Over the past few weeks, calls to abolish police departments and dramatically rethink what community law enforcement might look like have been vaulted from a niche — albeit longstanding — issue within progressive circles, and into the raging mainstream debate about race, justice, and equality, after white police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, a Black man, on the streets of Minneapolis in late May.
Police abolitionism, like all seismic social re-imaginings, is not a monolithic movement. Questions about tactics, priorities, and even terminology have punctuated conversations about how best to work toward a police-less society in recent days. But for all the disagreement about what defunding and dismantling police departments looks like, there remains a steady sense that convincing communities of the virtue of abolition is only one part of the equation. Another, perhaps even more intractable obstacle to radical change in this arena are police unions.
Conflict between a progressive movement and groups that frame themselves as — and currently sit alongside other — labor unions might seem at first like an unusual dynamic between camps that are frequently seen as being natural allies. But despite the similar nomenclature, police unions operate very differently from their ostensible peers. Continue reading.