Today, I'm joined by Maya Duke Moskva, who
is a senior writer at The Chicago Reader.
She covers policing, housing, the courts and
local social justice movements.
My, it's great to speak to you today.
Thanks for having me on.
So there are so many conversations over the
last four or five months that relate to policing
in the United States.
We've had the George Floyd protests.
We've had sort of more political conflicts
between local, state and federal law enforcement
as we saw federal troops deployed to certain
cities around the United States.
One of the things that is sort of underlying
a lot of these conversations are the issues
of police unions as well as police immunity
in certain situations.
And it's interesting, maybe as a place to
start the conversation, to think about a lot
of people who tend to be in favor of democratization
of workplaces and in favor of unions and collective
bargaining have identified that police unions
are a little bit different, that it's not
exactly the same when you're talking about
a union maybe of delivery drivers and a union
for police officers.
Can you talk a little bit about structurally
what the differences are?
Yeah, police unions are very different from
a lot of other public sector unions or private
sector unions.
So the I think the key difference begins with
where the power dynamic lies between the workers
and the bosses.
So police officers are employed by a municipality
and basically, unlike any other type of worker,
it's police that are response.
The municipality depends on the police for
the protection of property and a certain kind
of status quo.
So historically, police officers have been
this the strike force against striking, striking
workers in other sectors.
They have been the vehicles for maintaining
segregation and other types of policies around
that that politicians in the city would want
to perpetuate.
So the in the state of Illinois, like in a
lot of other places, are police officers and
firefighters as well, actually are prohibited
from striking.
And so when they sit down to bargain with
their employer, which is the city, they both
sides know that the strike is not on the table.
However, there's other ways that cops can
kind of withhold their labor and be noncooperative
to get the kind of contracts they would like
from the city and the city.
Unlike in, you know, let's say like a private
steel mill operator or, you know, I don't
know any other type of private business owner
or manager.
There's there's like limited there's limited
ways that that kind of withholding of labor
by the police officers can be mitigated.
So you can't you can't easily bring in scabs
essentially to to fill in the gaps left by
striking workers or workers.
They're withholding their labor in some way.
So really, what we see time and again and
specifically, especially in Chicago, is the
municipalities sort of like they're really
at the mercy of the union in this in the sense.
And historically, this is why municipalities
were so resistant to having police unions,
because the kind of view of local officials
and also of federal judges that litigate it,
you know, decided over lawsuits, over police
unionization throughout the 20th century was
that police officers really aren't workers
like other types of workers.
They are a pair, Maryland's military organization.
And just like the military, they have to have
their one allegiance be to their employer,
to the state that they serve.
And they shouldn't have any other type of
know interests involved in this.
And so now that police officers are able to
unionize, it's it's really a dynamic in which
they're able to get a lot more in their contracts
and get a lot more concessions and a lot more
bargain from a much stronger position than
any other really public or private sector
workforce.
Is this where the unions were able to sort
of gain enough leverage to develop some of
the defaults that are in place now in terms
of immunity, or is that actually coming from
some other structure?
Yeah.
So there's.
As far as the again and I know specifics about
that, that police contracts in Chicago.
So really, I'm speaking from from from this
place.
Yeah.
But the a lot of the the first the very first
police union contract that police officers
in Chicago had, which came in 1980, really
started out with its bedrock being that.
Policeman's Bill of Rights, which was modeled
on that kind of First Amendment Bill of Rights
type of protections that developed for criminal
suspects and people accused of crimes in the
U.S. Constitution in that in the 20th century.
And so as that was happening in the mid century,
police officers who were increasingly accused
of misconduct, that were increasingly dealing
with harsher and harsher just a discipline
for municipalities, they developed this sort
of you that police need a bill of rights and
they need protections when they're accused
of some kind of brutality or misconduct.
And so the bedrock of the contract here in
Chicago has always been this bill of rights
that protects officers from having to make
statements about their behavior on the job
in a certain conservative time.
They're able to know who is accusing them
of their crimes.
They're able to coordinate with one another
before they give statements, are able to amend
their statements after video or audio evidence
about the incident becomes available.
So really, the core of the contract is about
protecting officers who are accused of some
kind of misconduct.
And beyond that, there's a lot of other things
like provisions that would require destruction
of misconduct records.
There's all kinds of stuff, obviously, that's
more on the labor side of things about hours
and overtime and vacation and all of that.
