CONTENT WARNING: This episode involves mention of police violence against people of color.

Since the 1970s, Black police officers have formed informal unions in response to racism within their departments and in the greater community. In this episode, reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks to an economist, a law professor, and a former president of a Black police union to better understand the purpose these organizations serve, their limits, and the ways in which they differ from police unions with bargaining power, like the Police Benevolent Association and Fraternal Order of Police.

Transcript

Archival: As calls grow to defund police departments across the country, the largest police union in Florida now endorsing a candidate for the first time in eight years, it's Donald Trump. The National Association of Police Organizations endorsing President Trump. In the New York City PBA, Mr. President, you earned the endorsement and you've earned this endorsement. I'm proud to give it.

Reem Rayef: Hey everyone, Reem and Colleen here. This week on Talk Policy To Me, we are talking police unions, but not the kind you just heard.

Colleen Pulawski: Yeah, not quite. Today we're talking about Black police unions.

Reem Rayef: Black police unions can have pretty different politics from their more familiar counterparts, like the Fraternal Order of Police or the Police Benevolent Association.

Colleen Pulawski: But before we get too deep in the weeds, I think we should give our listeners a little bit of history and context, because if they're anything like me, they probably didn't even know that Black police unions existed.

Reem Rayef: Yeah, I didn't either. And that's probably because they're smaller, they're rarer, and, unlike typical labor unions, they don't actually have bargaining power or legal status. So in this episode, we're going to hear from an economist, a law professor and a former police lieutenant who will give us some more insight into what they are and what functions they serve for their members.

Colleen Pulawski: What a medley. I'm eager to hear what they have to say.

Reem Rayef: Right. Let's get into it. Welcome to this week's episode where we are talking Black police unions.

Elena Neale-Sacks: Let's just go ahead and start recording now...

Colleen Pulawski: That's Talk Policy To Me reporter Elena Neale-Sacks. For this episode, she spoke with Rob Gillezeau, an economist who has been researching the impact that collective bargaining rights have on police violence.

Elena Neale-Sacks: To start off, could you just introduce yourself and kind of talk a bit about how you came to research the relationship between collective bargaining rights and police killings of nonwhite civilians?

Rob Gillezeau: My name is Dr. Rob Gillezeau. I'm an assistant professor of economics at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. I started studying police violence and racial protest a number of years ago. You know, my initial interest in the topic actually came from where I was living. So I am from Canada, but I did my PhD at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And you know, that was a city that was very much marked by the uprising of 1967. The impacts of that uprising were still quite visible in the community. We often forget this part of the history, but the uprisings in the 1960s were overwhelmingly triggered by police brutality or perceived police brutality against the Black community.

Reem Rayef: So how exactly does this relate to police unions? We'll let Rob explain.

Rob Gillezeau: Police were starting to join unions in the late 1950s and 1960s, a period where you see a huge increase in civilian deaths. So between 1960 and 1975, when a lot of officers gained the right to bargain, you see a 53 percent increase in civilians being killed per capita. So something is going on in that era that is explaining part of how America ends up in, I don't want to use economist language, but I think what we can think of as a bad equilibrium.

Reem Rayef: Rob and his colleagues found that the adoption of collective bargaining rights for police officers between the 1960s and 1980s accounted for about 10 percent of the increase in nonwhite deaths at the hands of law enforcement in that period. In short, they found that police unions increased police violence against people of color.

Rob Gillezeau: So you introduced collective bargaining rights and at the margin, right, since there are going to be more procedural protections for the officer, you would expect them to shoot more civilians on average of both white and nonwhite, but also less officers to be killed. And so our actual findings don't match with that. We find a big increase in civilian deaths but it's exclusively in the nonwhite community. There really is no increase in whites killed. And then on top of that, policing itself isn't becoming safer. We find that the number of officers being killed in the line of duty after collective bargaining rights are rolled out doesn't decrease at all. And so that was, frankly, a really big surprise. So it looks like after bargaining rights are rolled out, our results are suggesting that society is becoming less safe.

Colleen Pulawski: OK, so police unions in general started forming in the 50s and 60s. But I'm interested to know, when do Black police unions start to gain steam and how exactly do they function?

Reem Rayef: Right. So like Rob was saying, the Detroit uprising in 1967 really catalyzed a movement against police brutality, and that movement even gained a foothold within police departments themselves. Then, in the 1970s, we begin to see groups of Black cops forming their own informal organizations. In many cases, this happened as a result of racism and feelings of isolation within predominantly white police departments.

Rob Gillezeau: Ethical societies of police, kind of the equivalent of a Black police union, what's usually very different is that they aren't formal unions. You're a voluntary association of folks, you know, acting outside of a formal labor relations process. But I also think that's a really important signal. It points to issues with union democracy, to a set of officers feeling like they don't have a place in the base union.

