Why do police unions talk and act like the Mafia?
Police unions not only keep bad cops on the force but threaten and bully any foes. Are this week's protests finally a turning point?
Finally! After an unforgettable week in which America — already reeling from the brutal caught-on-video Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, on top of a pandemic, a recession, and ... everything — watched with dropped jaw literally dozens of videos of police clubbing, shoving, or driving into peaceful protesters, or teargassing them, and even maiming some for life with rubber bullets, some officers are finally standing up and declaring: “I quit.”
The problem is, the 57 members of the police riot response unit in Buffalo, N.Y., who “resigned” — to be clear, these cops aren’t giving up their jobs, pay, or benefits, but rather shirking their assignment to a special unit — on Saturday weren’t opposing the shocking brutality in their ranks, but tacitly supporting it. They are instead protesting the local prosecutor who viewed a viral video of two Buffalo cops in full RoboCop attire violently shoving a 75-year-old peace activist to the pavement and cracking his skull, and reached the same conclusion as the rest of America. He charged them with a criminal assault.
OK, not all of America. After a hearing for the two officers Saturday morning, more than 100 people, many from the Buffalo law enforcement community, formed a phalanx outside the courthouse to cheer and applaud for Officers Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, the “hero cops” who sent activist Martin Gugino to the pavement, as blood poured from his ear. That crowd numbered more than 100 larger than the number of frontline cops — zero, to be exact — who aided the motionless senior citizen.
The shover-cop cheering society convened after the union president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, John Evans, said in a statement that the officers had been “merely following orders” to clear the square where a protest had occurred, adding bizarrely that Gugino “did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards.” It’s not often that you hear the defense from the Nuremberg trials and the standard line of your garden-variety wife-beater invoked in the same statement.
What’s truly galling, though, is that these bullying tactics from so many American police unions, acting like a protection racket and sounding more like the Mafia than anything remotely “benevolent,” have been brutally effective — until now. Could this week’s incredible scenes of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the streets protesting state-sanctioned violence and white supremacy, coupled with polls showing a massive drop in support for the police, really be a turning point? Will bullied, cowed, and sometimes bought-off politicians finally listen to the voice of the people?
The almost unshakable influence of police unions in American civic life, and especially in big cities, has been building at least a half-century — mainly since the aftermath of urban unrest in the 1960s and ’70s — but the six years since the Black Lives Matter movement emerged from the ashes of Ferguson, Mo., have finally brought the issue into sharper focus.
Finally! After an unforgettable week in which America — already reeling from the brutal caught-on-video Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, on top of a pandemic, a recession, and ... everything — watched with dropped jaw literally dozens of videos of police clubbing, shoving, or driving into peaceful protesters, or teargassing them, and even maiming some for life with rubber bullets, some officers are finally standing up and declaring: “I quit.”
The problem is, the 57 members of the police riot response unit in Buffalo, N.Y., who “resigned” — to be clear, these cops aren’t giving up their jobs, pay, or benefits, but rather shirking their assignment to a special unit — on Saturday weren’t opposing the shocking brutality in their ranks, but tacitly supporting it. They are instead protesting the local prosecutor who viewed a viral video of two Buffalo cops in full RoboCop attire violently shoving a 75-year-old peace activist to the pavement and cracking his skull, and reached the same conclusion as the rest of America. He charged them with a criminal assault.
OK, not all of America. After a hearing for the two officers Saturday morning, more than 100 people, many from the Buffalo law enforcement community, formed a phalanx outside the courthouse to cheer and applaud for Officers Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski, the “hero cops” who sent activist Martin Gugino to the pavement, as blood poured from his ear. That crowd numbered more than 100 larger than the number of frontline cops — zero, to be exact — who aided the motionless senior citizen.
The shover-cop cheering society convened after the union president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, John Evans, said in a statement that the officers had been “merely following orders” to clear the square where a protest had occurred, adding bizarrely that Gugino “did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards.” It’s not often that you hear the defense from the Nuremberg trials and the standard line of your garden-variety wife-beater invoked in the same statement.
What’s truly galling, though, is that these bullying tactics from so many American police unions, acting like a protection racket and sounding more like the Mafia than anything remotely “benevolent,” have been brutally effective — until now. Could this week’s incredible scenes of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the streets protesting state-sanctioned violence and white supremacy, coupled with polls showing a massive drop in support for the police, really be a turning point? Will bullied, cowed, and sometimes bought-off politicians finally listen to the voice of the people?
The almost unshakable influence of police unions in American civic life, and especially in big cities, has been building at least a half-century — mainly since the aftermath of urban unrest in the 1960s and ’70s — but the six years since the Black Lives Matter movement emerged from the ashes of Ferguson, Mo., have finally brought the issue into sharper focus.
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