Police Unions, Shake Shack, and The Milkshakes of Machinations
Shake Shack. Photo by Paul Sableman via Wikimedia Commons
If you went to bed early, you might have missed Milkshake-Gate bringing all the internet folks to the social media yard:
🚨URGENT SAFETY MESSAGE🚨
Tonight, three of our fellow officers were intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack at 200 Broadway in Manhattan. Fortunately, they were not seriously harmed. Please see the safety alert⤵️ https://t.co/D8Lywivhdu— Detectives’ Endowment Association (@NYCPDDEA) June 16, 2020
Note this is the verified account of the The Detectives’ Endowment Association, representing 20K police officers, which did the amazing detective work of declaring three NYPD officers “were intentionally poisoned by one or more workers at the Shake Shack at 200 Broadway in Manhattan.”
The Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, which represents some 50K police officers, used their verified social media platforms to jump all over the story:
#BREAKING When NYC police officers cannot even take meal without coming under attack, it is clear that environment in which we work has deteriorated to a critical level. We cannot afford to let our guard down for even a moment. pic.twitter.com/fbMMDOKqbV
— NYC PBA (@NYCPBA) June 16, 2020
Only problem was that isn’t what happened when the actual detectives of Manhattan South did the actual investigation:
Shake Shack employees have been cleared of any criminality after several police officers were sickened by drinks from a Lower Manhattan location Monday night, according to the NYPD.
“After a thorough investigation by the NYPD’s Manhattan South investigators, it has been determined that there was no criminality by Shake
Shack’s employees,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison tweeted just after 4 a.m. Tuesday.
According to police sources, it appeared a machine at the chain’s Fulton Center location was improperly cleaned, resulting in residue of a cleaning agent or bleach remaining inside when it was used to make beverages for the cops.
The full investigation came after three Bronx officers, assigned to a protest detail in Lower Manhattan, became ill after drinking beverages from the restaurant.
PBA President Pat Lynch said the cops were hospitalized but were expected to be okay.
Folks will spend today rehashing two other police incidents from the near past such as the “pig coffee” incident in Kansas which the officer finally admitted was a hoax, and more recently when NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea jumped on a Bon Appetit “for intentionally placing a razor blade inside a sandwich purchased by an officer” that also never actually happened.
So what’s going on here, other than an overreaction on social media in a heightened environment?
Simple. Negotiations.
The police unions are very much feeling under assault right now and for good reason. Many folks have pointed the finger directly at the unions — and rightly so in many cases — as being part of the problem when it comes to police misconduct. When a public sector union is negotiating such things as disciplinary action, it’s also by default making policing policy since that negotiation is with the government itself:
The deeper problem is that unionization and collective bargaining have made it almost impossible to bring about meaningful reform of state and local government, policing included. The consequences are huge, because the inability to reform government means that performance suffers and public trust in key institutions declines.
Collective bargaining is not fundamentally about products or services—whether public safety, education, automobiles, or anything else—but about the power and interests of workers and management. Public-sector unions are in the business of winning better salaries and benefits, protecting job security, and advancing their members’ occupational interests. Organizational incentives, and state law, ensure that union leaders prioritize these amenities.
Police and public schools are the institutions of government with which Americans most frequently engage. Police protect our most vulnerable citizens and allow communities to thrive. Schools offer opportunities for social mobility. There are thousands of heroic and devoted police officers and school teachers. But unionization and collective bargaining have enmeshed these two crucial government functions in red tape that too often protects the inept and abusive.
Collective bargaining in the public-safety and educational sectors strips government executives of the tools they need to supervise and manage their workforces effectively. Police chiefs and school principals struggle to weed out poor performers. A few bad actors can undermine an entire organizational culture.
Hold that thought about education and teachers unions, as the challenge of re-opening schools this fall is going to have that issue front in center soon enough. But in the meantime, with images and streams of police in the streets cracking heads of protesters and criminals alike, and more controversial officer-involved shootings sure to continue, normal folks’ heightened awareness of policing issues and the social issues they cause is putting the police unions’ backs against the wall.
Some of the police union leaders have not covered themselves in glory at the microphones. Whereas they can rightly point to injured and harmed officers on their side of the civil unrest in the country — 350 injured officers from the NYPD alone — and a spate of high-profile officers killing in the last few weeks, bunkering in that only the police are the victims here is not going to work anymore. The unions’ main tool in not reforming has always been “It’s us or chaos” and touting that the thin blue line must be protected at all cost. They are right about the first part; we need good police doing the hard, thankless work of protecting and serving. But the latter part is a lie. It isn’t at all cost. There must be accountability, and every time an obviously bad faith law enforcement official is protected and excused it not only harms the community’s trust, but hurts every one of the good officers saddled with unworthy peers they are pressured and brow beat into defending “at all costs.”
