impersonally. City government was becoming bureaucratized [56].
Police reforms contributed in several ways to the rise of bureaucracy. The narrowing of the police function promoted bureaucratic development, not only within police departments, but throughout the city government As elections, health regulations, licensing, and welfare duties were removed from the list of police responsibilities, other municipal departments - other bureaucracies - were created to take over these tasks. A similar process occurred within departments, as civilians began performing clerical, technical, and related work [57].
The efforts to improve personnel also resulted in increased bureaucratization. Cops were assigned civil service status or military rank, barred from accepting rewards, paid higher salaries, received better training, and hired and promoted on the basis of exams [58]. By rationalizing the selection of personnel and the delivery of services, the new procedures reduced the opportunities for personal favors and patronage, thus cutting machine bosses off from their means of securing support.59
Centralization, likewise, reduced the importance of the local precincts and undercut an important base for the ward organizations [60]. It also made it possible for such specialized functions as vice control, record-keeping, internal investigations, and detective work to be removed from the precincts and assigned to squads controlled by headquarters. (By 1930, such squads abounded - riot squads, prohibition squads, narcotics squads, gambling squads, homicide squads, robbery units, auto theft tean1S, missing persons bureaus, bomb squads, bicycle squads, motorcycle squads, juvenile divisions, red squads, units to handle particular ethnic groups, records divisions, and internal affairs [61].) This reorganization limited the opportunities for corruption and, again, put power in the hands of the police chief rather than ward bosses or precinct commanders [62].
But despite the specialization, civil service procedures, and administrative centralization, police departments became only incomplete, imperfect bureaucracies. Though governed in principle by general rules, police organizations lacked elements of managelial control implicit in the bureaucratic ideal.
The concept of control adopted by modern management requires that every activity in production have its several parallel activities in the management center: each must be devised, recalculated, tested, laid out, assigned and ordered, checked and inspected, and recorded throughout its duration and upon completion. The result is that the process of production is replicated in paper form before, as, and after it takes place in physical form [63].
This demand was incompatible with the dispersed and highly discretionary activities that characterized police work and made policing a source of power for the state. Officers on the street never approached the ideal of the impartial bureaucrat, nor was there much effort to transform them into such. Rules were crafted, records kept, promotions and assignments somewhat rationalized - but the cop on the beat was expected and required to exercise just the sort of individual discTetion and situational judgment denied to his counterpart on the lower rungs of proper bureaucracies. This allowed corruption, prejudice, favoritism, and political influences some amount of latitude on the street - where the police did their work - while limiting these factors in the offices of management, where policy was set [64].
The military aspects of reform were just as limited. Some departments adopted military ranks, instituted drilling, and began requiring target practice, but discipline was not established along military lines (in part because of the resistance of patrolmen's associations) [65]. In short, cops became neither soldiers nor bureaucrats; they did, however, cease acting as the pawns of the political machines.
Reformers quickly learned that this administrative independence cut both ways:
While civil service procedures reduced some of the politician's power over the policemen's working life, they also reduced policemen's receptivity to reform leadership. Increasingly, the police could follow their own lead, independent both of the party organizations and the innovative administrations [66].
Hence, while the new system of administration diminished the influence of machine bosses, it did so by bolstering the position of municipal bureaucracies as independent seats of power. While sometimes frustrating reform efforts, this arrangement was not wholly disadvantageous for the city administrators, mayors, and politicians, as it let them disavow the police department's excesses without needing to do anything to stop them. If authority was invested exclusively in the police chiefs, then the chiefs would also incur whatever blame was directed at the department, though they faced few consequences of public disfavor [67]. But even the position of the chief of police was not necessarily as strong as it appeared, and discipline was generally limited by the need to maintain the loyalty of those in his command.
It is exceedingly rare that a ranking police officer can take positive charge of police action, and even in the cases where this is possible, his power to determine the course of action is limited to giving the most general kinds of directions. But like all superiors. police superiors do depend on the good will of the subordinates.... Thus, they are forced to resort to the only means available to insure a modicum of loyalty, namely, covering mistakes. The more blatantly an officer's transgression violates an explicit departmental regulation the less likely it is that his superior will be able to conceal it. Therefore, to be helpful, as they must try to be, superiors must confine themselves to white-washing bad practices involving relatively unregulated conduct, that is, those dealings with citizens that lead up to arrests. In other words, to gain compliance with explicit regulations, where failings could be acutely embarrassing, command must yield in unregulated or little regulated areas of practice [68].
The protection that the individual officer once received from his political patron was thus transferred to his superior officers. In a formal sense, the police faced more discipline, while in practice they continued to engage the public - or certain parts of it - according to their own judgment. Hence, bureaucratization increased the autonomy of the department as a whole and, ironically, preserved the discretion enjoyed by officers at the lowest ranks.
Yet this gap in accountability was not particularly worrisome to reformers of the time. The Progressive movement, while often credited with improving the quality of public services and reducing corruption, was not especially concerned with protecting the rights of the poor. Reform efforts were not led by immigrant workers, who constituted the usual victims of the police abuse, but by the business and professional classes [69]. The Progressive agenda reflected the ideology and interests of this constituency [70]. By promoting bureaucratic reform, these "respectable" classes sought to ensure their own control over the workings of the local governments. J W. Hill, an influential reformer in Des Moines, wrote: "The professional politician must be ousted and in his place capable business men chosen to conduct the affairs of the city." Likewise, I. M. Earle, the general counsel of the Bankers Life Association and a reform advocate, explained, "When the plan [for a commission government] was adopted, it was the intention to get businessmen to run it [71]."
Put simply, the reformers hoped to break the machines and, at the same time, push working-class immigrants out of politics. Because immigrants generally lived together in distinct neighborhoods, they had been well placed to influence the ward-based machines. So Progressive reforms replaced districted elections with citywide contests and strengthened the mayor's office to the detriment of the ward councilors [72]. The Progressive reforms thus practically limited popular access to government [73]. Meanwhile, other efforts were underway to restrict suffrage, as immigrant children, and regulate the numbers of new immigrants [74].
Progressive efforts encouraged legalistic administration and promoted transparency, but these gains were only really extended to the White, Protestant, native-born, English-speaking middle and upper classes. The transition, then, was from a populist gangsterism to an elitist republicanism. The Progressive movement replaced machine politics with class rule.
Edward C. Banfield and James Q . Wilson explain this transformation:
The machine provided the politician with a base of influence deriving from its control of lower-income voters. As this base shrinks, he becomes more dependent on other sources of influence - especially newspapers, civic associates, labor unions, business groups, and churches. "Nonpolitical" (read nonparty) lines of access to the city administration are substituted for "political" ones. Campaign funds come not from salary kickbacks and the sale of favors, but from rich men and from companies doing business with the city. Department heads and other administrators who are able to command the support of professional associations and civic groups become indispensable to the mayor and are therefore harder for him to control. Whereas the spoils of office formerly went to "the boys" in the delivery [voting] wards in the form of jobs and favors, they now go in the form of urban renewal projects, street cleaning, and better police protection to newspaper [public opinion] wards [75].
