by Doctor Science
I’m not *completely* crazy, so I’m not doing NaNoWriMo, but I am going to try WriSoMiFu. The specific variant I am choosing: write a blog post per day, spending no more than one hour on the writing part. For me this will be practically Twitter-like, real high-speed stream-of-consciousness stuff.
The first second[1] thing to bob to the surface in the primordial soup that is my brain is a question. Late last week, the NY Times ran a story, Officers Unleash Anger at Ticket-Fixing Arraignments in the Bronx:
A three-year investigation into the police’s habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution.
My question relates to a specific quote in the story:
“It is hard to see an upside in the way the anger was expressed, especially in Bronx County, where you already have a hard row to hoe in terms of building rapport with the community,” said Eugene J. O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “The Police Department is a very angry work force, and that is something that should concern people, because it translates into hostile interactions with people.”
The article doesn’t get O’Donnell to say why the Police Department is “a very angry work force”. Do any of you have an ideas about why? Are the Police (in NYC or in the Bronx or in general) really more upset than other work forces in These Difficult Economic Times? Is more of their upset anger, or do they have something specific to be angry *about*?
The crime rate has been going down for some time, especially in NYC. Does this make the police angry, because it threatens their jobs, somehow? Or is their anger about CompStat and the numbers-driven approach to policing?
Tell me what’s going on.
The Night Watch is what immediately sprang to mind when I thought, “a picture of the police”. Not terribly relevant to New York’s Finest, perhaps, but that’s how my brain works.
[1] The first thing got too long. Coming later this week, I hope.
“The Night Watch” is actually not about the police. It, as far as I remember, shows the local town militia, a 17th centruy equivalent of a national guard unit.
“Is more of their upset anger, or do they have something specific to be angry *about*?”
The article seems to me to be quite specific about the source of their anger. They’re losing what they regard as an important job perk: Being above the law. They’ve been systematically corrupt for decades, benefited from it, and now it’s being taken away.
A rare point of agreement between Brett and I: the police are upset because someone is taking part of their power away. I’d be shocked if they weren’t angry; what surprises me is they’re basically on public record as being angry. It’s almost as good as a confession.
Some of the officers are holding up signs saying “Just following orders.” It would have been nice if Kleinfeld, Eligon, or any one of the several contributing reporters had asked them whose orders they were following.
I’d guess (this is almost completely unfounded) that based on what the article says, the officers who were convicted were doing ticket-fixing in conjunction with some other kind of fraud. The article says that ticket-fixing alone was so pervasive that they nearly charged the union for racketeering, so you get the feeling that they didn’t charge everyone they could have.
Really: protesting ticket-fixing in conjunction with (among other things) setting up a drug dealer with a safe place of business is not your shining moment in time, NYPD.
Privileged people tend to react angrily to attempts to reduce their privilege.
This is, of course, the downside to unions. I have spent some time over that past couple of years defending unions on the internets, because of the non-stop assault on them from the Right. But that doesn’t translate into blanket support.
The simple fact is that a union exists to secure and protect goodies for its members. A good union does this by getting good compensation packages, workplace safety and reasonable work rules, while also emphasizing to its members that work-product needs to be top-notch. A bad union simply circles the wagons and screams MINE!
‘Roid rage?
internalizing the right-wing hostility against peons and “the other”?
Why are rabid animals so *angry*??!?
Agreed all around, particularly Rob in CT.
I wonder what makes them feel more above the law — their health and pension benefits — or their weapons?
Interesting tri-cornered hat New York City is wearing right now — Occupy Wall Street versus champagne drinkers on balconies consorting with the Mayor, and the NYPD sent in by the latter to disrupt the former and protect the latter.
I love that you guys have been adding art to posts.
Countme–In:
I wonder what makes them feel more above the law — their health and pension benefits — or their weapons?
It’s got to be the weapons.
Teachers have unions and benefits, but that doesn’t make them feel like they have the right to violate *the standards they are paid to support*. Teachers don’t *always* have great spelling or math skills — but that’s the way to bet.
For instance, there was a time when the notices sent home from the Sprog’s elementary school frequently had its/it’s errors. The two of us parents happened to be in the main office for something or other, and we brought up the issue with the office manager person, the one who sent out the notices. She started to say, “come on, it really isn’t that important, it’s only a little mistake” when the Principal happened to be passing through the room. *She* stopped and said, “No, they’re right, it’s crucial for our official material to have accurate spelling and grammar, because that’s what we teach.”
