alt Hacker NewsWould police unions vote to strike to support a trooper who stole a laptop?
If so, then I think you've got police problems, not police unions problems.
Replies
It's an AND. The union is why administrations can't get rid of the problem employees.
In Seattle, the police are "quiet quitting" (traffic ticketing is down 8x over ~10 years ago) and literally committing fraud and getting away with it (an officer on his second time falsely applying over 24 hours of work in a day, just had to return the pay for that week. There's STILL not computerized time tracking...)
Unions strike primarily for collective bargaining purposes.
They use the bargaining to set contract terms that restrict how people can be fired.
A union member who gets in trouble can leverage union resources and representation to protect themselves.
One of my family members did a term as a union rep. He was getting really frustrated with some of the little claims that union members wanted to use the union to protect themselves from, but it was part of the job. Fortunately for him there wasn’t a serious incident like this to deal with during his term.
No, but they go on strike when negotiating their collective contracts, and put terms in the contract that govern how failures like this are investigated and punished.
Police Unions engaged in collective action beyond striking to support other police who shoved a senior citizen to the ground and gave him brain damage, so stealing is nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_police_shoving_inciden...
Back in 2019 the police in Fresno stole a bunch of rare coins during a search of a house where the warrant did not cover anything like said coins, valued at $125,000, by reporting that they seized $50,000 when they actually took twice that much in cash and the coins. The 9th Circuit ended up deciding that while it was obviously morally wrong, qualified immunity applied because there's clearly established case law that stealing property that was specifically targeted for a search does violate the Constitution, because there's no analogous case regarding property stolen by police that the police did not know was there and are not covered by the warrant, there's no clearly established violation of the 4th Amendment even though it is literally an unlawful seizure of property. Supreme Court denied cert, allowing the decision to stand. I wish I was joking.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...