Support the Rule of Law, Not Simply Law Enforcement

Conservatives seem to bend over backwards to protect police officers, no matter what.

I do want law enforcement to do their jobs. What I have begun to realize in some circumstances, however, is that police officers act as if they are above the law themselves.

One friend of mine called these rogue officers "lawless lawmen".

Steve Greenhut has called out the lawless, self-serving police officers associations, which protect these lawless lawmen.

All I can say is "Not a moment too soon."

Sorry, but police unions are just as troubling as other public-sector unions

During a speech to a conservative group about the state’s pension crisis several years ago, one member of the audience was upset that I focused so much attention on police and firefighter unions. He thought I should basically give those groups a pass, to which I replied that perhaps we should skip talking about pension issues altogether then, given that public-safety groups are the source of the bulk of the state’s pension-funding problem. In my view, it’s ridiculous to be upset at a problem caused by all public-sector unions, but only target those unions we don’t like.

Mr. Greenhut has done the right thing going after police and fire unions. They are not serving the public interest, including the police officers themselves. The good is that with the Janus decision, more police officers can leave their unions and not pay the unfair--and now unconstitutional--agency fees.

Unions protect unions. They do not serve workers, the cities, or the public.

This attitude is strangely prevalent among some conservatives. They are happy when I point to the ways the California Teachers Association and SEIU use union dues for political purposes, back rules that protect bad employees and resist reasonable reforms. Because of their overall support for police officers, however, these conservatives often don’t like to hear the truth about those unions, even though such unions operate in the same heavy-handed and undemocratic way as other public unions.

Greenhut should know that there are more conservatives, including activists like myself, who do not simply bow their knees to police officers and their associations. The rule of law is paramount, not the law enforcement officers. 

But I was surprised – shocked, actually – to read similar sentiments on the California Policy Center website, given CPC’s pioneering work unraveling the problems with public-sector unionization. In a recent column, the center’s Ed Ring complained about the solidarity of opposition among the state’s public-sector unions to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which freed government employees from being forced to pay dues to such unions.

That’s right on point, but then Ring made this observation: “While we’re on the topic of solidarity, why on Earth would PORAC (the Peace Officers’ Research Association of California) want to declare solidarity with the teachers’ union? There are legitimate reasons to criticize police unions, and police officers could probably operate just fine with civil service protection combined with the clout wielded by voluntary associations that didn’t engage in collective bargaining. But police unions did not destroy the effectiveness of law enforcement. They’re actually doing a pretty good job. The teachers’ union, on the other hand, has nearly destroyed public education.”

I would have to say that police officers associations are not going that great a job at all.

Greenhut explains why:

Like all unions, the police unions do a “pretty good job” for their members, if you define a “pretty good job” as securing an unsustainable level of pay and benefits for their members – and protecting virtually all of them from accountability. The problem is these unions don’t do a good job for the public, which pays their bills, suffers from the crowding out of public services and must live with the way officers perform their jobs.

That issue of protecting from accountability. I could not agree more with this frustrating outcome. Police officers are rarely held accountable. They misbehave, they get privately reprimanded, and then their back on the street. They can violate the rights of citizens, and hide behind the immunity of these police officers.

Any civil society requires law enforcement. It's not enough to have laws. We need people to ensure that those laws are followed, and since men are not angels, there is the ongoing tendency to violate those laws.

But what happens when the police officers themselves violate those laws? What happens when police seem more intent on protecting their interests than the public interest?

The nature of public unions is exactly the same, whether we’re talking about teachers, cops, firefighters, groundskeepers or prison guards. The CTA protects incompetent teachers and lets them receive full pay as they twiddle their thumbs in “rubber rooms,” while police unions assure that overly aggressive cops are back patrolling the streets unless they are convicted of a crime. The latter arguably is worse. That certainly has undermined the concept of community policing, as any number of highly publicized police shootings and dubious use-of-force instances illustrate.

Ouch! It's good that Greenhut is willing to speak the truth about this. I have experienced a growing cadre of arrogant police officers who stomp on citizens' rights in the name of public safety. I have witnessed, endured police officers not enforcing the rule of law or ensuring public safety. Trump supporters gather for safe protests, and they get led into violent, hostile crowds how harass, attack, and harm them.

The Peace Officers’ Bill of Rights, the California Supreme Court’s 2006 secrecy-enabling Copley decision and all those privacy laws and special protections that police unions have secured assure that the desires of the union members – not the public, which they are paid to protect and serve – are pre-eminent. Ring should have stuck to the right point: that police are best served with civil-service protections and voluntary associations.

Yes. I am glad to hear about these options. It is essential

Police unions have made it impossible for police chiefs to reform their departments, get rid of the small number of thugs within their midst, root out police corruption and privatize services. The 2014 Vergara decision revealed that a small percentage of unfit teachers miseducate large numbers of California students, causing a lifetime of harm.

It's worthwhile that Greenhut does talk about the "small number of thugs." Let's stress that there are many good police officers, and just because we don't like bein

One police officer pulled me over in Manhattan Beach two months ago because I was driving a rental car and had not turned on the headlights. He saved my life that day!

Likewise, a small number of problem officers – often protected from firing because of those union-secured protections – cause a large number of recurring problems for police departments and cause permanent harm to some citizens. “It has become a truism among police chiefs that 10 percent of their officers cause 90 percent of the problems,” according to a report from the federal National Institute of Justice. “Investigative journalists have documented departments in which as few as 2 percent of all officers are responsible for 50 percent of all citizen complaints.”