The poor did not control, or especially benefit from, the political machines. But the machines required their participation and offered them something in return. The emerging bureaucracies of the Progressive Era, in contrast, were designed to limit their participation. The poor did not control these either, and the new system offered them terribly little.
Machine rule was replaced with the more subtle power of the capitalist class. Whereas before local government had been administered according to strictly material incentives, it was now guided by administrative norms and the formal rules of bureaucracy, backed with the moral standards and political ideology of the Protestant bourgeoisie. This victory was ironic, in a sense, because Progressive rhetoric centered on "taking the police out of politics," and conversely, "taking the politics out of policing." Though the reforms did grant police commanders a fresh independence from the demands of politicians, the idea of taking the politics out of policing was doomed at the outset - as ridiculous a notion as taking the politics out of government.
Far from being mere administrative bodies that enforced the law, kept the peace, and served the public, the police departments were policy-making agencies that helped to decide which laws were enforced, whose peace was kept, and which public was served. Much like the courts, schools, and other vital institutions, the police thereby exercised a great deal of influence over the process of mobility, the distribution of power, and the struggle for status in urban America. To put it bluntly, no institution which had so great an impact on the lives and livelihoods of so many citizens could have been separated from the political process. Nor, so long as the nation was committed to democracy and pluralism, should it have been. None of the reform proposals - neither the schemes to centralize the police forces, upgrade their personnel, and narrow their function nor the appeals to transform them along the lines of a military organization - could have changed this situation [76].
In effect, the city government was wrested from the grip of the political machines, and the police were removed from the control of the city government, but the bourgeoisie exercised a high level of influence over both the city government and the police. The Progressive Era saw simultaneously an increase in stale autonomy and the full rise of capitalist class hegemony.
To understand this concurrence, we must recognize that "hegemony" is not synonymous with dictatorial rule [77]. It is more subtle, more flexible, and therefore also more insidious and more resilient. It is characterized less by the direct issuing of orders than by the setting of agendas, the framing of debate, the articulation of standards, the valuation of alternatives, and the delineation of available options [78]. It is through hegemony that the ruling class creates a bounded sphere of institutional autonomy. Without need of conspiracies or actual censorship, its ideological ascendancy determines in advance which issues will be raised, which debates will be aired, and ultimately, whose interests will be considered and whose rights respected.
All professions are conspiracies against the laity. - Bernard Shaw [79]
Despite the limitations of their actual reforms, the Progressives' ideology prevailed, and a perspective that was both Nativist and bureaucratic became the accepted view of newspapers, churches, commercial organizations, civic associations, universities, and other opinion-makers [80]. It also, predictably, found an audience among police administrators.
A second wave of police reform originated from within law enforcement [81]. More specifically, it was brought to policing by newcomers to the field. During the 1930s, depressed economic conditions made police work attractive to the large numbers of men seeking steady employment. Police departments became more selective [82], and the sudden influx of middle-class officers - many of whom shared the values of the Progressive reformers - changed the character of the institution. This "new breed" of officer found their backgrounds and ideals in conflict with the lowly status of their jobs and the ideology of the departments, but thanks to the civil service procedures, they soon moved through the ranks and into command positions [83].
The new police reformers retained Progressive assumptions about the purpose of the police, the need for its leaders to be autonomous, and the nature of political legitimacy, but were motivated by their own immediate frustration with the low level of respect accorded the occupation [84]. Despite the previous wave of reforms, the police had remained ineffective and often corrupt Departments were badly managed, with little forward planning, poor supervision, and no rational division of labor. Though formal standards and bureaucratic civil service procedures did exist, the personnel were poorly trained and generally undisciplined [85].
Faced with these conditions, the "new breed" sought to professionalize policing, and thereby raise their social standing. Beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they developed a model of professionalism that achieved prominence in police circles by mid-century. This model emphasized strict admission standards, extensive training, a high level of technical knowledge, and a devotion to service and a commitment to the public interest [86]. By becoming a profession, the reasoning went, police could improve the quality of their work, raise their own status, and further insulate themselves from outside interference [87].
The professional movement overlapped chronologically with the latter part of the Progressive Era, and the new reforms continued some of the efforts begun by the Progressives, finding more success in many areas. For example, they continued the project of reorganizing departments along functional lines and managed to close more precincts, extending the reliance on special squads and streamlining the hierarchy. While these changes did further diminish the influence of neighborhood bosses (whose power was already in decline), they often just shifted corruption from the wards to the squads [88]. In a textbook case of failed reform, Chicago mayor Richard Daley responded to a 1960 burglary ring scandal by replacing Police Commissioner Timothy J. O'Connor with reform luminary O. W. Wilson. Wilson set about professionalizing the department, removing corrupt or incompetent commanders, instituting a system of promotions based on seniority and competitive exams, and closing seventeen of the thirty-eight district stations - but corruption continued unabated [89]. A 1964 Justice Department report revealed that a score of Chicago cops, including an internal affairs investigator, were running a protection racket [90].
Reformers took steps to regulate the quality of the personnel, using physical examinations, education requirements, character checks, and the civil service process to weed out undesirable applicants [91]. Whether these measures succeeded in "improving" the quality of recruits is another matter. Critics at the time denounced the professional ideology as elitist [92], and in many cities, the new requirements were used to prevent racial minorities from joining the force [93].
The reform commanders seemed to want to fill departments with recruits whose backgrounds and values resembled their own, but the practical consequences of these changes were not what their advocates had intended. When the economy recovered from the Depression, the "professionalized" departments had trouble attracting and keeping recruits. The pay had not kept pace with that of other occupations, prestige was still lacking, and new officers could only enter the department at the lowest level [94]. Since the best cops did not always advance through the ranks, and the worst were seldom removed, stagnation set in. The quality of leadership suffered, and the police became increasingly isolated [95].
Compared to the Progressives, the advocates of professionalization had more success in instituting their prescribed reforms, but they did no better in achieving their ultimate aims. The status of the police did not come to equal that of doctors and lawyers, and the departments were only mildly cleaner than before. But the main effect of professionalization was to increase police autonomy. And professionalization, like bureaucratization, not only institutionalized that autonomy, but helped to legitimize it [96]. The discourse surrounding professionalization encouraged institutional problems to be thought of in technical terms, and thus referred to the "experts" - the police. Issues of accountability and oversight were thus framed as professional matters with which the uninitiated should not be trusted to interfere. In other words, professionalization sought to take the issues of police power and accountability outside of the realm of the political.