Elena Neale-Sacks: So you said these Black police unions are typically like kind of informal, they don't have the same legal authority as the main unions. So does that mean they don't have bargaining power because their members often are part of the larger umbrella unions as well, but then they have this separate union?

Rob Gillezeau: Yeah, it would be like, you don't really have many what are called "minority unions" in the United States anymore, so you have one union for the workplace. And so these are kind of unions in name, but not in legal status.

Colleen Pulawski: To find out more about the relationship between black police unions and bargaining unions, Elena spoke with a former police lieutenant and president of the St. Louis Ethical Society of Police.

Heather Taylor: My name is Heather Taylor. I became a police officer on 9/11/2000. I knew I always wanted to be a police officer, basically. My experiences with law enforcement that weren't so positive at times shaped my reasons for wanting to be a law enforcement officer and to focus on victims of violent crime.

Elena Neale-Sacks: So kind of to like reform it from the inside, in a way?

Heather Taylor: Yes. Yes.

Elena Neale-Sacks: So can you tell me a bit about the Ethical Society of Police? Is it a national organization with local chapters or is it just based in St. Louis? I know there are Black police officers associations throughout the country, but I'm trying to get a better hold on kind of if they're connected in any way, kind of on a national level, or if they spring up locally.

Heather Taylor: So Ethical was officially founded in 1972 and we were founded because there were four white officers who were with the St. Louis City Police Department who'd brutally beaten a protester who was protesting injustice of course, in St. Louis city community. And they were ultimately charged, removed from the street, and those four white officers were, you know, they had a following and they had the backing of the St. Louis police officers, what's now known as the St. Louis Police Officers Association, who basically had those officers and other officers say that they were going to have a blue flu, they're going to have a blue flu, and that means that they weren't going to go to work until those four officers were returned to duty. So at the time, there was a police board of commissioners who returned those four officers to duty, and around that time, that police association, St. Louis Police Officers Association, what they are known as now, they endorsed, I believe it was, gosh, Wallace, George Wallace, for president, he was running for president. And we knew that he was racist, absolutely racist. So Ethical was founded to have a voice for Black people who were brutally beaten by police and Black officers who were subjected to police officers and police associations and unions that supported racist presidential candidates, prior presidential candidates, we're talking about Donald Trump, we can add him to it as well, because you fast forward nearly 50 years later and you have them endorsing Donald Trump twice as well, the same police association. So ethical was founded out of that.

Elena Neale-Sacks: I'm curious what the relationship is like today between ESOP and the St. Louis Police Officers Association.

Reem Rayef: ESOP stands for Ethical Society of Police.

Heather Taylor: Ethical and the Police Officers Association, we're often times at odds about a lot of things. We're fighting about the CBA, collective bargaining agreement. We're fighting about the lack of attention they pay to matters that are specific to minorities in the police department and in our community. There are, a lot of things that are discussed are along racial lines, but when you talk about our LGBTQ officers as well, we have members who are white women and the struggles that they face with the police association, come to us specifically for that voice, and we fight for them because they've been wronged as well. There's a history. At one point we used to have to log in to get to our emails through the Police Officers Association's website. And if you were to scroll below, there were bulletin boards. Those bulletin boards would essentially, when you scroll below, you would see things like officers being referred to as monkeys, people in our community being called, you know, some of the most vile names you could think of. And you had to literally log in to your department email, to get to your department emails, through the Police Officers Association web page, which was called Cop Talk. The police department knew it. They knew that these were officers hiding behind fake profiles and sometimes not fake profiles to post this racist and homophobic and Islamophobic, just, you name it, content that was on there. So that's the history.

Elena Neale-Sacks: Given that relationship, the fact that they are the union that has bargaining rights, because that's the way that it's set up, specifically in terms of like contract negotiations, I guess, what are your sentiments around that?

Heather Taylor: They would never have me seated at the table to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement because of my knowledge and because I would call out things that I believe are systemic that's going to continue to harm marginalized communities.

Colleen Pulawski: Another quick interjection here. Heather's referencing the fact that the POA, as the sole bargaining entity for officers and sergeants, has the power to select someone from Ethical or another group to participate in bargaining sessions.

Heather Taylor: They pick and choose who, and they'll pick the member that's not engaged, not involved. And that member will allow themselves to be manipulated with their contract. And that's just the nature of politics and people. And it's no different within the police department.

Elena Neale-Sacks: And so what are some of those things that if you did individually get a seat at the table, that you would likely be calling out in the contract or in the negotiations?

