Northwest labor press., July 03, 2020, Page 8, Image 8

PAGE 8 |
July 3, 2020 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
...Police unions
From Page 1
and enforcement mechanism.”
That response didn’t quiet the
AFL-CIO’s activist critics. But
the truth is, police unions mostly
aren’t in the AFL-CIO to begin
with. At 23,000 members, IUPA
is less than one-fourteenth the
size of American’s biggest na-
tional police union—330,000-
member Fraternal Order of Po-
lice—which is not part of the
AFL-CIO. And hundreds of
thousand of other police union
members are in independent
stand-alone unions like Portland
Police Association.
In fact, police unions have had
a long and at times uneasy his-
tory within the labor movement.
When a Cleveland police union
asked to be admitted to the
American Federation of Labor
(AFL) as an affiliate, delegates to
the AFL’s 1897 convention voted
no, reasoning that it was “not
within the province of the trade
union movement to specially or-
ganize policemen, no more than
to organize militiamen, as both
… are too often controlled by
forces inimical to the labor
movement.” Inimical is closely
related to the word enemy. The
AFL delegates of 1897 regarded
police as tools of the enemies of
the trade union movement.
And that gets to one of the
awkward facts about police
unionism. Then as now, police
are called upon to protect prop-
erty and use force to quell disor-
der, and that has at times meant
arresting union organizers and
leafletters accused of trespassing,
and forcefully confronting union
picket lines. Today, America’s
unions seldom engage in disrup-
tive strikes, protests, and occupa-
tions. When they did in the past,
they faced billy clubs, tear gas,
and even bullets at the hands of
police. And there’s reason to
think unions would face police
force if they again became dis-
ruptive. Police got rough with
union members during the
Pittston Coal wildcat strike of
1989-90 and the Seattle WTO
protests of 1999.
In 2011, as part of a dispute
with a nonunion grain terminal,
400 Longshore members and
supporters blocked train tracks in
Vancouver, Wash. About 50 po-
lice moved in aggressively with
batons and pepper spray, tackled
union members, and made 125
arrests over several days. That
was condemned by the Interna-
tional Transport Workers Feder-
ation, and the ILWU protested by
About 300 people from over a dozen local unions took part in a June 18 Black Lives Matter rally sponsored by IBEW
Local 48. Supporters lined sidewalks on Southeast Stark and Washington streets between 99th and 102nd Avenue
in Portland during rush hour traffic from 4 to 7 p.m. All participants wore face coverings and tried to maintain 6 feet
of social distancing. Passing drivers showed support by honking horns.
shutting down four Washington
ports for a day.
Back in 1919, the affiliation
question came up again at the
AFL. This time, convention del-
egates voted to admit police
unions. But a police strike in
Boston that same year created
such a public backlash that it
made the question moot: Police
unions dissolved, and the move-
ment to unionize police was set
back by a generation.
The first police union to form
in modern times, it turns out,
was the Portland Police Associ-
ation (PPA), which formed in
1942. In 1996, PPA hired jour-
nalist Susan Hauser to docu-
ment its first 54 years, and Pick-
ets, Pistols and Politics, the
resulting book, doesn’t white-
wash PPA’s record on race or
police accountability issues. Ac-
cording to the book, the union’s
first official president was Otto
Meiners, a former active mem-
ber of the German-American
Bund (a group formed in 1936
to promote a favorable view of
Nazi Germany in the pre-war
era). And when it comes to po-
lice reform and race relations,
the history of Oregon’s largest
police union didn’t improve
much from there. PPA began as
AFSCME Local 456, and it had
substantial local labor support in
its campaign for a first union
contract in 1970. After Labor
Press editor Gene Klare editori-
alized that it might take a strike
to get City Council’s attention,
local ILWU members honored
PPA’s informational picket lines,
shutting down the docks for
three days. A contract was
signed. That same year, PPA left
AFSCME and became inde-
pendent.