“It’s us or chaos” doesn’t play when the chaos is being exacerbated by the unions whose main goal increasingly is protecting and serving themselves. Hard questions with no good answers are being asked of our law enforcement, and a bunker mentality is only going to discourage the good police, reinforce the bad actors in uniform, and convince the unions that are desperate for PR leverage of any kind to keep making media mountains out of milkshakes. They are not going to be able to BS their way out of the week’s worth of videos and images America has been watching of police behaving badly, an America less inclined to listen that those bad cops are the minority if their leadership and unions keep pulling stunts like this. Everyone involved needs to stop and think where we will all be if all the good police find the whole situation unworkable and walk away from it.
The bad ones won’t walk away, or be fired, or go anywhere. After all, they have their unions. They are, apparently, to be protected at all cost, especially by union leaders who are starting to reveal themselves as among the worst of the bad faith actors here.
Of course City Journal takes a Union bashing line. I will be somewhat fair though because progressive outlets are also calling for the abolishment of police unions. The problem is that Unions are often the only ways most workers have any power at all. I am not sure how to square the circle here. Also I think our Jesse has a point. Getting rid of police unions is more likely to screw the woman who does admin and not the officers on the beat.
The “it’s us or chaos” line might just be a sincere and authoritarian thought.Report
Pivoting from “the people who disagree with me are immoral” to “well, the people who disagree with me are moral but they don’t understand pragmatics” is less than no fun.Report
Hey look… we agree!
Saul.. you often decry partisanship. But this statement is literally the definition of such: “Of course City Journal takes a Union bashing line. I will be somewhat fair though because progressive outlets are also calling for the abolishment of police unions.”
“Of course the bozos who have a different ideological bent than I do take this awful position. Then again, the saints who share my ideological bent have a reasonable position that just so happens to dovetail with the bozos and their awful position.”Report
“Getting rid of police unions is more likely to screw the woman who does admin and not the officers on the beat.”
“Why don’t you see this as an opportunity to hire more women?”Report
Because it wouldn’t be.Report
Then make it one. Turn “defund the police” into an opportunity to eliminate expensive jobs that kill minorities into less expensive jobs (but ones that still provide good pay and good benefits!) to women, minorities, female minorities, and members of the TLBG+ community.Report
I’m told that it’s okay to entrust government with virtually unlimited power because it’s accountable to people through democratic elections. Given that government employees work for the government, shouldn’t they be able to exercise power over their employers through the ballot box?Report
How are they union bashing? Or is any discussion of the downsides of the American Union verboten to you?Report
Maybe Jessie Smollet can help them with their image.Report
This has a lot more teeth than I thought at first glance.
(Some prankster should ask about Smollet at any press conference where the Police Chief explains the difference between technical truth and poetic truth.)Report
Took the words right out my mouth.Report
This is good.Report
I saw this on FB, posted by a friend who is Blue Friendly. Big statement of how awful this is. No mention that the police themselves later cleared everyone.
Obviously, this is what they want.Report
Shorter City Journal:
“Man, those cops are out bashing heads and being racist! We need to fire some teachers and strip them of benefits.”
We just talked about this last week, where there seemed to be some sort of consensus that stripping disciplinary procedures from police would be effective, while leaving them the power to bargain collectively for pay and benefits.
Now here we have someone doing exactly what we fear, making the case that collective bargaining itself is the problem.
For cops, teachers, and anyone who works for the government.Report
“They want to fire some teachers and strip them of benefits? Better keep the racist cops out there bashing heads!”
Let me know when Black Lives matter to you more than white jobs.Report
Equal protection is something of an all or nothing deal. If you tell cops they can’t have a union, you effectively end all public sector unions. If you tell cops that they can’t negotiate to subvert criminal investigations into their members, you put the infamous teacher rubber rooms at risk.
Etc, ad nauseum.
But please, tell me how your concern is not special pleading.Report
Its worthwhile to remember that the internal investigators are themselves cops, policing other cops.
Would it be a persuasive argument that “Unless we free the IA to beat confessions out of recalcitrant cops, we will never be able to discipline them!”
Of course not.
For the same reason that “Unless we can summarily fire any worker without cause, we can’t enforce discipline/ quality control/ production speed!” is a foolish argument.
They all have a vast excluded middle.Report
Do you feel that the argument that those who criticize police unions is best summarized as “Unless we can summarily fire any worker without cause, we can’t enforce discipline/ quality control/ production speed!”?
Because if it’s not, there is more than one middle being excluded here.Report
That’s how I read the City Journal essay.
Collective bargaining in the public-safety and educational sectors strips government executives of the tools they need to supervise and manage their workforces effectively.