Heather Taylor: When 67 percent of your police department is white and mostly male, you are inherently going to have less minorities, 60 percent of African-American officers leave within their first seven years. We're always recovering along racial lines. We have very few Hispanic and Asian officers and our police department is so racist that they just refer to them as "other." They're just "other." They're not listed as Asian. They're not listed as Hispanic. They're not listed as Pacific Islander. They're not listed as any of those things. Everyone else is listed as "other" if they're outside of Black and white. And you miss the perspectives of these communities. Most of the homicide victims in the city of St. Louis, the demographic is about 75 percent to 80 percent or 85 percent African-American. Those are your victims most times. And if you're trying to connect to a community, it's already been said that you have to have people that look like the people in those communities so that people can relate to you, and being an African-American female on nights in homicide as a supervisor, I had mostly white males and it was critical that those mostly white males had this Black female.

Reem Rayef: Now, this isn't to say that white police officers can't connect with Black residents or that all Black officers do, but history has shown that far too often white officers perceive a threat from Black people where there is none. And this can lead to unnecessary and fatal violence.

Colleen Pulawski: And we've seen this happen time and time again, from Oscar Grant to Sandra Bland to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and more.

Reem Rayef: And in the vast majority of these cases, the officers responsible never face any major consequences. Let's take a wild guess at why.

Colleen Pulawski: Hmm? Could it have to do with police unions by chance?

Reem Rayef: Yup, specifically provisions known as procedural protections, which are elements of a contract between local governments and police unions that give officers a safety net if they use excessive force or even kill a civilian.

Colleen Pulawski: And as always, we brought in an expert to help us dig in a little bit more. Stephen Rushin is an associate professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, and he co-wrote a research paper that analyzed over 600 police union contracts in the United States.

Elena Neale-Sacks: So I mostly want to focus on the article you sent that was about interrogating police officers, that one. Can you talk a bit about your methodology for that research?

Stephen Rushin: So what we did is we looked at about between six and seven hundred jurisdictions across the country where we were able to get access to their collective bargaining agreement or their union contract. And we just focused upon that source of disciplinary procedures. And it's worth keeping in mind that jurisdictions have disciplinary procedures derived from a number of different sources, not just union contracts. We were just focused upon the union contracts and then the state law enforcement officer bills of rights for that particular article. So what we did is we kind of categorized, based on those two sources, what do these like 600 plus agencies do? And what we found is that a pretty substantial number of them provide officers with a delay period before you can ask them questions about alleged misconduct. Among those that do delay for a rigid period of time, interrogations, the median period of time guaranteed for delay in the contract or in the state law was 48 hours. So 48 hours was like the median expected period of time for delay they would have. Second thing we looked at was whether officers would have access to information that could be used as a basis of evidence against them. So whether they got access to, for example, the complaints or information about the complaint, whether they got access to video footage, audio files, pictures, any kind of physical evidence, whether they had a chance to basically see the evidence against them in some form before they had to answer questions about that evidence. And what we found, again, is that a minority, but a pretty significant minority of departments do, in fact, give officers access to that information. And we kind of use the article as an opportunity to ask questions about whether or not this is the right balance of procedural protections and whether or not rigid delay periods and access to information prior to questioning may actually impair the ability to get to the truth and the ability to conduct adequate investigations and discipline and terminate officers when appropriate.

Reem Rayef: Stephen sent a survey to hundreds of police chiefs and others high in the ranks of local law enforcement to get their thoughts on these kinds of protections.

Colleen Pulawski: Only he didn't tell them he was talking about protections for cops. So most respondents were answering as though the questions had to do with civilians who were under investigation.

Stephen Rushin: We sent a survey to police leaders across the country and we asked them whether or not they think those procedural protections that I just mentioned, access to evidence in advance of interrogation, as well as a delay period of about 48 hours, whether that would impair the ability to get to the truth in the eyes of a police supervisor. And we were a little bit careful in how we worded it. We didn't necessarily overtly tell folks we're asking this about potentially a police officer being interrogated, we just kind of framed it more generally. And what we found is that overwhelmingly the police executives that we talked to felt as if these procedural protections would impair their ability to get to the truth in any type of an investigation. And I think what we take home from it is that while there are a lot of things that I think do represent reasonable due process and a lot of ways that we can regulate interrogations to make sure we're not abusing officers or any suspects, there's also a package of due process protections that are somewhat common in labor agreements that we really do think, based on the survey evidence, are really inconsistent with getting to the truth and we don't really think are necessary to adequately protect against false confessions or protect against unreliable information.

Elena Neale-Sacks: And I'm curious, you know, how you think that these types of protections, especially allowing the officer to see the evidence beforehand, which, you know, strike me as a pretty strong protection. So how do those make their way into the contracts that these unions negotiate?