The move toward professionalization embodied both a continuation of and a reaction against the bureaucratization of policing. The advocates of professionalization, usually police administrators, envisioned their project as an extension of the bureaucratic reforms, with an increased emphasis on the quality of recruits and higher public esteem for the occupation. Carl Klockars argues from this basis that the term "professional" was primarily of rhetorical value:
The fact is that the "professional" police officer, as conceived by the professional police model, was understood to be a very special kind of professional, a kind of professional that taxes the very meaning of the idea. The distinctive characteristic of the work of professionals is the range of discretion accorded them in the performance of their work. By contrast, the police view of professionalism was exactly the opposite. It emphasized centralized control and policy, tight command structure, extensive departmental regulation, strict discipline, and careful oversight. While the professional model wanted intelligent and educated police officers and the technological appearance of modern professionals, it did not want police officers who were granted broad, professional discretion. It wanted obedient bureaucrats [97].
The rank-and-file officer, on the other hand, had a very different notion of what professionalization implied. "The professionally-minded patrolman wants to act according to his evaluation of the situation and not according to some bureaucratic directive [98]." Professionalization very clearly promoted police autonomy, but it was deeply ambivalent about what this meant for the management of departments. Did professionalization only require the autonomy of the institution relative to the civilian authorities, or did it also demand the autonomy of the patrolman relative to departmental control? In practice the second followed from the first, as commanders sought to protect themselves from criticism. Rather than exposing abuses and disciplining the officers, internal affairs investigators and unit commanders took their task as the defense of the department as a whole, and especially of the officers under their command [99].
Most high-ranking officials were prone to praise the efforts of their units and, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, to shift the responsibility to other parts of the force or other branches of government. If this tactic failed, they were ready to deny responsibility on the grounds that ... they had few effective sanctions over their subordinates [100].
Professionalization, again like the earlier reform effort, continued to put supervisors in the position of covering for their subordinates.
At the Same time as the "professional" police were asserting a new independence, they also adopted strategies that increased their presence in the lives of the urban poor and people of color. The professional model encouraged police leaders to take seriously the elusive goal of preventing crime. Making the most of the new squad structure, the police sought to reduce the opportunity for crime, experimenting with vehicular patrols, saturation tactics, and high-discretion techniques like "stop-and-search" or "field interrogation. [101]" For example, in the late 1950s, the San Francisco police used each of these approaches in tandem. Chief Thomas Cahill created an "S Squad" ("S" standing for "saturation") to be deployed in high-crime areas, with instructions to stop, question, and search suspicious characters. During its first year, the S Squad stopped 20,000 people, filed 11,000 reports, and made 1,000 arrests. Most of those they stopped were Black people and young people [102]. The preventive aims of the professionals led the police to intervene in situations that had previously gone unnoticed, were ignored, or were not even criminal. This encroachment promoted a generalized distrust on both sides, as police grew ever more suspicious of the public and the public (especially the Black community) grew increasingly resentful of the police [103]. As we have seen, this tension bore bitter fruit in the years that followed.
Today's police unions are the bastard children of the mid-century professionals. Though earlier union efforts had met with little success, the fissures and contradictions of the professional agenda helped create conditions that made unionization possible. While the rhetoric of professionalization lent legitimacy to demands for higher pay and greater autonomy, the prescriptions of the reformers alienated the regular officers and produced additional strife with the public. This situation created new tensions within police departments and brought the idea of unionization back to the surface.
Though coming as a direct result of the attempts to professionalize policing, union organizing efforts were of a quite different character. The movement for police unions reflected a working-class labor perspective rather than a middle-class professional agenda, and found its support with the mass of patrol officers rather than with commanders. The International Association of Chiefs of Police recognized this difference as crucial, and described unionization as sounding "the death knell of proffessionalization [104]."
The influence of unionization has extended far beyond such basic matters as wages, working conditions, and grievances. Unionization, like the previous two waves of reform, had the general effect of increasing the institutional autonomy of the department [105] and the autonomy of individual officers [106]. But unionization took the latter as one of its principle aims, and for that matter, sought to provide the lowest-level officers collective power over the institution as a whole [107].
As the police unions grew, they set about negotiating policy matters, including those governing patrols, deployment, and discipline [108]. The agenda quickly broadened to include "questions of social policy, including which type of conduct should be criminal, societal attitudes toward protest, the procedural rights of defendants, and the sufficiency of resources allocated to the enforcement of the criminal law. [109]" These efforts represented "a phenomenon new to American society: the emergence of the police as a self-conscious, organized, and militant political constituency, bidding for far-reaching political power in their own right [110]."
The police also returned to open electioneering - like in the machine days, but with a difference. Rather than owing allegiance to their patrons and taking orders from the ward bosses, the police had developed into a constituency for the politicians to wow and woo. Police support could make or break a candidate, and once in office the politician owed his allegiance to the cops, rather than the other way around [111].
Some politicians made the most of the new balance of power. Philadelphia police commissioner, and later mayor, Frank Rizzo deftly exploited the political potential of the department, building himself a career while at the same time amplifying the power of the police and increasing their independence. Under Rizzo's guidance. the police department became the unrivaled center and base of his power [112].
It wasn't long before police unions started producing their own candidates, and served in some places as a ladder into office. In 1969, Wayne Larking, who had served as head of the Police Officer's Guild, was elected to the Seattle City Council [113]. That same year, Charles Stenvig, a former police detective and the business manager of the Minneapolis Police Officer's Federation, was elected mayor, having run solely on a law-and-order platform [114]. Stenvig convinced patrolmen to campaign for him. When an interviewer asked an officer, "Did you introduce yourself as a patrolman?" the officer responded: "Sure. That was the whole point. The idea was to convince people that a cop would know how to bring peace back to the community [115]."
At times, such political efforts - especially electioneering - crossed lines of decorum. In 1964, many departments had to issue special orders to prevent officers from wearing Goldwater or Wallace buttons on their uniforms, or from putting campaign stickers on squad cars. Some cops even handed out campaign literature while on duty [116].
In each arena, whether their efforts involved electioneering, lobbying, or strikes, the police pursued a conservative agenda - specifically one that increased the power, autonomy, and central role of law enforcement. LA's Fireman's and Policemen's Protective League ("Fi-Po") represented the direction of the new activism; it lobbied for counter-subversive laws, promoted light-wing rallies, sponsored conservative speakers, and sold businesses a blacklist naming union organizers and radicals [117].
In July 1966, New York supplied the first real test of this newfound power. Mayor John Lindsay made good on one of his campaign promises, restructuring the city's police complaint board to include a civilian majority. The Police Benevolent Association immediately and vigorously attacked the plan, eventually forcing the issue to the ballot. The PBA then sponsored an extensive ad campaign and individual officers put anti-review board signs on their cars, distributed literature, and harassed those who campaigned in favor of the board - often while on duty [118].
