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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...=pocket-newtab


How Police Unions fight reform.


Long article

In May, just days after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, Lieutenant Bob Kroll, the bellicose leader of the city’s police union, described Floyd as a violent criminal, said that the protesters who had gathered to lament his death were terrorists, and complained that they weren’t being treated more roughly by police. Kroll, who has spoken unsentimentally about being involved in three shootings himself, said that he was fighting to get the accused officers reinstated. In the following days, the Kentucky police union rallied around officers who had fatally shot an E.M.T. worker named Breonna Taylor in her home. Atlanta police staged an organized sick-out after the officers who killed Rayshard Brooks were charged. Philadelphia police sold T-shirts celebrating a fellow-cop who was caught on video clubbing a student protester with a steel baton. The list goes on.

In their interstitial safe zone, police unions can offer their members extraordinary protections. Officers accused of misconduct may be given legal representation paid for by the city, and ample time to review evidence before speaking to investigators. In many cases, suspended officers have their pay guaranteed, and disciplinary recommendations of oversight boards are ignored. Complaints submitted too late are disqualified. Records of misconduct may be kept secret, and permanently destroyed after as little as sixty days.

The N.Y.P.D. is not the most insular, lawless police department around. It is, in fact, one of the least violent police agencies in the country’s hundred largest cities. During the past seven years, according to a database built by a group called Mapping Police Violence, the police in St. Louis have killed fourteen times more civilians, per capita, than New York police have. In New York, police kill Black civilians at 7.8 times the rate of white civilians. In Chicago, the factor is 27.4.

A sense of being unthanked runs deep in the N.Y.P.D. People protesting police brutality, according to Lynch, “obviously do not appreciate the risk and sacrifice we make for them.” Mike O’Meara, who heads the transit-police union, scolded state officials at a recent rally, shouting, “Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect!” In February, after Mayor Bill de Blasio expressed his sympathies to two police officers who had been shot, the Sergeants Benevolent Association tweeted, “Mayor DeBlasio, the members of the NYPD are declaring war on you! We do not respect you, DO NOT visit us in hospitals. You sold the NYPD to the vile creatures, the 1% who hate cops but vote for you.” The S.B.A. was also responsible for doxxing the Mayor’s daughter, Chiara; after she was arrested during a peaceful demonstration in late May, it published the police report, including her height, weight, and address, on Twitter. The City Council member Ritchie Torres described the S.B.A. as “a hate group masquerading as a labor union.”

Police work is indisputably difficult. Patrol officers are often confronted with people at their worst and their most trying; in a country that has more firearms in private hands than it has citizens, the threat of being shot is real. But, statistically, law enforcement does not make the list of the ten most dangerous jobs in America. Commercial fishing is worse, as are roofing and construction. Studies of patrol officers’ service calls have shown that less than five per cent are related to violent crimes.
Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who now teaches law at the University of South Carolina, argues that law enforcement’s “warrior problem” begins in the first days of training. “Would-be officers are told that their prime objective, the proverbial ‘first rule of law enforcement,’ is to go home at the end of every shift,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 2015. “But they are taught that they live in an intensely hostile world. A world that is, quite literally, gunning for them. . . . As a result, officers learn to be afraid.” This message is then drummed into young cops on the job. The only way to survive is by hypervigilance, addressing civilians in a tone of “unquestioned command,” and identifying those who don’t readily accede to authority as enemies.

I was struck by a coincidence in telephone interviews with two Black N.Y.P.D. officers, one of them retired. In both conversations, we ended up discussing the latest local police scandal, in which an officer was caught on video applying a choke hold to someone on the boardwalk in the Rockaways. The officer, David Afanador, had previously been tried for felony assault—he pistol-whipped an unarmed, unresisting sixteen-year-old, breaking his teeth—but he was acquitted at trial. In the new case, he was quickly suspended and indicted for “attempted aggravated strangulation,” with no discussion of a grand jury. Both interviewees called my attention to the same detail in the Afanador video: a second officer urging him to ease up. That was what excited them. It was a complicity breach—a small but perhaps indicative case of the ninety per cent reining in the ten. “That’s what we want to see,” the retired officer said. “That guy’s an actual hero.”