Police unions in the United States

Within four months an ill-advised strike by the freshly chartered Boston Police Department resulted in four days of public disorder, nine deaths, and widespread property damage.

High union membership rates among police and other law enforcement officers significantly raise the average.

[1][19] Other union affiliates include the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, which is part of National Association of Government Employees (SEIU/CtW).

[26] Officers speaking anonymously have supported the view that the cards are designed to help certain people avoid minor citations.

[25] The legitimacy of the cards is a subject of debate with critics maintaining that it is a form of police corruption for officers to take them into consideration.

[29] The New York Times prohibits its journalists from accepting the cards out of concerns that doing so would prevent them from covering the police objectively.

It alleged the NYPD violated Bianchi's first amendment right to speak out against "widespread corruption, illegal practices and the manipulation of issuance" of traffic tickets through the cards.

[31] Specifically, Bianchi claimed that his decision to ticket some cardholders led to the PBA threatening to drop his union protection, and that he was ultimately reassigned from his traffic unit on Staten Island to a night patrol shift after he ticketed a friend of NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey; Bianchi described that stop as "unremarkable" and said the friend did not mention she knew Maddrey.

[32][33] In addition to collective bargaining on behalf of their members, police unions engage in political advocacy around "law and order," crime legislation and legal protections for individual officers.

[23] In June 1919 the American Federation of Labor[note 1] began chartering local police organizations as affiliates.

The first was the police force of Knoxville, Tennessee,[40] followed by cities such as Cincinnati, Washington DC, Los Angeles, St. Paul, Fort Worth, and Boston.

The city descended into four days and nights of lawlessness, with widespread property damage and nine killed outright, eight of them by members of the 5,000 Massachusetts State Guard ordered in by Governor Calvin Coolidge.

[note 2] [47] In 1935, the Wagner Act was passed by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, allowing private sector employees to collectively bargain.

[51] On August 18, 2020, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York endorsed Trump for President in the 2020 United States presidential election.

Police unions have been described as an impediment to organizational reform and as organizations that hinder discipline for officers involved in misconduct.

[56] Academics cite a link with perceived police union corruption and their shielding of "dirty" officers by organized labor.