And what’s more, the errors became less common after that. It was very like “accountability”, in fact.
It’s not the unions, it’s the weapons.
Now that I think about it some more, I wonder if the psychology of wielding or even holding weapons isn’t naturally opposed to justice. Once you’re carrying a gun, the balance between “might” and “right” tips *really hard* toward “might”.
This very thing absolutely bugs the crap out of me. And the Principal’s response is, IMO, exactly on target. The underlying message in notices having careless grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors is “we don’t really care so much about these things”. Which is not a message you want to be sending the parents OR the students.
I almost agree with you here, but I think it’s more than that. I think policemen see themselves as enforcers of the law, and therefore Special; not quite subject to it in the same way that everyman is. I see the weapons as part of that, but I also see the unions as part of that. It’s an effective way to exert peer pressure on police officers who object to extralegal (ok: illegal) behavior on the part of other police officers.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe the union is not quite as complicit as I suspect. But it seems that their complicity was very close to being enough to bring charges against the union itself.
Which, sure, isn’t the same as charges being brought, which in turn isn’t the same as conviction. But I could certainly imagine corruption invading the union from the police force itself, and then reinforcing the corruption already in the force.
Again: not to try and completely negate this idea, but any officer being held to account by an uncorrupted department is by definition way, way outgunned.
It’s the complicity that’s the problem. The guns just give a police officer more power than an unarmed civilian; they don’t trump the power of fellow officers, or superiors.
It’s not the unions, it’s the weapons.
Can I vote for “both?” (What’s up with the whole walking thing? Is it the feet or the legs?)
There might be a self-selecting process here. I know that there are wonderful, nuturing dedicated cops etc. but the job is to, well, exert power potentially over everyone else. So the sorts of people who want to be police officers might be the sorts of people who let that power go to their heads especially given the us-against-everyone almost cultlike cohesiveness that police departments can develop.
I walked ino the local grocery yestderday ad the cops were there fundraising for their K-9 unit which receives no taxsupport (!). I stopped mainly because it turns out our drug sniffing dog is a pitbull and I was pleased to see a pittie gettig good pulbic relations. Blows against the stereotype! But my pointhere is that the cops were all wearing black, all big men, all had shades on inside a store, and all had that widelegged stance which I suppose is intended to look macho but looks to me like the guy is peeing. And big black boots.
And they stood around at their pulbic event talking to each other. It was the female volunteer with them who spoke to us citizens.
This is a small town police department in a rural area. But they didn’t have the mental fantasy of themsleves as Mayberry cops.
Yes, but I notice the cops, and the champagne quaffers, and their Tea Party constituents on one side carry weapons AND can afford to carry health insurance coverage and decent retirement plans while few, if any, of the Occupy Wall Street crowd on the other side seem to have any of that.
That’s a pretty good power arrangement Mayor Bloomberg has for himself.
Doctor, I wonder how the power arrangement regarding the quality of spelling would be altered IF libertarian and Republican desires to arm teachers and school staff came to fruition.
I can picture you in a parent/teacher conference suggesting diplomatically that “potato” in a school notice would be, umm, superior in its pedagogical value to “potatoe”, and the teacher merely drawing aside his/her suit coat to reveal some holstered firepower that has “2 & 2 = 5, and would anyone like to question that?” written all over it.
Now, someone very near, probably here, might retort that instead of demurring on the spelling, you as a citizen have a right to turn back toward the teacher as you leave the room, narrow your eyes like Clint Eastwood, and utter some last words, like “Yes, but can you spell ‘atlatle*’?”, let that sink in for a second, and then say “We shall meet again.”
Perhaps you could spit into the grey metal trashcan next to the the teacher’s desk before hightailing it down the hall to look at the Sprog’s Halloween construction paper artwork on the bulletin board, with the teacher calling after “You can schedule your next parent-teacher conference with Miss Reprobait (yes, that’s how she spells it) in the Principal’s office. You know where to find me.”
*As long as the Second Amendment enforces the First Amendment, I’ll spell atlatle any way I like. Alatle. Atlattel.
