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?
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/police-unions-defend-brutality-george-floyd-protests-20200607.html
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.
Not only is the public now seeing cell phone videos of police brutality, but it’s learning that many of these cops have been the subject of multiple complaints — yet protected by union rules or arbitration from any meaningful discipline. What’s more, the mild reforms from America’s first black president, Barack Obama, the election of progressive mayors and prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, and the rise of Donald Trump — endorsed in 2016 by many of these unions — has heightened a paranoid style and an embrace of authoritarianism by cop-union leaders.
A quick flyover of America reveals the problem:
In Minneapolis, amid the birth of Black Lives Matter and their city’s appointment of a reform-minded chief, the local police union in 2015 elected a new president, Lt. Bob Kroll, even though he’s the subject of 29 complaints, was accused in a lawsuit by black officers — including the current top cop — of promoting a hostile work environment (wearing a biker patch linked to white supremacy), and once boasted, “I was involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me.” Kroll was a featured speaker at an October 2019 Trump rally in which he blamed Obama for “oppression” of police and praised the current president who “put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of [on] us.” Eight months later, after the handcuffed Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis cop, Kroll doubled down, writing in a letter to members that the citizens protesting his death are “a terrorist organization.”
In New York City, where online watchers have been shocked this week by the images of a police riot, with officers shoving, striking, and abusing citizens, and using the excuse of an ill-advised curfew to arrest thousands of peaceful demonstrators, maybe viewers would be less surprised if they knew the head of NYC’s Sergeants Benevolent Association had not so benevolently tweeted in February at Mayor Bill de Blasio that “the members of the NYPD are declaring war on you!” When de Blasio’s adult daughter was arrested at a protest this week — a curious enough event — that same union event tweeted out her address, or “doxxing,” as kids today like to call it. Closer to home in Delaware County, a police sergeant in the county seat of Media — and vice president of the county police union — is reportedly on administrative leave after a bizarre episode with a local shopkeeper who voiced support on Facebook for Black Lives Matter, only to see Sgt. Robert “Skippy” Carroll reply from the official FOP account: “If you choose to speak out against the police or our members, we will do everything in our power to not support your business,” later adding on his own personal Facebook page, “Try us. We’ll destroy you.”
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