Truthiness from David Brooks

Montreal cops in 2008 or 2009 protesting against government messing with their pensions by dressing down. They are a real union. You never hear of Montreal cops killing unarmed black men. Coincidence? You decide. Via CyberSmokeBlog.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Union Future", December 19 2014:

I'm not going to lie, police departments are pretty abusive. Kind of like teachers, refusing to fire incompetent officers, refusing accountability in the form of body cams, refusing to apologize. Some socialists accuse them of racism, but even-the-liberal-Conor-Friedersdorf will tell you the real problem is they're unionized.

Just as we lose Stephen Colbert, Brooks slides into some of the nastiest truthiness I can recall.

I just want to clarify that the Police Benevolent Associations and similar associations in the northeast US, Texas, and other places are not unions. They do act in a union-like fashion as bargaining agents for cops and operate benefit programs like health insurance, but they are autonomous local fraternal organizations entirely independent of the labor movement.

This is not a distinction without a difference: it is perhaps a significant part of why their politics is so retrograde and they have so much difficulty shaking their history of racism. They are in opposition to the labor movement. And while both PBAs and teachers' unions work to build protection for their members against arbitrary firing into the contracts, I've sure never heard of teachers demonstrating and editorializing and generally making heroes of incompetent teachers the way PBAs have done for Darrel Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo. (It was the anti-union side that lionized known incompetent teacher Michelle Rhee.)

They have nothing whatever in common with teachers' unions except the role in collective bargaining. Go ahead and criticize them all you want.

Many US police departments are represented by labor unions (such as the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, International Union of Police Associations, AFSCME, or the teamsters), by the way. I don't know if you can draw any kind of correlation between abusive police and whether they are organized by a benevolent society or a union, but the police of St. Louis County, Missouri, including Ferguson, belong to the fraternal St. Louis County Police Officers Association, and the killers of 12-year-old Tamir Rice are represented by another PBA, the fraternal Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association. The police department of Oakland, California, whose abuses are discussed in the Friedersdorf article Brooks links to, is a PBA, the Oakland Police Officers Association, and so are those of the other abuses Brooks notes in Miami, Philadelphia, and Wichita, and the cases from Friedersdorf I have checked out (Washington, Boston) so far. And everybody knows the New York City police, killers of Eric Brown and Akai Gurley, are represented by the loudest and most reactionary PBA you ever want to see.

Larry Gaines and John Worrall, 2011, Police Administration (3rd ed.).