The anti-review board propaganda openly appealed to public anxieties about civil unrest and crime - two issues, in the context of the time, with obvious racial overtones. One poster showed a young girl at the entrance to a subway; its text read: "The Civilian Review Board must be stopped. Her life, your life, may depend on it [119]." Another poster showed a riot-torn street, cluttered with rubble and lined with damaged storefronts. The caption stated: "This is the aftermath of a riot in a city that had a civilian review board [120]." An August 18, 1966, Reporter editorial titled "License to Riot" worked from the same theme: "Did you see the pictures of those Cleveland riots, of Negro thieves running wild, in and out of wrecked establishments, arms loaded? And did you see the cops standing by, idly watching the debauchery? That was the result of a Police Review Board [121]."
As the November election approached, police tactics became more brazen. The PBA and their supporters packed a meeting about the review board, chaired by Councilman Theodore S. Weiss. Former FBI agent William Turner described the scene:
Thousands of off-duty policemen in uniform, with service revolvers strapped on and wearing PBA buttons (the buttons were later removed at the request of the police commissioner) tightly ringed City Hall and packed its corridors. Many carried signs with such slogans as "What About Civil Rights For Cops," [and] "Don't Let The Reds Frame The Police." Adding to the spectacle were dozens of American nazis and John Birch Society members toting American flags and shouting encouragement to the police [122].
The New York review board was defeated by a two-to-one margin - 1,313,161 to 765,468 [123]. Elsewhere during the same period, similar battles were fought more quietly, with police associations convincing city councils or mayors to refuse proposals for review boards - sometimes even dismantling existing boards. Such was the story in Los Angeles, Denver, Cincinnati, Seattle, Detroit, Newark, San Diego, Hartford, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Philadelphia [124].
But it is worth noting that the police were not univocal in their opposition to civilian review. In many cases, associations of Black officers openly favored the review proposals [125]. In New York, when one such group, the Guardians, released a statement expressing their support of the mayor's proposal, a PBA spokesman protested, "they put their color before their duties and their oath as policemen [126]." It seems that the PBA saw its own political agenda as determining the scope and content of official police duty.
This view was given a fuller expression in August 1968, when PBA president John Cassese issued his own orders concerning police behavior during demonstrations. Cassese instructed PBA members, "If a superior tells a man to ignore a violation of the law, the policeman will take action notwithstanding that order [127]." When the PBA finally published its full guidelines they turned out to be more bark than bite, as they mostly just paraphrased existing laws and policies, but the episode demonstrated something of the PBA's aims [128]. In particular, it suggested an emerging system of dual-power within police agencies, with commanders and union-leaders sometimes sharing and sometimes competing for control. This situation was a natural outgrowth of earlier struggles for departmental autonomy, like that against the Civilian Review Board.
In the course of these conflicts, the political ambitions of police became more aggressive: they not only sought to insulate themselves from all outside control, but also wanted to exercise control over other areas of the government and public policy. Henry Wise, the lawyer for the Patrohnen's Benevolent Association, was very optimistic about the organization's potential: "We could elect governors, or at least knock 'em off. I've told them [the police] if you get out and organize, you could become one [of] the strongest political units in the commonwealth [129]."
By the end of the 1960s, the trajectory of these developments was clear, and elites started to worry. The New York Times opined, "[A] city cannot be ruled by its police force, any more than a free nation can be ruled by its military establishment [130]." The police, both in their departments and in their unions, were coming to represent a force that could rival the civil authorities. In 1968, Boston mayor Kevin White confessed, "Are the police governable? Yes. Do I control the police, right now? NO [131]." In 1972 LA city administrative officer C. Erwin Piper said Fi-Po had "more political clout than any other group in city government [132]."
Unfortunately, the period of police militancy has outlasted many of the social conditions that produced its rise, and police activism continues to have major political consequences. In 1992, when New York mayor David Dinkins proposed a civilian review committee, the PBA mounted a protest-cum-riot, which Acting Commissioner Raymond Kelly described as "unruly, mean spirited and perhaps criminal [133]." According to Kelly's report, 10,000 off-duty cops took over the steps of City Hall, blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, damaged property, and assaulted passersby. The response of the on-duty officers was "lethargic at best [134]." Several officers, including one captain and two sergeants, failed to hold police lines, and a uniformed officer - Michael P. Abitabile - waved protesters through the police barricades while shouting racial slurs [135]. Police Chief David W. Scott later said, "I'm disappointed in the fact that police officers would violate the law [136]."
The demonstration carried obvious racial overtones. Signs read, "Dinkins, we know your true color-yellow bellied," and "Dear Mayor, have you hugged a drug dealer today?" T-shirts urged, "Dinkins must go!" And demonstrators chanted, "The mayor's on crack" and "No justice! No police [137]!" Kelly's report suggests that the demonstration was self-defeating, as "the inability of the on-duty personnel assigned to police the demonstration has raised serious questions about the department's willingness and ability to police itself [138]." I would actually say that it answered those questions, but the disagreement is academic; the demonstration had greater practical consequences, helping to launch the candidacy of Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani, who spoke at the rally, was elected mayor following Dinkins and immediately set about expanding police power [139]. In retrospect, the September 16 rally has all the flavor of a municipal-level coup.
Police activism, especially in the guise of union activity, remains somewhat perplexing. The historical development is clear enough, but politically it is troublesome - especially for the left. The whole issue presents a nest of paradoxes: the police have unionized, and struck - but continue in their role as strikebreakers [140]. They have pitted themselves against their bosses and the government, but represent a threat to democracy, rather than an expression of it. They have resisted authority for the sake of authoritarian aims, have broken laws in the name of law and order, and have demanded rights that they consistently deny to others. This situation is sometimes thought to create a bind for those who both support the rights of workers and demand that police be accountable to the community. But the dilemma here is illusory. The demands of solidarity - ethical solidarity - are with the oppressed, and against the police. Working people cannot afford to extend solidarity to the police, and we cannot let the reactionary goals of police unions restrain us in our attacks on injustice. Confusion in this matter represents a set of related misconceptions; these can be resolved by clearly examining the class status of the police and the nature of their organizations.
The class position of the police is complex, and even contradictory.
Individual officers may consider themselves "working class" for any of a variety of reasons. First, there is the fact that, even after the period of professionalization, most officers are still drawn from working-class backgrounds. There is also the persistent sense that, regardless of income, the job has little social status attached to it. And finally, there is the nature of the work itself. "After all, police work is often physical, sometimes dirty, involves shift-work, and brings officers into contact with undesirable elements of society [141]."
