If we're going to get the police reform that really matters, Republicans have to take on cop unions

Ideas for “police reform” are all over the place at the moment. There are proposals about training. There are proposals about banning certain techniques. There are discussions about de-escalation, and even some suggestions that police officers should not be allowed to carry guns (as if a gun killed George Floyd).

These are the kinds of things that bubble to the surface when politicians become convinced they have to do something, even though they have no earthly notion of what to do. Let’s have a new policy. Let’s ban something. Let’s require something.

Let’s get rid of police altogether!

Right now this issue is at a fever pitch, and no idea – now matter how ill-conceived – seems beyond the pale. This is why you don’t make major policy changes at a time like this. You’re setting yourself up to look back six months later and ask, “What did we do?”

Yet there’s one thing we should all agree we can do and should do – immediately. It will not be championed by Democrats, even though they’re the ones screaming loudest for police reform. That thing is: Stand up to the union.

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This is an issue Republicans can and should champion. It would be a winning issue for them. It would address every conceivable concern about police brutality. It would make law-abiding citizens safer. It would make suspects of crime safer. And it would be political suicide for Democrats to actively oppose it.

The best thing we can do to solve the problem of police brutality is to take power away from police unions. Police unions consistently shield bad cops from accountability. Even now, the Minneapolis police union is attacking the character of George Floyd and is trying to get Derek Chauvin and his colleagues their jobs back.

This happens again and again when police officers do wrong, and makes it almost impossible for departments to clear their ranks of bad cops. Yet the laws in most states tip the scales in favor of police unions (and all other unions for that matter), such that departments have little recourse when they’re dealing with an officer who has engaged in wrongdoing. They can reprimand them, and the black police chief in Minneapolis had reprimanded Derek Chauvin multiple times.

But usually they cannot fire them. Want to get a sense of just how big a problem that is?

Consider:

According to the FBI, there are more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies – and more than 800,000 law enforcement officers – in the United States. In order to staff all those departments, the communities of this nation have to find 800,000 people who are willing to serve, can go through training and can handle the rigors of the job sufficiently to stay employed on an ongoing basis.

That’s an extraordinary number of people we’re asking to be police officers. It’s astonishing that so many of them do the job well, and with integrity, and with character and goodwill.

But out of 800,000 people, how many people will you get who are angry, or undisciplined, or mentally unstable, or racist? How many end up taking out their own trauma on others? What if it’s one out of every 100?

That’s 8,000 bad cops. That a lot of bad cops. It’s not because of training or policies or anything like that. It’s simply because you can’t fill 800,000 positions without inadvertently pulling in a few people who shouldn’t be there.

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This will be the case with any organization. My company has been in business 20 years. It’s a small company and I’ve had a grand total of 14 employees. I’ve had to fire three. That’s more than I would have preferred, but it’s not an outrageous percentage out of 14.

Why should we expect any different from police departments, who collectively employ hundreds of thousands at any given time, especially when they have a much more stressful job than the people who have worked for me, or for most other companies?

But most of the time, police departments can’t fire the people who need to be fired. In 2014, Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic wrote a stunning piece that detailed many cases in which police officers abused their positions, and their departments tried to fire them. But they couldn’t because of police unions. The examples are stunning, and I encourage you to click the link and read them to your horror. I also encourage you to consider Friedersdorf’s conclusion:

Society entrusts police officers with awesome power. The stakes could not be higher when they abuse it: Innocents are killed, wrongly imprisoned, beaten, harassed—and as knowledge of such abuses spreads, respect for the rule of law wanes. If police officers were at-will employees (as I’ve been at every job I’ve ever held), none of the cops mentioned above would now be walking the streets with badges and loaded guns. Perhaps one or two of them deserved to be exonerated, despite how bad their cases look. Does the benefit of being scrupulously fair to those individuals justify the cost of having more abusive cops on the street?

I’d rather see 10 wrongful terminations than one person wrongfully shot and killed. Because good police officers and bad police officers pay the same union dues and are equally entitled to labor representation, police unions have pushed for arbitration procedures that skew in the opposite direction. Why have we let them? If at-will employment, the standard that would best protect the public, is not currently possible, arbitration proceedings should at a minimum be transparent and fully reviewable so that miscarriages of justice are known when they happen. With full facts, the public would favor at-will employment eventually.

Emasculating police unions wouldn’t guarantee that departments always fire bad cops. But it would at least leave them with no excuse for not doing so. I believe most police chiefs want to run clean departments, and would fire bad cops if they were free to do so.

This is a cause Republicans can and should champion. Most of the public has no idea what an obstacle police unions are to accountability for police officers. Although the media would serve as an obstacle to public education on this subject, Republicans could get around that by effectively using social media and other direct means of communication with the public. It would resonate. And it would be very hard for Democrats – after railing for weeks on end against police brutality – to openly oppose this reform. They will want to, because they rely so heavily on organized labor for campaign funds. But I don’t see how they can, even with the media trying to provide cover for them.

This is the one reform that could and would make the most difference. It is long overdue. Police officers should be at-will employees. If they were, I believe Derek Chauvin would have been fired long ago, and George Floyd would be alive today. It took a suspect’s death to get Chauvin fired, and even now the union wants him reinstated.

That is not how this should work.

I hope the police officers I love and still support don’t think I’m turning on them by advocating this. I admire police officers more than just about any other profession, precisely because I believe so many of them are heroic, and courageous, and good. Those who fit that description have little to fear from the reform I’m proposing.

The George Floyds of the world have a lot to fear from the status quo without it.