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85 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 712 (2017)
Police Unions

handle is hein.journals/gwlr85 and id is 754 raw text is: Police Unions Catherine L. Fisk & L. Song Richardson* ABSTRACT No issue has been more controversial in the discussion of police union responses to allegations of excessive force than statutory and contractual pro- tections for officers accused of misconduct, as critics assail such protections and police unions defend them. For all the public controversy over police un- ions, there is relatively little legal scholarship on them. Neither the legal nor the social science literature on policing and police reform has explored the opportunities and constraints that labor law offers in thinking about organiza- tional change. The scholarly deficit has substantial public policy conse- quences, as groups ranging from Black Lives Matter to the U.S. Department of Justice are proposing legal changes that will require the cooperation of po- lice labor organizations to implement. This Article fills that gap. Part I explores the structure and functioning of police departments and the evolution of police unions as a response to a hierarchical and autocratic command structure. Part II examines how and why police unions have been obstacles to reform, focusing particularly on union defense of protections for officers accused of misconduct. Part III describes and analyzes instances in which cities have implemented reforms to reduce police violence and improve police-community relations over fifty years. All of them involved the coopera- tion of the rank-and-file, and many involved active cooperation with the union. Part IV proposes mild changes in the law governing police labor rela- tions to facilitate rank-and-file support of the kinds of transparency, accounta- bility, and constitutional policing practices that police reformers have been advocating for at least a generation. We propose a limited form of minority union bargaining-a reform that has been advocated in other contexts by both the political left and the political right at various points in recent history-to create an institutional structure enabling diverse representatives of police rank- and-file to meet and confer with police management over policing practices. * The authors are Chancellor's Professor of Law and Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. The authors wish to thank Erwin Chemerinsky, Michael Oswalt, Martin Malin, Joe Slater, Ann Hodges, David Sklansky, and Jeff Hirsch for valuable feedback, and Ivette Aragon, Zackory Burns, and John Sirjord for their helpful research assis- tance. Finally, they wish to thank the staff at The George Washington Law Review for their work editing this Article, including Melika Hadziomerovic, Julia Duke, and Richard Rothman. May 2017 Vol. 85 No. 3

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