But confusion about this matter does not concern organized labor alone. During Occupy, many were tempted to include policemen among the 99%, and so we heard chants addressed to policemen to invite them to join the struggle against the 1%: the same policemen who were routinely brutalizing Black and Brown people during stop-and-frisk programs, and who would soon start beating and evicting occupiers across the country.
Less than three years ago, Danny Fetonte, a staffer of Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas from 2009–2014, was elected to the DSA National Political Committee (NPC). When racialized activists within the organization got hold of information about Fetonte’s past involvement with law enforcement, which he had not disclosed prior to his election, they reasonably demanded Fetonte be removed from the NPC. This should have been a no-brainer, for as these activists also discovered, “Fetonte had a direct hand in building police association power which was used by killer cops to cover for their actions. Fetonte organized the Bexar County Sheriff Deputies and successfully bargained a contract that included terms allowing officers under investigation to see all evidence before making a statement. Officers in the department Fetonte organized used that contract he negotiated to view all evidence against them after they shot and killed a man. They then made statements which omitted the fact that the man they shot had his hands up.” Yet, the majority of the NPC repeatedly refused to take this action, the purported rationale being that the DSA support unions and that police unions can be a democratizing tool against police brutality.
At the basis of these kinds of positions lies a fundamental analytical mistake: policemen and their union staffers are not “workers in uniform,” but part and parcel of the repressive state apparatus. The fundamental role of the police is the protection of property relations, a key function of the capitalist state: this role is freely chosen by policemen and, as a rule, it is chosen as a profession for life. Becoming a cop is usually not an expedient, determined by necessity, to have access, for example, to higher education or healthcare benefits; rather, it is a commitment to a profession. Whether one is already a bully before joining law enforcement is often irrelevant, for becoming a bully is the profession’s requirement: those who end up refusing this role are usually pushed out of the police force altogether. And so, the fact that cops live on wages—just as Amazon employees do—does not have any impact whatsoever on the social and political role they objectively play. For all our illusions to the contrary, they are not Amazon employees.
Besides this rather obvious point, there is also overwhelming empirical evidence concerning the absolutely negative role played by cop unions in stopping any attempt at even mild reform and in making police departments unaccountable. Based on data from 2016, there are around 18,000 police agencies across the country, which employ more than 1.1 million people, 750,000 of whom are sworn officers. In a country where only 12% of the workforce is unionized, police officers have one of the highest unionization rates, in line with the unionization rate of public employees. In addition to ILPA, for example, there is the Fraternal Order of Police, with 340,000 members (which endorsed Trump in 2016), the National Association of Police Organizations, and then a myriad of locals and associations at city level. On a formal level, cop unions understand their role as equivalent to the role of labor unions: protecting the interests of their members from the management and from hierarchical excesses within the police administration. But given the particular social and political role of police in the repressive state apparatus, this unavoidably translates into protecting police officers from accountability, hence, enabling them to kill and brutalize at will. This is the case, again, because policemen are not workers: receiving a wage is a grossly insufficient marker of class belonging.