But basically, yeah, that the contract is
is now extremely elaborate.
And it really it's really much more there's
much more that off.
Every time there's something new that's in
the contract, which also, of course, depends
on the political situation in which the contract
is decided.
Every time something new is added, it's much
more difficult to take it away and to renegotiate
the contract.
So what we see time after time is especially
throughout the 90s, the contract becomes more
elaborate.
There's there's more and more protections
and guarantees for officers and less and less
space for the city to come in and really radically
change things in order to say change how officers
are disciplined, for example.
So in this context, when the defund the police
movement, I guess if we call it that, got
some momentum a few months ago.
One of the things that that I said was I'm
unsure that defund is the right approach in
all cases and that there are.
But my this is just to give you context for
the upcoming discussion.
My thought was there there are cases where
there's too much funding for certain things
like militarization of police.
There's other cases we're actually being underfunded,
leads to some of the sort of lower hanging
fruit policing that actually causes the problems
we're trying to solve.
Anyway, my point was I laid out some ideas
that I think would be very useful in actually
getting at some of the problems in policing,
which include, for example, a national bad
actors database to take away the possibility
of a police officer leaving one department
for bad actions being hired elsewhere in the
new department, saying we had no idea, there
was no way we could have known that that's
what that that's what took place, that this
individual had a bad act in their past.
Now, the obvious obstacle to that would be
every police union would oppose such a database.
Right?
I mean, is it is it is it even conceivable
that something like that could get past unions?
Yeah.
So every every police union would oppose that.
And also, in a lot of places, the police contracts
do actually provide for the destruction of
police misconduct records after a certain
amount of years.
Wow.
So even if you wanted to create such a database
in a lot of places, you just couldn't because
the records wouldn't even exist anymore.
I mean, Illinois is really an exceptional
case because we've had a lot of civil rights
litigation on this issue.
And basically this past June, actually, the
Illinois Supreme Court decided on a case that
was launched that was started by a independent
journalist and civil rights activist, Jimmy
Calvin, in Calvin vs. Chicago.
The Illinois Supreme Court decided that the
destruction of police misconduct records,
which were the it turned out that the city
wasn't doing it, even though that police union
contract said that they were supposed to be
destroying them after five years.
Turned out they weren't doing it.
We've got records going back to the 60s and
the Illinois Supreme Court found that actually
that's a dead letter provision and the police
union contract, that these records can't and
shouldn't be destroyed because it's a matter
of public interest to continue having them.
So technically, like in the state of Illinois,
you could have some kind of statewide database
where like if a cop gets fired, which, by
the way, is extremely, extremely rare for
a cop to even have any kind of discipline
based on misconduct allegations or complaints.
But in the rare occasions where they are disciplined
or fired, you know, you could technically
have this kind of database that would prevent
them from them going across to a different
municipality and getting a job there.
But I think that one of the other things and
kind of brought this up with your earlier.
Question about.
About the immunity that officers have, that
the kind of immunity from prosecution for
their conduct on the job.
What's sometimes called qualified immunity
or indemnification.
That stuff doesn't really stem from the union
contracts themselves.
Those are provisions that are installed by
state law.
So it's the state that indemnifies officers
against essentially liability for the things
they do on the job, which is then why whenever
a cop does something bad, they are.
It's the city that has to be responsible for
that conduct.
That's the city that gets sued.
It's a city that has to pay.
And now the conversation that I'm hearing
more and more is about how we should actually
require officers to carry liability insurance
of some sort for misconduct, like sort of
like malpractise insurance for doctors so
that they are themselves financially liable
for their behavior.
And then if they mess up enough times, then
no one nobody's going to want insure them.
And that's how you get these kind of, quote
unquote, bad apples out of the force.
Well, that conversation is really dead in
the water.
As long as there are these state laws indemnifying
officers and I'm doing them would be like
a massive, massive battle, especially in a
state like Illinois where, you know, it's
very blew up in Chicago.
But then the rest of state is pretty red.
It would be hard to get Republican state legislation
on board for changing this indemnifying in
indemnification thing.
But, yeah, that's just an additional layer
of complication.
Aside from the contract that already provides
so many protections for officers, let's pause
our conversation there with Maya Duke Moskva,
and we will have
the full conversation for 
you on our YouTube channel at YouTube.
