The real issue in Amrika is that the "law enforcement" were never really designed for serving the society. They were morphed into civil servants much later in American history.
In that light, even a hardcore socialist in Amrika agrees that there is something ominous about police unions, which is one of the two employee unions I support breaking and shredding. The other one being the Prison guard union. There is no place for unionism within a govt. department of any kind. It is a one way street to fascism.
The article below argues that it has always been fascist from day one in Amrika. Just that awareness is more acute in current day situation.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/the- ... -unionism/
Worth a read, IMO. Notable quotes below:
As Kristian Williams documents in Our Enemies in Blue, professionalized policing arose in the United States amid urbanization in the 1820s and 1830s. Controlling “dangerous” classes (principally of the industrial working variety), more than ameliorating any pronounced spike in crime, was the reason for its formation. The institution had its roots in slave patrols, which were established to control the behavior of slaves — the “dangerous” classes of that day.
In the late 1800s, when more workers banded together to improve their situation, elites once again blanched. Police broke up strikes, confiscated pro-labor newspapers, and arrested radicals. States like Pennsylvania set up forces to deal with labor stoppages. Free speech and free association were subordinated to private property.
Some people here were wondering why the Border Patrol Pandu in the airport is becoming more and more rude, harsh and irrational, and the answer to it is here:
And police unions aren’t even the worst actors.
In the hovel of coercive unionism, the California prison guards union (the California Correctional Peace Officers Association) is the leader. The organization has long defined itself as separate from the mainstream labor movement. Politically, the California prison guards aren’t wedded to the Democratic Party, and institutionally, they’re not affiliated with either of the nation’s labor federations. The association has proven its ability to parlay mass incarceration into increased political power, membership, and dues. They bankroll “victim’s rights” groups, they fight anti-incarceration referenda, they funnel millions to Democrats and Republicans who adopt law-and-order stances.
When tougher sentencing became the new norm several decades ago, the organization was small — membership totaled about five thousand, and their budget didn’t crack a half a million dollars. They now represent more than thirty thousand correctional officers. In 2008 alone, they spent nearly $5 million to elect sympathetic candidates and, more importantly, to defeat a ballot measure seeking to reduce the prison population through treatment instead of incarceration. Other prison-guard unions have benefited from the prison boom, but none have been able to capitalize on the carceral state as well as the CCPOA. The union looks at the marginalized and sees an opportunity for enrichment.
Two of the CCPOA’s ideological cousins are the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) and the National ICE Council. Unlike the CCPOA, the two are inhabitants of the House of Labor — they’re member unions of the American Federation of Government Employees, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. On immigration, however, they’ve bucked the federation’s pro-reform line (a line that has already conceded far too much to the Right).
Above all, both organizations are interested in more enforcement — despite the Obama administration’s deportation of undocumented immigrants at a faster rate than any previous president. The two groups’ preferred term for undocumented immigrants is “illegal aliens,” of course. ICE Council President Chris Crane, the New York Times wrote in June, has been “the most frequent witness on Capitol Hill during this year’s immigration debate and the favorite expert of conservative critics of the Senate measure.”
On top of trying to scuttle any path to citizenship, the border-patrol union has resisted efforts to restrict its violent mandate. “If you don’t throw rocks at Border Patrol agents,” the NBPC’s charming vice president said in November, “you won’t be shot.”
Ironically, these are the descendants of the original illegal aliens.
