hogposting wrote on July 3, 2020 at 3:12 PM

Really makes you question everyone pointing at police unions as a big part of the problem.

flipshod wrote on July 3, 2020 at 8:44 PM

But they really are.

Many years ago when I was a fresh new lawyer who did a lot of insurance defense work, I was hired by a cop union liability carrier to shield some racist cops from a wrongful arrest case and used the qualified immunity defense all the way up to no cert. at SCOTUS. I did the immoral thing and cut ties with the client after being disgusted by them even in simple conversations. (you can't just drop a case midstream)

That alone is enough to make them a big part of the problem.

hogposting wrote on July 4, 2020 at 6:51 PM

A wrongful arrest case (was that a Section 1983 suit?) presumably from a private plaintiff is not the same as a department firing one of its own officers, which is what this article is about. If your local PD wants to fire one of its cops the union might dispute that, but I don't think the union would be able to make a qualified immunity argument, for instance. My understanding is it's more of a labor and employment matter at that point. If you know better, I would genuinely love to hear your thoughts on this.

And even if unions do have tremendous power to fight the firing of one of their members, clearly they have discretion not to use that power to fight every single firing (the union in this article doesn't appear to have fought for this cop's job, for instance). So there's a world where you can have police unions, but they choose not to defend murderers in their ranks, much like the SEIU or any other union wouldn't go to the mat to keep the job of one of their members who murdered someone on the job.

[deleted] wrote on July 3, 2020 at 3:25 PM

hogposting wrote on July 3, 2020 at 4:45 PM

The article doesn't mention anything about the union's involvement (or lack thereof) in this firing.

The possibilities seem to be:

You can in fact fire a cop and the police union isn't some all-powerful entity that can stop that process on a whim, or
The police union can choose to not fight firings in certain circumstances.

If (1) is true -- and it makes a certain amount of sense -- then this should be the go-to reply to reactionaries who are trying to derail this issue into an anti-union crusade. If (2) is true, then again, the problem isn't really police unions, as one can imagine a world where police unions (like literally every other union) will choose not to fight when a murderer in their ranks gets fired.