In 1981, two Portland police
officers were fired after they
WHAT CONGRESS COULD DO
The national AFL-CIO and hundreds of other organ-
izations have endorsed the following recommen-
dations for national legislation from the Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights:
1
Require a federal standard that use of force be reserved for only
when necessary as a last resort after exhausting reasonable
options, and incentivize states to implement this standard;
require the use of de-escalation techniques, and the duty to
intervene; ban the use of force as a punitive measure or means of
retaliation against individuals who only verbally confront officers,
or against individuals who pose a danger only to themselves; and
require all officers to accurately report all uses of force;
Prohibit all maneuvers that restrict the flow of blood or oxygen to
the brain, including neck holds, chokeholds, and similar excessive
force, deeming the use of such force a federal civil rights violation;
Prohibit racial profiling with robust data collection on police-
community encounters and law enforcement activities;
2
3
4
5
6
7
dumped four dead possums in
the doorway of a Black-owned
restaurant in the Albina District.
To protest their firing, PPA hired
the fired officers to work tem-
porarily on its newspaper, The
Rap Sheet, and led 850 police
and supporters in a march
around City Hall. Members
voted 411 to 10 to condemn
Black police commissioner
Charles Jordan for the firing. An
arbitrator overturned the firings,
and the two officers were back
to work five months later.
PPA also spent $80,000 in
1982 (the equivalent of
$213,000 today) on a ballot
measure to stop a newly created
accountability organ called the
Police Internal Investigations
Auditing Committee. After PPA
came a few hundred votes short
of stopping it at the ballot, it told
members to refuse to testify
when subpoenaed.
Eliminate federal programs that provide military equipment to
law enforcement;
Prohibit the use of no-knock warrants, especially for drug
searches;
Change the legal standard from “willfulness” to “recklessness” in
order to allow federal prosecutors to hold law enforcement
accountable for the deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties;
Develop a national public database covering all police agencies in
the United States, which would compile the names of officers
who have had their licenses revoked due to misconduct,
including but not limited to domestic violence, sexual violence,
assault and harassment, criminal offense against minors,
excessive use of force, perjury, falsifying a police report or planting
and destroying evidence, and deadly physical assault; as well as
terminations and complaints against the officers;
End the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” that prevents
police from being held legally accountable when they break the
law.
8
In decades since the events
narrated in the book, police ac-
countability activists say PPA
has continued to oppose police
reforms in bargaining, in court,
and in the Legislature.
If police unions are an obsta-
cle to police reform, it’s partly
because state legislators have
given them that ability. Legisla-
tors could also take it away, by
restricting the scope of what po-
lice unions can bargain over.
There’s currently no proposal to
do that in Oregon.
But with the momentum of
the George Floyd protest move-
ment, Oregon lawmakers met
June 24-26 in a legislative spe-
cial session to consider six po-
lice reform bills. And this time,
the legislative representative for
Oregon police unions didn’t
stand totally opposed.
Mike Selvaggio, a contract
lobbyist who also represents
United Food and Commercial
Workers Local 555, has repre-
sented the Oregon Coalition of
Police and Sheriffs (ORCOPS)
since it formed in 2014.
“We don’t want to be known
as the organization that draws a
line in the sand and says, ‘Don’t
cross this.’” Selvaggio told the
Labor Press.
Selvaggio said ORCOPS was
supportive of all the proposals in
concept, but had issues with
each, and especially opposed, as
written, the bill to make it harder
for arbitrators to overturn officer
discipline. Five of the six pro-
posals passed anyway. Under
the bills:
■ Arbitrators can’t overturn police
disciplinary findings if they agree
misconduct occurred and disciplinary
policies were followed
■ Chokeholds are banned (except when
deadly force is warranted, thanks to an
amendment)
■ Tear gas is allowed only after police
declare a riot, announce they intend to use
it, and give people time to disperse.
■ Police officers now have a “duty to
intervene” to prevent or report
misconduct by a fellow officer.
■ The state will maintain a database on
police discipline that law enforcement
agencies around the state must check
when hiring an officer.
A fifth proposal—to put the
Oregon Department of Justice in
charge of police shooting inves-
tigations—was killed. Instead, a
joint committee will come up
with recommendations for fur-
ther legislative action on police
transparency and use of force in
next year’s legislative session.
What do YOU think?
Comment on this article online at
nwlaborpress.org/policeunions