The police have certainly faced their share of uncomfortable and unfair working conditions. In the nineteenth century, police received low pay (unless one counts graft), worked long shifts, were given no vacations, enjoyed little job security, and had no guarantee of income if they were injured (or of support for their families if they were killed) [142]. Such standards are appalling, for certain, but most workers were no better off [143]. In the twentieth century, the pressures of bureaucratization and professionalization were often resented by the officers at the lowest levels. Bureaucratization increased discipline, eliminated political patronage and protection, and supplied rule-bound prescriptions for police action. Professionalization represented, from the perspective of the old-school cops, an unnecessary intrusion of elitist organizational goals at the expense of a traditional hard-nosed approach. Both reform movements created structural tensions within the police departments that later motivated the drive toward unionization.
But the proletarian aspects of policing are only half the equation. Though individually they receive just a meager portion of capitalism's benefits, the police represent both the interests and the power of the ruling class. Like managers, police control those who do the work, and they actively maintain the conditions that allow for profitable exploitation [144].
The police thus occupy a dual position as workers and overseers, but this is not a fatal contradiction: a worker can be made to discern "his own" interests, apart from the interests of the working class as a whole. This is the nature of the so-called "middle class," which is really a section of the working class bought off by the capitalists to manage their affairs [145]. Class status, in this regard, is determined neither by income nor by ownership, but by power relations:
Since the authority and expertise of the middle ranks in the capitalist corporation represent an unavoidable delegation of responsibility, the position of such functionaries may best be judged by their relation to the power and wealth that commands them from above, and to the mass of labor beneath them which they in turn help to control, command, and organize [146].
The peculiar distinction of this middle stratum is that its members share in both the power and rewards of the upper classes and in the alienation of the workers they control [147]. This basic fact requires elites to treat police differently than other workers, seeking through ideology and material incentives to separate them from the mass of workers (and the labor movement especially), tying the interests of the police to those of capitalism and the state [148]. This trick is accomplished through peculiar means, using what is ostensibly a labor organization - the police union.
The status of police unions, and their relationship to the labor movement as a whole, has always been troublesome. When the NYPD challenged the legality of the Patrolman's Benevolent Association in 1951, the court ruled that the PBA could organize police and could negotiate contracts precisely because it was not a union. According to the court, the police could join "associations" like the PBA and FOP, but not any organization that had either non-police leadership or affiliation with non-police unions [149]. This ruling represented something of a compromise position, seeking both to preserve the "neutrality" of police action against strikes and to respect the officers' right to free association.
As legal reasoning goes, that's not ver y impressive. New York City Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy, who strongly resisted the PBA's demands for recognition in the late 1950s, argued that the distinction between an independent association and a union was meaningless: "When an organization acts like a union, talks like a union, makes demands like a union and conducts itself like a union, it cannot be heard to say that it is not a union [150]." But the legal status of police associations is at most a secondary matter. The practical effect of the ruling was to privilege the PBAs and FOPs over the Teamsters and AFSCME. Police managers were then quick to recognize (in some cases, to create) associations - especially when facing a Teamsters organizing drive. The associations gave police management a means of establishing agreed-upon conditions while still discouraging autonomous rank-and-file action and solidarity with other workers [151].
Police associations thus developed in relative isolation from the rest of the labor movement, while building close ties with the command hierarchy within the departments. This fact points to two related reasons why police unions are not legitimate labor unions. First, as is discussed above, the police are clearly part of the managerial machinery of capitalism. Their status as "workers" is therefore problematic [152]. Second, the agendas of police unions mostly reflect the interests of the institution (the police department) rather than those of the working c1ass [153].
When the PBA organized in New York, collective bargaining rights were traded for no-strike agreements and a bar from affiliating with other unions. During the same period, police unions around the country were defecting from AFSCME to form police-only locals [154]. Almost twenty y ears later, in 1970, the NY PBA took this dissociation further than the law required, moving to break parity with other city employees, including firefighters, corrections deputies, and sanitation workers [155]. This is telling, and not just because it shows the lack of solidarity between police associations and the rest of the working class. It indicates that police associations organize more along institutional rather than class lines - that is, they organize police as police, not as workers.
The police exhibit an institutional unity that is fundamentally different than the class consciousness underlying union activity. The chief difference is that despite fissures along race lines, disputes between superiors and subordinates, and intra-departmental rivalries - a sense of shared identity extends to every branch of police organizations and is felt at every level, from the highest commander to the rookie on the beat. This solidarity helps the commanders maintain the loyalty of their troops and, as mentioned before, it also leads cops of all ranks to cover up for each other. Not only do street cops hide one another's mistakes from those above them, but superiors shield subordinates from outside scrutiny [156].
Such managerial complicity reinforces the sense of identity and group cohesion, thus reducing the possibilities for conflict within the department. And as the rank and file have become a more vocal, and more powerful, political constituency, some commanders have extended this strategy in order to share in the benefits of militancy [157]. A savvy commander can secure the loyalty of his troops by participating in their revolt, providing himself with the platform for leadership and at the same time retaining a militant force prepared to back him up in clashes with civil authorities.
Police unions exercise influence over departments in ways other unions can only envy. However, apart from localized (usually individual) grievances, the officers and their managers share interests, perspectives, and a sense of identity. In the end, their institutional identification is superior to their class consciousness. To a very large extent, police departments achieve internal peace by subsuming the interests of both workers and managers to those of the institution. Even economic issues, like wages and hours, become common ground for cops and their bosses: both want increases in department budgets. The officers, of course, enjoy a higher standard of living as a result, and police administrators can look forward to more funding, larger departments, better morale, and an easier time attracting recruits. For this reason some scholars describe police contract negotiations as exercises in "collusive bargaining."
Margaret Levi explains:
As the literature on private labor unions so often illustrates, collective bargaining often serves as a device of social control. It channels conflict and sets its terms. But collusive bargaining goes one step further: it enables management and labor negotiators to cooperate actively with each other. (In order to convince their constituencies of their motives the bargaining teams fight publicly, but privately they compromise.) By engaging in collusive bargaining, city leaders gain credibility with the public for being tough, gain some assurance of relatively uninterrupted service delivery, and regain some power to make programmatic innovations. Of course, in return, they must grant some of the union's demands [158].
Union leaders, meanwhile, put on a similar act for the benefit of their constituency. As a result, they are able to deliver gains to the union members and retain their positions of influence - all without the risks of genuine conflict.
As an example of this collusive approach, Levi cites the relationship between the Fraternal Order of Police and Atlanta Police Chief John Inman: "The chief found the FOP was sympathetic enough to his policies to become a much needed ally, and the FOP discovered it could gain promotions and respect.... However, this alliance also contributed to the racism of the police labor organization [159]." In this way, antagonisms between labor and management become secondary to their common, institutional aims. As both press to increase the power, resources, and autonomy of the institution, they form a community of interests, an alliance against the meddling of city officials or the competing demands of other government agencies.