And yet those police officers are never disciplined. This is wrong, and we cannot continue to tolerate this. The country has thrown numerous fits over the corrupt and abusive teachers in schools who have harmed our children. These numbers must include the incompetent instructors, not just those teachers who molest and abuse students.

Union protections are the source of many taxpayer-funded liability payouts. But unions also dominate police departments’ training procedures, and tend to promote militarization and other policies that are designed to protect the officer at all costs, with the public being an afterthought at best.

Yep. Wow. The rot goes from the top down. I have dealt with sergeants and lieutenants who defend their worst police officers. Filing complaints against police officers is a supreme waste of time on the surface of it, since the internal affairs agencies will cover for their cops all the time. This is quite manifest in Southern California, sadly.

Here’s Ring again: “Public safety professionals realize the consequences of leftist policies. Every day they patrol and protect communities ravaged by welfare programs that have destroyed work ethics and dismantled nuclear families. Every day they cope with fallout from gang conflict and drug abuse. … Every day they have to mitigate these ongoing and escalating problems while looking over their shoulder to see if they’ve ‘profiled’ someone or committed some similar phony transgression. Every day they have to endure undeserved hostility, funded and fomented by anti-American leftist oligarchs, because of the isolated actions of a vanishingly few bad apples.”

It's good that Greenhut recognizes the millions of other public sector workers, and even moreso the private sector investors and entrepreneurs, who have to contend with general moral decay and cultural breakdown in our country.

It’s hard to unravel all those overheated clichés, but the police-union groups that Ring defends have had a far greater role in destroying the public-spirited nature of California policing than anti-American leftists. PORAC, for instance, runs a legal-insurance fund that pays the legal bills for police accused of crimes. And it’s not unnamed oligarchs who are behind California’s pension crisis or budget woes.

YES.

Police, by the way, aren’t the only employees who have to deal with societal breakdown. So do teachers, nurses and people in the private sector. Regarding all those problems that Ring deplores, note that the state’s police unions are supporters of many of the state’s most liberal politicians. Here are PORAC’s endorsements from the June primary, in which it backed Antonio Villaraigosa for governor.

Wow! Good point. Police officers have to deal with the dregs of society, so to speak. Yet these police officers associations continue to protect and promote these awful politicians who push this destruction of families and communities.

Ring is right that police unions don’t embrace all the wacky national left-wing political action nonsense supported by other unions. But police unions often back gun control and always back more public spending. They are among the state’s most notorious defenders of government secrecy and rarely hesitate flexing their political muscle to bring local governments to heel.

This I can attest to directly. I talked to two high-ranking sheriff's deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "We don't like guns", they told us. Really? Yet they pack heat, right, but the rest of us little people can't. Seriously. 

The hypocrisy is just plain sickening. Not only that, but they told a friend of mine as well as myself that we should invest in having our own security at certain city council meetings. Peace officers are less and less inclined to protect the public, it seems.

Very sad, considering how much money they rake in from the taxpayers.

One now-defunct law firm that had represented dozens of the state’s police unions was proud of its “playbook” that detailed the way police unions can intimidate city councils, including work slowdowns and other dubious policies.  This is corrosive of public service. So is the way that police organizations fought bitterly against reforms to the state’s asset-forfeiture laws, which allow police agencies to take a person’s property – even if that person has never been convicted or even accused of committing a crime.

Disgusting, and yet no one bats an eyelash to stop this abusive practice.

California Policy Center has led the fight against excessive public pensions, but police unions were a main cause of the state’s pension crisis. Senate Bill 400 in 1999 was passed on behalf of the California Highway Patrol. It created a 50-percent retroactive pension increase for officers – a formula that subsequently spread across the state and led to the current pension mess. We all appreciate the work of police officers, just as we appreciate the work of teachers, but we shouldn’t let emotionalism get in the way of our analysis of the noxious effect of their unions.

SHAMEFUL.

This is wrong, and we cannot continue to tolerate lawless lawmen getting away with breaking the law or breaking the bank for their benefit.

Final Reflection

This article was a breath, a blast of fresh air. With all due respect to the good men and women who put their lives on the line for cities and countries throughout the state, no law enforcement officer is worth a six-figure salary every year. Sorry, but it's just too much. How many of us are going to keep paying for all the gadgets and goodies placed.

One good man I know, let's call him Frank, has served as a private security detail for me in times past. I support and embrace his service and commitment to protecting people like me. Yet even with him I had to say: "A city, a county, even a state government cannot continue to pay police officers $100k a year. There's simply not enough money to do it."

Besides, even the best of law enforcement officers cannot be everywhere at every time. When seconds count, police officers are minutes away. That's just the life and times of everyday challenges. That's just the way it is.

It's time to restore the rights of citizens to protect themselves. We need full restoration of the right of citizens to carry firearms to protect themselves, to ensure that they can ward off criminals and subdue deviant hatemongers. The right to concealed-carry must be protected, as well, and the permit process needs to be streamlined to make it 

Criminals should fear citizens again. Police officers should protect citizens and their rights. It's also time for elected officials to stand their ground with law enforcement to ensure that they are treated fairly and adequately, but at the same time they do not get to gouge taxpayers in their respective cities.

Steven Greenhut is contributing editor for the California Policy Center. He is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.