Slart wrote:
“It’s the complicity that’s the problem. The guns just give a police officer more power than an unarmed civilian; they don’t trump the power of fellow officers, or superiors.”
and hairshirtthedonist wrote:
‘Can I vote for “both?”‘
Here’s a third item that is a feature of police forces (especially big-city), not to mention military units, in which the members are placed in a situation where their lives might depend on protecting each other, at all costs:
The fraternal order, the brothers in arms no matter the corruption, the suspicion of all outsiders, the harrassment (Serpico) of all insiders who break the code, etc.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
Then throw unions and weapons into the mix.
Add Compstat to that.
Not sure what the solution is, except scandal wide open, indicting lots of people, waiting five years, and doing it all over again.
atlatl, college boy. 😉
Laura, there’s something about a cop with a pit bull that sets all of my Oliver Twist heuristic alarm signals to blaring and strobing.
Not that I’m too fond of German Shepherds or Rottweilers either.
I’d rather be savaged by a toy poodle.
“It’s got to be the weapons.
Teachers have unions and benefits, but that doesn’t make them feel like they have the right to violate *the standards they are paid to support*. Teachers don’t *always* have great spelling or math skills — but that’s the way to bet.”
I’m not so sure, after repeatedly witnessing teachers who have contracts precluding strikes calling in sick en mass, that they’re all that hostile to violating standards.
It’s not the weapons, it’s the power. Teachers do engage in minor corruption and abuse of power, like punishing students for petty personal reasons or going easy on star athletes so they can stay eligible, because that’s the limit of their power. If the police are more corrupt than other civil servants, it’s because the power of their position gives them more scope for corruption.
I suspect that there’s also some difference just because the police are expected to cooperate on a larger scale than teachers. Teachers’ influence is mostly limited to their schools, so a teacher at a high school in Brooklyn has limited ability to help out a colleague at an elementary school in the same neighborhood, much less one at a school in Manhattan. But a traffic cop in Brooklyn may be able and expected to help a gang officer in his precinct, on the far side of the city, or even from New Jersey. That ability to cooperate over longer distances gives a much greater scope for large-scale corruption.
Reporting on a demonstration by police upset that the Bronx DA was considering prosecution in a case where a cop shot a civilian, Jimmy Breslin called it the largest collection of suburban white males in the Bronx since the New York Giants played in Yankee Stadium.
Hmmm, glad someone was watching.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/feds_four_members_of_georgia_fringe_militia_group_plotted_biological_attack_on_citizens_government_officials.php?ref=fpblg
Never mind, I’ll start over when italics begone.
Countme-In:
Area man licked to death by poodle, film at 11!
Finally, I get to be useful.
I’m not so sure, after repeatedly witnessing teachers who have contracts precluding strikes calling in sick en mass, that they’re all that hostile to violating standards.
Aren’t you ignoring the part about the standards being those they are supposed to uphold as part of their jobs? Maybe if it were a rule of grammar that teachers weren’t supposed to strike, you’d have a point here, at least as far as English teachers were concerned. (Math teachers might be able to get away with it, unless the same rule was also one of geometry or something.)
I’ve never had a teacher instruct me not to strike if I were to become a teacher. But I do recall something in class about “its” versus “it’s.”
And the problem being pointed out with the cops isn’t that they’re calling out sick to get around a no-strike provision. It’s that they’re mad about getting in trouble for breaking the law – you know, the thing they’re paid to enforce.
Countme-in, the pitbull was doing what pitbulls do naturally :lolling on the floor smiling at everyone with that milewide pitbull smile, tail wagging. Pitties are good dogs.
People not so much. The calendar the cops were selling for their fundraiser had the pittie posing with her handler. He was in macho asshole stance and she had been positioned by his side in a similar pose.
People dress and pose in accordance witht their fantasies about themselves. And they impose their fantasies on dogs, too.
Dr. Science, I skimmed this post yesterday and misread the reference to “Night Watch” as referring to Night Watch, the novel by Terry Pratchett.
Which is not so much of a non sequitur as one might think, given how much Pratchett has to say in that book (and the other City Watch novels) about the position of the policeman in modern life. I just finished a re-listen of Night Watch, and there is a marvelous paragraph about the necessity for police to be civilians rather than military, and how their primary responsibility is to the law and the people, not their superiors.
Given the current political climate, and the questions that are arising about the proper role of the police in an atmosphere of protest, I can’t recommend the novel highly enough. It’s funny, cynical, moving, and it will make you think.