Such an alliance bears the markings of corporatism. Colin Crouch and Ronald Dore define "a corporatist arrangement" as:
An institutional pattern which involves an explicit or implicit bargain (or recurring bargaining) between some organ of government and private interest groups (including those promoting "ideal interests" - "causes" ), one element in the bargain being that the groups receive certain institutionalized or ad hoc benefits in return for guarantees by the groups' representatives that their members will behave in certain ways considered to be in the public interest. [160].
They go on to cite both historical and recent examples:
The doctors and lawyers of medieval England - as well as the civil engineers and all the other professional groups which got their charters in the nineteenth century - were granted monopoly privileges (the right to decide who should and who should not be allowed to sell certain kinds of services) in exchange for promises to make sure that the professional standards of those who did sell those services - their skills and their morals - were what the public had a right to expect. More modern forms - this time the granting by the state of an ad hoc concession rather than an institutionalized privilege - include, for instance, the bargains sometimes struck in the 1960s and 1970s in Britain between the British Rail management, the railway modernized the government: more state funds for railway modernization provided that the unions would agree to get their members to accept productivity improvements and changes in the work practice [161].
They could also have pointed to, more notoriously, the economic system of Fascist Italy [162].
Leaving aside the question of police fascism, corporatist arrangements in policing have taken both the "medieval" and the "modern" forms that Crouch and Dore describe. As the historical comparisons indicate, each phase of police reform has tended toward corporatist arrangements - bureaucratization and professionalization under the "medieval" model, and unionization in a more "modern" guise. Currently, the "medieval" aspects find an analogy in the relations between police departments and governments (wherein bargaining is implicit), and the "modern" are in evidence with the three-party relations between the union, the departments, and the government. However, with the police, the corporatist deal is not between the state and some outside group (as it is in Crouch and Dore's idealized scenario), but between various sections of the state. Specifically, it is an agreement between the elected civil authorities (the government), the police commanders (the department), and the representatives of the rank-and-file officers (the union) [163].
This alignment between workers and management is not unique to police labor relations, but a common feature of many public or semi-public institutions. In the wave of public employee unionization of the 1960s, many public ser vice workers - not just cops - began to demand changes in the way their work was organized, and sometimes sought to influence the social conditions that affected their work. But whereas teachers and social workers rallied against discrimination, inequality, and the meager remedies of the Great Society, the police turned sharply to the right. For example, a major demand of the 1967 Chicago social workers' strike was the provision of additional services for clients. Teachers' unions frequently demand smaller classes and better material. The police, in contrast, advocate longer prison sentences, fewer safeguards against brutality, and new weaponry [164].
In each case, the workers seek to make common cause with their clients but the clientele of the various agencies are quite different. Smaller classes benefit both teachers and students; additional social services are good for the people who receive them and for the people who provide them. But, such provisions likely inconvenience taxpayers, other portions of the government (who compete for the funds), and the business and government elites who feel they can surely find "better" uses for the money and have little sympathy for the plight of public school students and the poor. In the case of the police, these relationships are exactly reversed: the police defend the interests of elites, and it is the poor who are burdened [165]. Thus, the social function of policing provides a permanent basis for the conservative orientation of police unions.
In turn, police associations provide a stronghold for the most reactionary aspects of the profession - elements that the command hierarchy is often at pains to disavow [166]. When the police command cannot, for legal or political reasons, resist demands for civilian oversight, for more diversity in the department, or for redress in particular cases, the union can defend the departmental status quo. Historically, most police associations barred Black members [167], and police in Detroit and St. Louis threatened strikes to keep Black people off the force. The police departments accommodated the White officers in various ways, sometimes by refusing to hire Black people, in other cases by keeping Black officers out of uniform, restricting them to Black neighborhoods, or barring them from arresting White people [168]. As recently as 1995, a group of Black LAPD officers sued the Police Protective League for its role in preserving discrimination on the force, describing the union as a "bastion of white supremacy [169]."
Police unions are also on hand to defend individual officers whose misbehavior becomes embarrassing to the department and who therefore cannot be protected by their supervisors. For instance, when officer Doug Erickson was fired for shooting twenty-two times at a fleeing suspect, the Portland Police Association spent over $100,00 taking the case to arbitration; Erickson was reinstated as a result [170].
The police union represents an extreme of autonomy, protecting officers of the lowest rank from authority both inside and outside the department. This has the effect of distributing some kinds of power toward the bottom of the formal hierarchy:
Certainly if the police chief or police commissioner ignores legislative mandates or other directives from policy-makers, he must suffer the consequences, whereas even the rookie patrolman soon learns the art of camouflaging both inefficiency and policy infractions. In this sense, not only does the individual officer, acting in an isolated instance, make a subjective judgment as to how he should intervene in a particular situation, but when these discretionary judgments are made by officers on a wholesale basis, as they frequently are, it takes on the character of administrative and policy decisions being made by officers at the lowest level of the hierarchy [171].
The careful tension between departmental policy and officer autonomy has its benefits for both the commanders and the line officers. Though police regulations do notoriously little to actually regulate officer conduct, they do provide a layer of plausible deniability between commanders and the routine activities of their troops. That is, the rules help to insulate commanders from responsibility for misconduct while at the same time police unions defend the rank and file from meaningful discipline. This arrangement allows for the formal appearance of a rigorous command and control while maintaining maximum discretion at the lowest levels of the organization. The command staff can minimize the criticism it faces through the manipulation of formal policies and bureaucratic shuffling, but concessions granted at this level need not affect much of what happens on the street.
Of course, discipline does exist and can be quite stringent when it comes to certain procedural or organizational matters - scheduling, the chain of command, uniforms, budgets, and so on. But both discipline and discretion exist within carefully proscribed bounds according to the needs and aims of the institution. Discipline fails and discretion is preserved in those areas where it is most convenient for the department that it be so - that is, when the police come into contact with the public. The public cares very little about whether cops are issued light blue or dark blue shirts, whether they stand at attention during roll call, whether they work eight or ten-hour shifts, are disciplined in pairs or alone, etc. - but these are just the sort of matters over which management exercises the most control. Those elements with which the public is especially concerned - when and how force is used, how the police deal with a noisy but peaceful drunk, the basis on which people are treated with suspicion - these are left to the individual officer's discretion.
Here is a convenient rule of thumb: police will be disciplined when their behavior threatens the smooth operation of the institution. But there is a corollary to this: to the degree that officers collectively control the department, discipline wil be weaker, as elites will have to bargain for access to the institution's power. This is one effect of police unionization.