They don’t make any distinction between police unions and teacher unions, between collective bargaining over pay and benefits and collective bargaining over disciplinary procedures.Report
Is the statement made true or not? Union contracts often limit the ability of management to manage their work force, for good or ill. A lot of PSU contracts include terms that make it very difficult to fire employees, even for cause, so yeah, it’s a legitimate point of criticism.Report
Why is “Limit the ability of management to manage their workforce” a bad thing?
Should management have UNlimited power to manage their workforce?
Wouldn’t that be just as silly as saying that management should have NO power to manage their workforce?
It is possible to have some safeguards against unfair management behavior, while also allowing them power to do their core function, right?Report
Are you reading what I wrote, or just arguing with a strawman of me in your head?
Let me write this out again:
See that bit at the end, ‘even for cause’, that’s kind of important to my point, because ‘for cause’ is something that is spelled out and not arbitrary.
If a Union wants to be able to prevent management from dismissing employees because management doesn’t like women, or POC, or gingers, or whatnot, that’s fine.
But if the employee is abusive to others, or a thief, or lazy, or any other of the common ‘for cause’ reasons to terminate, the union should, at most, just be able to make sure the employer has evidence and dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s.
I mean, this is the actual fecking problem with police unions, right? That an officer has demonstrated that they absolutely should not be trusted with a badge and a gun, and the union get’s them reinstated, or at the very least gets the history buried so the officer can get hired elsewhere. Do you truly think Unions should be able to keep dangerous people on the job just because? I get wanting to protect people from arbitrary and capricious dismissals, but there needs to be a bright line between that and employees who are just a train wreck.Report
One thing to note, and this comes from my time managing represented employees, is that whenever such a person is disiplined you immediatley go to the contract and present that as part of your findings. IE you start any disiplinary report with a passage from the contract simply to show the union that yes, you do have the specific ability to discuss this, note it and keep it as part of the employees ongoing record. This keeps the union from greiving you first of all, but it also shows anyone looking that you take this thing seriously, and will use the law to make sure that you can do this.Report
I’m completely fine with taking disciplinary procedures entirely out of the hands of the police.
Because I don’t think that the police management itself is any more inclined to fire bad cops. I think they foster and encourage the culture in the first place.Report
Out of curiosity, have you seen any “abolish the police!” type arguments? How about “defund the police”?
Do you think “the union has secured a contract for officers which specifies a minimum amount of pay, hours, and overtime” is a good counter-argument against these arguments?Report
Can we stick to the words I actually use, and avoid extrapolating to something I haven’t said?
I have said, REPEATEDLY, that if we are going to allow public sector unions, that cops get a union. That does not mean that we can not pass laws to limit what kinds of terms can be included in public sector negotiations, but doing so will likely impact all public sector unions, not just police.
We should also outlaw Police Bill of Rights kinds of laws as violating equal protection, but that is a slightly different topic.Report
There are bad-faith actors embedded in unions, abusing the power this brings them. This is a repeated pattern.
If this brings you to call for the destruction of unions: consider this:
There are bad-faith actors embedded in corporations, abusing the power this brings them. This is a repeated pattern.
The situation needs to change. We have institutional problems. I’m not arguing for status quo. It’s just the union-bashing seems pretty unexamined.Report
I find myself in a weird place where “criticizing police unions” is immediately conflated with “union-bashing”.
I have criticisms of private sector unions, yes. A good example is the truck drivers at Hostess. I think the unions were pretty dumb and shot themselves in the foot. This is a different criticism than “they shouldn’t be allowed to have a union”. My saying that their move resulted in their loss is not “bashing”.
But this is a different criticism than the ones I have of Police Unions. I’d point to stuff like the stuff that pops up when you google “Police Union defends” and look at the first handful of links. I’d look at stuff like cops getting fired for cause and then re-hired with back pay. I’d look at stuff like the Police Unions fighting against laws prohibiting “duty booty”.
And that’s without getting into the history of opposition to Public Sector Unions shown by such luminaries as FDR (whose opposition to Public Sector Unions was examined).
This seems like an argument that you shouldn’t have to argue against the position that we need to get rid of Police Unions until your opponents have demonstrated that they’ve read a handful of books.
Which might work, in the short term… but what happens when they show up having read one?Report
“I find myself in a weird place where “criticizing police unions” is immediately conflated with “union-bashing”.”
Because the people you’re talking to don’t think that bad cops are being enabled by the union’s bad behavior; they think that cops are inherently bad and would be bad whether they had a union or not, so the union is irrelevant (and criticizing it just goes to show that you don’t care about cops being bad, you care about Grrr Unions Boo.)
Which, the Buffalo cops resigning after the union said it wouldn’t protect them would seem like a good answer to that, but that’s eighth-dimensional thinking and the #ACAB crowd can barely manage to handle one…Report
I’m happy to consider any structural change that limits the ability of bad faith actors to abuse power.Report
Speaking of Police Unions, our friends at Arc Digital have published a piece by Walter Olsen talking about reining in Police Unions titled: “Taming the Police Unions“.