Again, glad SOMEONE’s watching:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/feds_four_members_of_georgia_fringe_militia_group_plotted_biological_attack_on_citizens_government_officials.php?ref=fpblg
“Yes, but I notice the cops, and the champagne quaffers, and their Tea Party constituents on one side carry weapons AND can afford to carry health insurance coverage and decent retirement plans while few, if any, of the Occupy Wall Street crowd on the other side seem to have any of that.“
“Aren’t you ignoring the part about the standards being those they are supposed to uphold as part of their jobs?”
Employees aren’t supposed to uphold their employment contracts as part of their jobs? Teachers aren’t supposed to be good roll models who don’t break the law?
People tend to get away with about as much as their circumstances enable them to get away with; Police just happen to have jobs enforcing the rules, and so are unusually well placed to make sure they can get away with their own abuses. The problem appears to be that they were trusted, and you should never trust people with power.
BTW, this interested me:
“The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.”
This is, make no mistake about it, assault. Unambiguously illegal, and, as they did it on their own time, they can’t claim any protection based on their status as officers of the law, as is usually the case when cops assault photographers.
It should result in further prosecutions, or perhaps civil rights lawsuits. Probably won’t, because nobody wants to face what the cops will do to whoever files the complaint.
Teachers aren’t supposed to be good roll models
No, they’re supposed to be role models.
(And some of us are pedants, to boot.)
I can see correcting the “roll/role”, but do you really want to assert that they’re not supposed to be good role models?
What Brett said at 7:17.
Also:
The simple fact is that a union exists to secure and protect goodies for its members.
Not quite.
Unions exist to give working people leverage in the labor market.
Institutions like unions exist for reason. Just like things like ‘limited liability’ exist for a reason.
Want to get rid of the institution, get rid of the thing that makes it necessary.
Unions suck? So does every collection of more than, say, ten human beings whose sole reason for associating with each other is the advancement of some common interest.
Nothing special about unions in that regard.
Employees aren’t supposed to uphold their employment contracts as part of their jobs? Teachers aren’t supposed to be good roll models who don’t break the law?
How didn’t they uphold their employment contract, and how did they break the law?
You wrote about violating standards generally, as opposed to the specific standards to be upheld as part of their day-to-day job duties. They don’t teach kids about their contracts. They do teach kids “its” versus “it’s.”
Are you seriously comparing teachers calling out sick to cops fixing tickets on an institutional scale, or what?
Unions exist to give working people leverage in the labor market.
They exist to give their members leverage in the market (yes, I know, there can be free-rider benefits for non-union workers in the same industry).
That is not a knock on them. If it reads that way, I wasn’t clear.
It’s not the weapons, it’s the power.
I don’t think is simply the weapons or the power. Cops in wealthy suburbs, after all, also have weapons, and pretty much the same power. No, it’s the sense of impunity, and of deserving to not be accountable. In a wealthy suburb, the cops know that, if they start to run wild, there will certainly be voters showing up at city council meetings in response, and lawyers arriving with suits. In the Bronx, not so likely.
The NYPD are not angry that their power is being questioned. They appear to be angry because they are being held to account for their (illegal) actions. Just as, for example, politicians get angry if their right to be above the laws that they write for others is threatened. (Yes, they are still subject to getting voted out of office. But that’s not on the same level as being charged with a crime.)
P.S. It belatedly occurs to me that this is also why you have police getting upset that, in a city full of traffic cameras and security cameras, some civilian might be using a cell phone camera to record their actions.
The actions are probably being photographed anyway. But would you know how ot find that footage? Or how to get a copy to post on the Internet? So the threat to impunity is not present except by photos which are already in potentially unfriendly hands. After all, an officer doing his job properly should welcome someone taking viedo which could be used as evidence for the prosecution.
Unions exist to give working people leverage in the labor market.
They exist to give their members leverage in the market
Bolds mine. And, quite so, your edit is apt, and more accurate than my original statement.
Why are cops angry? Cops generally deal with 2 kinds of people – criminals, and people having a very bad day (mugging victim, car accident, etc). Neither person is generally going to be friendly to a cop. On top of that, police in the ghetto are dealing with murders, rapes, drug abuse, child abuse, etc. all day, every day, and it’s easy to see yourself as all that’s standing between civilized life and total chaos. Hence the term the “thin blue line.” And there is plenty of truth to that. I would not want to live in many parts of my city (Rochester, NY) without a functioning police force.