Stephen Rushin: They're able to kind of extract those protections, it seems like, during private negotiations, in part when a locality isn't able to meet their salary demands. So we have evidence in places like Chicago, places like San Antonio, where the city leaders haven't been able to meet the demands for salary, that during these negotiations, because you're negotiating salaries and benefits on one hand alongside disciplinary concessions, if you can't meet the salary demands, something's got to give. And in that negotiation, what often is given are those disciplinary concessions. Now, also speculating here a little bit, I think part of the other reason is that what drives headlines in local media is the salary number, like what is the effect on the taxpayer? How much more money am I going to have to pay as a taxpayer as a result of this collective bargaining negotiation? But the disciplinary concessions, particularly rather technical ones, things like the actual period of time of delay between a civilian complaint and the actual interrogation, those are fairly in the weeds kind of issues that don't really drive headlines. And thus, if you're going to make a concession somewhere, I think you could argue that there's a kind of built-in incentive for elected leaders to make the concession there rather than conceding the extra percent or two of salary increases that's going to directly impact the taxpayers and it's also going to drive headlines the next morning.

Elena Neale-Sacks: Is there something about the culture of police unions, which often now include strong procedural protections, that is distinct from that of other labor unions?

Stephen Rushin: There's a segment of police misconduct that looks like misconduct in any other professional field, things like showing up to work late, things like failing to follow an order or failing to fill out the proper paperwork, disagreeing with your boss. Heck, there was one case where a person brought their dog to work without authorization, like small stuff that we wouldn't view as something exceptional to policing or something that raises unique public policy concerns. And that may make up like half of the misconduct that we're talking about, and in that respect, negotiating for disciplinary procedures for those types of issues to me doesn't raise any unique concerns, nor does it mean that we need to treat police officers differently than we treat any other public servant. But if you look at the other segments of misconduct that results in discipline and goes to appeal, you have some really, really different cases that raise much more significant concerns from a public policy perspective. You have a significant number of cases involving police officer use of excessive or deadly force against civilians. That's not something you see in really any other professional context. You have a significant number of cases involving officers lying as part of their professional duties in a way that could potentially put an innocent person in prison or could result in their wrongful conviction. Again, something you don't see in other contexts. You have officers using racial or homophobic slurs when interacting with members of the public, where I think the power dynamic of law enforcement, again, makes that a unique type of misconduct worthy of a different type of a public policy concern.

Reem Rayef: Heather shared something similar with Elena.

Heather Taylor: You bargain an all day for pay raises, overtime, you know, your pensions and all of that stuff, that's normal. But to have a say so in discipline, to have a say so in things that are about coveted positions like that, no. No contract shouldn't have it and shouldn't have anything in there about promotion because it's a conflict, it's just a conflict of interest. And that collective bargaining agreement with the St. Louis Police Officers Association has been inherently biased, has been detrimental to Black officers. What we know now is that Black officers are still the fastest group that leaves the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. But on the front end of it, we're the highest demographic that's applying to be police officers. Hey, if you see someone on video beating the hell out of someone, why would I ever come out and say, Oh, that person's innocent? No, I'm looking at you beat the hell out of someone that did nothing to you on video. So, no, you should be charged and you should be fired and we should give you an attorney, because that's what you have paid your dues for faithfully to provide you with legal representation. And that's it.

Reem Rayef: To a point, it makes sense that if you're under investigation for something you did at your public service job, you get access to an attorney. But police unions provide so much protection above and beyond whatever protection that most workers get from their labor unions. From Heather's perspective and by admission from the surveyed officers themselves, it's completely unreasonable.

Colleen Pulawski: And that brings us back to the whole point here. Black police officers formed their own organizations because they were fed up, not only with the daily racism they faced from their own peers, but also with these union protections that allow officers to get away with, quite literally, murder.

Reem Rayef: Yeah, and like Rob's research shows us, once police departments started developing collective bargaining rights, we saw an increase in the number of police killings of people of color.

Colleen Pulawski: So full transparency here, Reem and I don't think the police should exist, period, but even if you don't support dismantling or even defunding the police, it seems like we should all be able to agree that police unions have a ridiculous and almost unbelievable level of power and that power has literally taken lives, as Rob's research shows. The reasons why Black police unions started cropping up — violence against Black people and internal departmental racism — clearly persist today. To me, this demonstrates the need for much more than the representation or workplace community for Black officers that Black police unions are meant to provide. We need a massive overhaul of an institution that is inherently flawed.

Colleen Pulawski: Talk Policy To Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans.

Reem Rayef: Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck.

Colleen Pulawski: Editing for this episode by Elena Neale-Sacks.

Reem Rayef: The music you heard today is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions.

Colleen Pulawski: I'm Colleen Pulawski.

Reem Rayef: And I'm Reem Rayef.

Colleen Pulawski: Catch you next time.