Five years ago, in response to George Floyd’s death, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute issued a report outlining methods to move toward a “criminal justice system — police, courts, prison, reentry, community supervision — that is focused on the safety, health and well-being of communities rather than on maintaining a harsh, semi-militarized revolving door system from which, for too many, there is often no escape.”
The 95-page document made a single recommendation regarding law enforcement and organized labor: “Police union contracts need to be evaluated to ensure they do not obstruct the ability for officers who engage in misconduct to be held accountable.”
It’s likely that such kid-gloves treatment for one of the most politically powerful forces in urban America wouldn’t shock Stuart Schrader. The author of “Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves” (Basic Books; 432 pages; $34.00) teaches at Johns Hopkins University, and is “the Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism.”
For readers sturdy enough to endure his nausea-inducing wokery, the professor’s book is a valuable chronicle of how, within “a couple of decades,” cops became “well enough organized to be able to command resources and respect from Congress, the White House and city halls and statehouses across the country” — and do so “without a single, national police union.” Unionization altered the “balance of power within the profession,” as well. If the top brass “wanted to survive,” it “had to accommodate or accede to rank-and-file power,” with cops “unafraid to wield this power openly, uproariously and sometimes illegally.”
Well within the lifetimes of the Baby Boomers, the law-enforcement profession was profoundly different than it is in the third decade of the 21st century. Education levels were far lower. In 1966, “almost 12% of cops in the [Detroit] area did not have a high school diploma … and over 75% had never attended any college.” In Baltimore, it was “normal practice for cops to paint buildings around the city,” and many had “duties related to maintenance, sanitation, towing or health inspection.”
Pay and benefits weren’t attractive, and palm-greasing was disturbingly common — “[c]orruption was not merely endemic to policing; it was constitutive.” Unions didn’t exist. (Perhaps out of loyalty to his ideological tribe, Schrader doesn’t mention it, but liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that the “process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”)
Between bigotry, brutality and bribery — something had to be done. Reformers “at the end of the Progressive Era” sought to forge “the police into a more effective anticrime force,” and the “new orientation required disentangling police from politics, vanquishing the machines, and transforming governance into a more outwardly apolitical form of administration.” Better compensation came to be seen as “a surefire way to ensure police competence and rectitude,” and “cops increasingly sought union protections.”
Schrader delves deeply into how Blue Power took hold in Detroit, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York. Empowered by state laws that legalized collective bargaining in state and local employment, it didn’t take long for law enforcement’s Big Labor division to use its forced-dues windfall for affairs well beyond the negotiating table. Jerry Crowley made “political action” a priority. Under his leadership, the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association:
[B]egan experimenting with new ways of making its voice heard and engaging its membership. One example was printing preaddressed form letters in its newsletter, which members could then clip and send to the mayor and the supervisors. In addition, the association identified a range of activities for members, including retirees, to help support its agenda, including posting signs, making financial contributions, speaking to civic groups, and urging friends to vote. At the end of the 1970s, one of Crowley’s colleagues reflected on their many successes, and the variety of tactics they had needed to use: ‘political considerations, pressure on politicians, talking, influencing, supporting, opposing politicians is what got the work done.’ Simply put, over and over, ‘our answer was politics.’
Multiply the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association’s “success” in cities from coast to coast, and add four decades. What’s the cost? Between “1977 to 2021, according to the Urban Institute, state and local expenditures on police increased 175%, adjusted for inflation — more than expenditures on health, education or transportation.” Today, over 95% of law-enforcement spending “goes to salaries and benefits,” with cops in large cities earning “copious overtime pay, sometimes more than doubling individual base salaries and dramatically increasing pension obligations. Police officers in the Big Apple enjoy goodies “unavailable to most other workers: a year of sick leave, retirement after 20 years of service, and a pension, as well as protections from punishment for misconduct (the most common punishment is loss of vacation days).”
And the future? In 2026, “there are more police agencies than ever,” and they are “approved to hire more officers than they can recruit, who stand to earn more money than ever before.” Many states have “advanced efforts to outlaw municipal budget reductions for police,” and in Texas, “the governor signed a bill to penalize jurisdictions that reduce police budgets,” even requiring “budgets to keep pace with inflation.”
America loves its cops. And not without reasons, of course. Particularly in high-crime cities, policing is an often-dangerous, frequently thankless job. But how badly has catering to Blue Power fostered fiscal crises and impeded effective crimefighting? Give his profession and worldview, Schrader dodges the question, railing that police, protecting “the power of the titans of capital,” grabbed “what they needed from organized labor, leaving aside its core value of solidarity.” To him, Blue Power “gained extraordinarily powerful backers because of [its] long-standing willingness to put down protests, strikes and other mobilizations for racial and economic justice.”
Overburdened taxpayers, and residents worried about the safety of their neighborhoods, have more prosaic concerns.
D. Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.