When you see yourself in that position, it’s easy to feel like you are owed something more than your salary. Thus when others don’t agree, it’s like a feeling of “look at all we do for you and you don’t appreciate any of it.”
A secondary reason is I think that when most cops signed up, ticket-fixing was seen as an accepted perk. Thus taking it away feels like a pay cut.
I don’t agree. The labour movement has always has as its goals the defense of the rights of all workers.
The history of the labor movement has never been about getting goodies for members of a particular group. It was about protecting the workers of the world. (Those folks who had nothing to lose but their chains.)
The American labor movement was similarly about the rights of all workers.
Narrow unions were and are a way of carving out specific protections, but have never been the goal of the labor movement. The goals have been laws that protect all workers, and to organize all workers.
None of this was about protecting specific groups of people, other than as practical compromises with not being able to make more major changes.
The IWW, aka the “Wobblies” epitomize this. History just doesn’t support the case that the labor movement, whether European or American (or more than not in the rest of the world) has been about forming specific limited unions to protect specific groups; the idea has always been to be as broad as possible in changing laws and changing the way all workers are treated.
That there have been only limited victories (many rolled back since 1980)is a matter of practicality and events, not of goals.
If we want to criticize specific unions, or the current state of the union movement, or some other narrow specific about a given set of unions, that’s another discussion than what the point of the idea of unions has been.
So, now specific instances of labor unions are “the labor movement”?
I would, in fact, go further: Pretty much every organization, without exception, eventually comes to the point where it exists to further the interests of the people running it, regardless of what it may have originally have been formed for. (A great many organizations actually begin at that point, by design.) Labor unions have certainly been around long enough for this process to have gone to completion.
That’s why the foremost problem in organizational design is making sure that is necessary for the people running an organization to advance the interests for which the organization was created in order to advance their own. Because that’s the only way they’ll consistently bother to do so.
Labor unions, given dues collected by third parties, fairly opaque organization, and internal communications controlled from the top, appear to me to flunk on just about every last measure in that regard. It would literally be a miracle if they operated for the benefit of somebody other than the people running them, and running for the benefit of people who aren’t even in the membership is so far out of the ballpark it’s flat out crazy.
I disagree. That might have been the thinking, but there seems to be no thought whatsoever put toward protecting the workers of the world from the other workers of the world.
When teachers lobby to weaken the ability of school administrations to dismiss teachers for incompetence, whose children are adversely affected? The workers, of course. There are loads of other examples, but I don’t think I need to belabor the point. When unions exert their power to gather to themselves more benefits than are available to other people, that actually affects those other people, from time to time, in adverse ways.
And of course when unions strike and commit violence against those who cross the picket lines, even if it’s only breaking car windows, workers are affected. You might argue that the good outweighs the evil, but I think the people at the receiving end of the violence would not agree.
None of which is to say that bad behavior has only ever been exhibited by unions, where labor disputes are concerned.
Anyway, shorter me: unless you belong to the leisure class, you’re a worker. In the conflicts between unions and management, those conflicts are felt by many more workers than just those belonging to the unions.
None of which is meant to argue against the right of unions to exist.
Unions are an imperfect solution to a crappy situation.
We have organized our society and our economic and legal institutions such that folks who really ought to be cooperating in a common productive enterprise are positioned as adversaries.
So, the only way for working people — the folks who participate by *doing the thing that actually creates the value* — to have their interests represented is to sharpen their elbows. Just like everybody else at the table does.
Unions exist because we have organized ourselves such that, in their absence, folks who do the actual hands-on part of whatever it is that is getting done will be treated as a fungible commodity.
Which sucks.
*Of course* unions jealously guard the interests of their members. If they don’t do it, nobody else will.
If you don’t like unions, eliminate their reason for existence.
“When teachers lobby to weaken the ability of school administrations to dismiss teachers for incompetence, whose children are adversely affected? The workers, of course.”
Some teachers have kids too, and the teachers who have kids in public schools have a countervailing incentive.
This is not to condone all teacher’s union policy positions, but they do have some skin in the game w/r/t policies affecting kids.
orginal superr
No. Talk about specific examples of unions and/or locals all you like.
That’s my point: an individual, particular, union, or local, isn’t “unions” or the labor movement.
Obviously there have been corrupt unions and locals, and plenty of criticizable things about specific unions and their operations, down to outright criminality.