Police labor action reminds local governments that they have created for themselves a rival to their own power. Unlike private-sector strikes, which threaten the bosses' ability to make a profit, public worker strikes threaten the local government's ability to provide services or, in the case of the police, to rule. They work by disrupting the city government's access to the institutions by which it achieves its ends. While a sit-down strike may raise the specter of workers controlling industry - since there is a natural continuum between workers shutting down a plant, occupying it, and running it themselves - analogous actions by the police would fall on a different continuum and foreshadow less blissful social arrangements: if the police continued to patrol, make arrests, and otherwise conduct surveillance and distribute violence but do so without direction from the local government, this would amount to a transfer of power from the one institution to the other. It would portend the possibility of direct rule by the police.
In 1919 it was thought, clumsily, that this was a threat to be repressed. And such repression has occurred since then, when police excesses create the conditions for unrest or otherwise threaten the status quo. But police ambitions cannot be permanently repressed if the cops are to continue in their capacity, reliably suppressing the unruly portions of the population. And so, through a long series of reforms and negotiations, a strategy of co-optation developed, and with it emerged the instrument for balancing police loyalty with the demands of a semi-autonomous organization.
These instruments are generally called unions, though that misnomer (like so many others in "police science") relies on a false analogy to other, dissimilar organizations. Police unions provide the means by which the officers can collectively negotiate with the civil authorities, determine together the conditions under which loyalty may be ensured - loyalty to the police commanders, civil authorities, and the ruling class, respectively. It is not the loyalty of the individual officers that is at stake: they are not freelancers or mercenaries negotiating a fee for service. Rather, it is the loyalty of the institution that the officers collectively, through their union, may not control but can disable. Interestingly, this not only increases the power and autonomy of the union, but of the entire department, relative to the rest of the city government. The officers may, under rare conditions, even use their associations to compete with the civil authorities for control. Such power struggles are generally of short duration, but their effects can be long-lasting. They demonstrate the limit of police loyalty and the threat of mutiny - really, the usurpation of the institution - and in so doing they help to set the price for that loyalty. When that price is agreed on, the police again become fully available for the uses to which the ruling class, the state authorities, and their own commanders would put them.
As police organize, lobby, and strike, it seems that their negotiations have as much to do with the elites' access to, and the smooth functioning of, the police institution itself as with wages and working conditions. In this, police bargaining resembles less the struggles of exploited workers than the agreements formed between sovereigns and their intermediaries in the creation or expansion of states [172]. In fact, in at least one sense, police associations are best conceived of as semi-autonomous, but constitutive, parts of the state.
The independent organization of police officers has done a great deal to protect both individual cops and whole departments from meaningful oversight. Unionization has thus served to preserve patterns of abuse and discrimination, while at the same time advancing the agenda of law enforcement on the social and political fronts. This development represents, as per William Westley's analysis of police brutality, the collective usurpation of governmental authority and the means of violence.
This process then results in a transfer in property from the state to the colleague group. The means of violence which were originally a property of the state, in loan to its law-enforcement agent, the police. are in a psychological sense confiscated by the police, to be conceived of as a personal property to be used at their discretion [173].
But whereas Westley analyzed police brutality in terms of the informal, "psychological" confiscation of authority, union negotiations formalize the officers' claim to partial control of the institution and, by implication, its capacity for violence [174].
Our earlier discussion of police brutality led us to pose a series of questions we are now primed to address. These were: To what degree is violence the "property" of the state? At what point does the police cooptation of violence challenge the state's monopoly on it? When do the police, in themselves, become a genuine rival of the state? Are they a rival to be used (as in a system of indirect rule) or a rival to be suppressed? Is there a genuine danger of the police becoming the dominant force in society, displacing the civilian authorities? Is this a problem for the ruling class? Might such a development, under certain conditions, be to their favor?
These questions suggest another, prior, question: What is the state? Let us begin with that.
It may seem odd to talk about an independent private organization, such as a police association, as a constitutive part of the state. The tendency is to think of the state as a monolithic institution claiming an exclusive right to the use of force. But this conception of state power is overly simple, both in terms of the state's actual operation and in terms of its historical development.
Martin J. Smith defines the state as "a set of institutions which provide the parameters for political conflict between various interests over the use of resources and the direction of public policy [175]." The state is not a unitary organization, but rather a complex network, with components termed "the welfare state," "the police state," etc., and with extensions identified as "the military-industrial complex," "the prison-industrial complex," and so on. As the state becomes increasingly differentiated and its power ever more diffuse, its precise edges become difficult to define and the public/private distinction grows hazy [176]. What has sometimes been hailed as a post-modern end to state sovereignty is in reality the modern state reaching maturity, drawing in additional elements, incorporating new sources of influence and legitimacy, and adjusting the balance of power accordingly.
Organizations and power networks win influence over the state according to their ability to aid or impede its operation (or to contribute to the aims of other institutional actors). Sometimes this influence will be established through sharp conflict and the decisive victory of one faction over another. More usually, however, it will be settled through a process of negotiation and bargaining. The latter is generally preferable, not only because it carries fewer costs than all-out battle, but also because by sharing power the various interests can oftentimes increase the power that is there to be shared.
Within these networks, power is not simply wielded instrumentally by the autonomous state over social actors, or conversely by dominant social groups over a neutral or powerless state. Rather, power is to some extent created within these networks.... [I]t arises out of a relationship of dependence between state and social actors. Each actor provides something that the other cannot obtain on its own, and the power (or autonomy) of each is hence increased by the relationship [177].
In the case of police officers, police administrators, police departments, and police unions, this dynamic is at work simultaneously on several levels. Individual officers share in the authority of the department, while the department maintains its power through the concerted efforts of its individual members. By joining together in independent associations, the member officers can effectively shape the policies and operations of the department, and can sometimes influence the policies and priorities of the government more broadly. When police unions and administrators make common cause, they can pressure the civil authorities to increase the power, resources, and independence of the department - because, to a certain extent, the civil authorities are always dependent on the cooperation of the police to defend their power and enforce their will [178]. Meanwhile, as the departments become more prominent as institutions, the share of power controlled by administrators and the unions increases proportionately - and the department finds itself well placed to form alliances with other government agencies (and sometimes private enterprises), enhancing the bargaining power of each [179]. And, in the process, departmental administrators and union leaders alike can increase their personal influence [180].
This analysis is in keeping with the historical development of the state. Charles Tilly explains:
Because no ruler or ruling coalition had absolute power and because classes outside the ruling coalition always held day-to-day control over a significant share of the resources rulers drew on for war, no state escaped the creation of some organizational burdens rulers would have preferred to avoid. A second, parallel process also generated unintended burdens for the state: as rulers created organizations either to make war or to draw the requisites of war from the subject population - not only armies and navies but also tax offices, customs services, treasuries, regional administrations, and armed forces to forward their work among the civilian population - they discovered that the organizations themselves developed interests, rights, perquisites, needs. and demands requiring attention on their own [181].
