It’s Past Time to Examine How Police Unions Protect Bad Cops
Maybe it’s finally time to consider the role that police unions play in perpetuating police brutality. Mayor de Blasio has frequently tangled with his city’s powerful unions, but he’s never challenged their vast political power. And make no mistake, that power is often used to cover up and deflect charges of police misconduct.
“The unions, at least in New York City, outright just protect, protect, protect the cops,” retired NYPD commander Corey Pegues wrote in his memoir, Once a Cop. “It’s a blanket system of covering up police officers.”
Writing in the Stanford Law Review, scholar Katherine Bies notes that ever since “the rise of police unions to political power in the 1970s,” they have succeeded in shielding their members from public accountability. “Police unions have established highly developed political machinery that exerts significant political and financial pressure on all three...