So criticize *them* all you like. (Be prepared to defend assertions, of course.)
But the general concept of “unions,” and what they’re “for,” which is what Russell and Rob in CT discussed is, of course, different from a discussion of a specific union or local.
And, yes, to varying degrees, contemporary American unions make a priority of bargaining for their memberships, but most, or at least many, unions have far larger progressive goals, and pretty much all unions at least give lip service support to such.
I could start going into detail on this, but it’s not really worth doing as a comment.
If you put that far more loosely, saying that there is a strong tendency towards this, I’d certainly agree. As an absolute, I don’t.
Slart:
Certainly that’s true in many cases; nationalism is a strong force.
If one really wants to know about this, reading up on leftist politics of the 1890s and 1910s will do the trick; WWI fractionated the worldwide labor movement, and did more than decimate it. The Russian Revolution compounded this in spades.
But meanwhile most national labor organizations throughout the world have outreach and at least attempts at worldwide coordination.
Not to mention the actual worldwide labor organizations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_labor_organizations
You may be unfamiliar with the Socialist International, but it’s not exactly small and uninfluential in the world labor movement, even though it is in the U.S.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_International
That’s assuming that the administrators are themselves competent to judge who is and isn’t competent, and aren’t motivated instead by, say, personal bias, whim, personality, politics, and every other sort of subjective factor.
I agree that striking a balance between these sorts of values and judgements is difficult, and there are no perfect solutions. In the case of teachers, or any other organization, seniority is an imperfect solution. But so is allowing firing at whim.
If there’s an ideal solution, I don’t know what it is. I do agree that in such cases there are perfectly valid arguments on both sides. That is, I’m suggesting there are, rather than agreeing that it’s simple, and that seniority/tenure has no merit as a factor.
And in good ways. This is the sort of thing where I prefer to discuss specifics.
I’m for non-violent protest, pretty much period.
Russell:
Quite. How about having most businesses be worker-owned, at least in part? How about having government go back to defending collective bargaining, rather than tearing away the right? How about having a national living wage, and a negative income tax, instead of spending a trillion dollars invading other countries to little end (Iraq)?
“I’m for non-violent protest, pretty much period.”
Dreadful sentence. I meant that I’m for only non-violent protest, at least in America.
“Labor unions, given dues collected by third parties, fairly opaque organization, and internal communications controlled from the top, appear to me to flunk on just about every last measure in that regard. It would literally be a miracle if they operated for the benefit of somebody other than the people running them, and running for the benefit of people who aren’t even in the membership is so far out of the ballpark it’s flat out crazy.”
I don’t think Brett knows very much about real unions or labor history.
I have belonged to unions all forall of my adult life and so has my ex-husband and my current husband. Between the three of us we have direct experience with four unions and indirect experience with several more. The the idea that it “would literally be a miracle if they operated for the benefit of somebody other than the people running them” has no correspondence with reality. If the union leadership slipped too far away from serving the best interests of its members they would not be re-elected.
And yes, unions do benefit more than just their members. The increase in wages that unions bring for their employees benefits enerybody. Union members have discretionary money which supports the local economy and union members can afford to own homes, thus paying property taxes. De-unionize a business, cut everyone’s pay and the local economy is harmed. This is what happened to small town Iowa when out of state corporations took over the unionized meatpacking plants and threw out the unions. Try reading Methland.
Enjoying being able to agree w/ Brett. Interesting article from the Daily Caller – I’d had no interest in checking them out prior, and this very slanted article seals the deal. I don’t know why I’m surprised to see Carlson sponsor something this scurrilous, but I am.
This is a good point to remember that US law enforcement has been on a tear since the first Iraq war, hiring out-mustering troops in preference to other candidates, w/ emphasis on combat vets and military police. At one point, they apparently had LE recruiters SET UP AT AIRPORTS to snag returnees with signing bonuses and side-arms (this from my own conversations w/ returning Desert Set-up troops).
The progressive militarization of US police (a la every third-world police force on the planet) went hand-in-hand with this “jobs for vets” program. Add all this up w/ the accepted practice of police agencies profiting from extra-legal seizures of money and property, and the nearly-uncontrolled sense of police entitlement seems not only inevitable but highly corrosive to civil society.
Phil, I’m deleting your comment @8:45 for its 100% ad hominem content. No personal attacks, people.