Within this theoretical framework, it is possible to briefly re-interpret the history of policing. The use of legitimate violence, which was originally the "property" of individual slaveholders, heads of households, and various secular and ecclesiastic authorities, was slowly formalized and consolidated. On the local level, this process produced slave patrols and then police. Initially, the police were highly dependent on local patrons and served as the instruments of political machines. As the capitalist class and its middle-class supporters took control of the government, the police were transformed to a tool of class rule. The destruction of the machines, however, required the creation of formal bureaucracies, which quickly came to develop interests of their own and started to formulate their own demands. The police were the prototypical bureaucracy, and the following wave of professionalization only further decreased their dependence on the municipal administration while reinforcing the organization's loyalty to the ruling class. The police rebellion came when the lowest ranking officers reacted against the demands of professionalization while taking advantage of the autonomy it granted. They organized independently and began presenting demands at every level - of administrators, of city and state officials, of legislatures, and of society. Because a strike would disrupt the city government's power and therefore also weaken the state's protection of the ruling class's interests, the rank and file held enough control over the state's coercive apparatus to credibly threaten its access to force, even if they could not fully mobilize it for their own purposes. By this telling, the coup of police unionization did not represent a sharp break from the institution's previous development, but instead signaled a new step in the pre-existing pattern. The emergence of the police as social and political actors marked the maturity of the institution.
The police have always been thugs, but they have traditionally been thugs in the service of elites. The crises of the 1960s produced an outbreak of police hooliganism directed against the citizenry (especially Black people, students, and radicals) and a revolt against their own commanders and the civil authorities. The police, in short, became self-conscious political actors seeking to defend their own interests, advance their own agenda, act under their own authority, and increase their already substantial power. Such a development is very dangerous for a wavering democracy like that of the United States.
An uneasy truce has developed between the cops and the civil authorities. Police departments have been granted a great deal of autonomy concerning their policies, procedures, and discipline. This allows for peace between the civil authorities and the police while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability concerning misconduct, as long as abuse is directed against suitable targets - racial minorities and the poor.
So, to answer our earlier questions: To what degree is violence the "property" of the state? In the United States, the state has increasingly exercised monopolistic control over legitimate violence, especially since the early nineteenth century. However, given the networked nature of power relations constituting the state, the means of violence have always been invested in some particular institution or set of institutions that carried - to a greater or lesser degree - the potential for independent action.
At what point does the police co-optation of violence challenge the state's monopoly? When do the police, in themselves, become a genuine rival of the state? Are they a rival to be used (as in a system of indirect rule) or a rival to be suppressed? Given their unique bargaining positions (only the military can compete with the cops' potential for organized violence), the possibility of police dominance of the government cannot be discounted. So far, they have not achieved permanent ascendancy in any city, and nationally their influence has been rather limited. On the other hand, since their inception the police have been increasingly central to any power network that succeeds in controlling local government, and there is no indication that this trend is being reversed.
Of course, so long as the faction that maintains control of the apparatus of violence remains loyal to, and incorporated within, the network that is the state, the development of semi-autonomous police institutions may actually bolster the power of the state, especially in times of crisis when that power is challenged.
Under these conditions, though it may require shifting power and resources to the criminal justice system at the expense of other state enterprises, the police may - in part because of their high level of independent organization - be effectively used by the dominant group. But if the police mutiny for either material or ideological reasons, or if they begin to make demands that the government cannot accommodate, police control of institutional resources may threaten the power of civil authorities. Under such conditions, the civil authorities will feel compelled to break the police unions for the sake of preserving their own position.
Is there a genuine danger of the police becoming the dominant force in society, displacing the civilian authorities? A simple armed revolt would invite intervention at the state or federal level, and would surely fail. But, it is conceivable that the police could seize control of a local government if they proceeded with a combination of electoral and bully-boy tactics, on the Rizzo and Giuliani model. For the police to seize control nationally, they would either need to be networked on that level to a greater extent than they are presently, or else gain the assistance of some other institution (e.g., the military).
Is this a problem for the ruling class? Might it, under certain conditions, be to their favor? Logically speaking, it is possible that police-rule would favor the ruling class. For example, capitalists may feel that the cops are more willing or able to defend their interests than are the civilian authorities. This may especially be the case if the authorities are so divided as to threaten regime collapse, while the police retain the unity necessary to take control and keep order. The significance of the 1967 riots for the Detroit police strike is precisely this: the state is more tolerant of some rivals than others, more willing to accept some challenges to its power than others, and more ready to bargain with its long term allies than to face defeat at the hands of immediate antagonists. As rebellions go, a police rebellion is particularly likely to gain the support of elites. For though police autonomy diminishes the power of the courts, civil government, and the rule of law vis-a-vis the police - it tends on the whole to preserve the inequalities extant in the status quo, including the inequalities inherent in these other institutions.
Of course, a full-force police state may make economic demands that prove inconvenient for business, and would almost certainly hinder the fully autonomous operation of industry. But under certain conditions, especially those of social crisis, the ruling class may prefer the stability of police or military rule, with all its accompanying constraints, to the possibility of facing extinction in the course of revolution. (It was just such considerations that led the middle and upper classes to support Franco in Spain, and later, Pinochet in Chile [182].) More likely, however, is a "soft" coup, by which the police gradually gain a dominant position within the local government, though never becoming the only voice. The police could then form the center and base for a new kind of machine, building the necessary alliances with other social actors, but keeping the power in the stationhouse rather than in the wards. Formally representative structures could remain in place while the police use their power to squash dissent, engineer campaigns, and shape policies - making the most of their practical monopoly on organized violence. This would seem the natural ideal of "Blue Power," and while it may prove compatible to the needs of capitalism, it is an obvious threat to democracy.
The police have been transformed from a wholly dependent tool of the political machines to an independent source of power. I noted in an earlier chapter that the development of modern police forces marked an unprecedented incursion on the part of the state into the lives of the citizenry, and signified in retrospect a clear step toward totalitarianism [183]. As the police institution has evolved, it has become a major source of power not only for the state, but within the state. This achievement represents another step in the same direction: as the institutions of violence become more autonomous, they isolate themselves from democratic control. This is bad enough, surely - but as these same institutions gain influence over policy and social priorities, they inhibit the representative aspects of other parts of government. Blue Power reduces the possibility of democracy.
While the police were undergoing their metamorphosis - from instrument of the machines to bureaucratic apparatus of class rule, to independent political force - they were simultaneously challenging democracy in other ways and expanding their social influence in some surprising directions. The task of the police in preserving race and class hierarchies made them experts in suppressing dissent, and police departments quickly developed specializations in this regard. More recently, as we shall see, these same designs have led them to seek ever-more involvement and greater shares of influence in aspects of social life quite removed from law enforcement.