In the essay, he touches on a number of excesses of Police Unions as well as findings that seem to indicate that members of Police Unions result in more problems like excessive force and violent misconduct. Read the whole thing, of course, but here’s the closer:
(May I suggest the counter-argument of “but reining in these organizations isn’t a silver bullet that will result in all of us living in Utopia”?)Report
Meanwhile, Chipotle is fuming that they sickened Randos and not Cops with their lax food prep oversight; Wendy’s twitter is holding back out of professional courtesy.Report
Comparing cop and teachers unions is a poor comparison that is more about yelling at unions. Not that these discussions are new. They are so old here that years ago i went to the trouble to look up research comparing student success in states with and without teachers unions. Very short version: no difference. Having teachers unions did not lead to poorer performance for the kids. Isn’t that sort of the point when talking about the “bad apple” teachers who can’t be fired, suggesting that it’s harming the kids. But that doesn’t seem to be true. You can certainly find among the highest performing states many with teachers unions but that is without accounting for the obvious confounding variables.
The key difference between teachers and cop unions is that it is actually possible to fire teachers who F up though i’m certainly aware of the horror stories where that has been prevented by unions. But teachers have non-union admin who supervise them. Cops have other cops who supervise and investigate them which seems like a big difference. Also cops have a para military structure, a very different culture and different role is society. Comparing teachers and cops unions are a poor comparison.
Of course i’m pro union, gov and non gov. I’m even fine with cops negotiating salary and benefits. It’s everything else that they shouldn’t be able to negotiate and which is a big source of the problem with them. They shouldn’t be able negotiate discipline or oversight or BS like the blue bill of rights. But why shouldn’t workers have some power?Report
https://www.wbez.org/stories/must-chicago-destroy-records-of-police-complaints-after-5-years-illinois-supreme-court-scheduled-to-decide-this-week/de477d9d-22ee-4a2f-a302-bf5059b1c467
Why on earth would the city even make this a bargaining point? This is the problem with public sector unions. There is no one with a vested interest on the other side of the negotiating table. The whole store is given away in the interest of labor peace.Report
I think that depends on the public sector union. Plenty of teachers from Kindergarten to community college to prestigious “public ivy” universities don’t seem to have any shortage with people with a vested interest in telling them no and instituting furloughs, budget cuts for supplies, hiring and pay raise freezes, etc.
Other government employees get similar cuts and furloughs. The police seem more untouchable and able to hurt any politician that seeks to reform them.Report
Sure, but that is a feature of all public unions, the police just leverage that feature more effectively than any of the other ones. This is what I mean by special pleading and equal protection. If you hamstring the police union such that they can’t do that anymore, you will have to hamstring all public unions in the same way.Report
Slade writes: “Police Unions do this awful thing with regards to public records”
Saul writes: (comment that defend public sector unions in general and discusses teachers not having access to school supplies)
This is nuts.
Here’s a question for the supporters of teacher unions: If a gym coach was reprimanded for having sex with a student and the leadership found that the relationship was “consensual” and then the coach was let back after receiving additional training, is that record something that you, as a parent, ought to have access to before deciding whether to let your kid try out for basketball?Report
This past Fall here in Chicago the public school teachers went on strike for 14 days. It was actually settled a few days prior to that, but it went on longer because there was a tussle about getting paid for the strike days. So, they were actually striking about being on strike.
The strike was actually pretty popular amongst CPS parents, because the union was able to frame it as being about more than the cash on offer. Which is was, really. They did a lot of good for the school system with their strike.
By the end of it, however, public sentiment was starting to turn against them, mostly due to the inconvenience of what to do with the kids, and the perceived greed about getting paid for the strike days.
It was kind of interesting to watch the negotiations. Both sides got a fair deal. The point I’m trying to make is the city could have caved right away. The fact that they went on so long is entirely due to the mayor being willing to go to the mat with the union. It won’t always be that way.Report
Again, I think it depends on the union. It is almost always unpopular when say transit workers go on strike and I’ve lived through two. One was in NYC in December 2005 during a bitterly cold week, another was a BART strike in the Bay Area.
Here, people complain because they have to get to work, it takes longer, plans get screwed, people worry about getting fired by unsympathetic bosses themselves, etc.
Police unions are about one of the few groups that pays regular attention to city council elections. The other group is real estate developers. Plus the police do have a strong image of being the source of order and calm that a lot of people just went with until now.Report
Saul, I like football as much as the next guy, but you’re doing an end run around my point. Public employee strikes are never popular, and police unions are generally prohibited by law from even considering it. That is neither here nor there.
What’s in the contracts that someone with a vested interest would object to?Report
Police unions are more able to use force than other unions.Report