To understand the citadel of law enforcement, we must reckon with its unions—which resemble fraternities more than labor unions.
BY EVE L. EWING
ILLUSTRATION BY SHAWN MARTINBROUGHAugust 25, 2020
Illustration by Shawn Martinbrough. Colorist Christopher Sotomayor.
The man stands before them, head slightly bowed. He is gangly, awkward, against the backdrop of the officers’ firm march. They are hurried and he is not. Everything about them is fast, crisp, matte.
We watch the push. We watch him fall.
We watch them pass his body. Swirling around him, an eddy of thick black fabric. When the blood comes, it drifts languidly across the concrete.
When night falls, this is the story they tell: “During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.” But when the video appears, the world will see the police shove Martin Gugino to the ground, fracturing his skull.
The email from John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, came the next day. Evans forcefully defended the police officers implicated in the assault. “After witnessing first hand how these 2 officers were treated,” Evans wrote, “I can tell you, they tried to fuck over these guys like I have never seen in my 54 years.” He signed off the email by writing, “Fraternally, John Evans – PBA.”
There are people who will tell you that people like John Evans lead a union. But this is not a union. This is something else.
This is a brotherhood. It abides no law but its own. It scorns the personhood of all but its own brethren. It derides all creatures outside its own clan. And for that reason, the brotherhood is not only a hurdle impeding reform. It is the architecture of an alternate reality, one that seethes and bubbles just beneath the surface of our own. And it’s a reality in which none of us are human.
In May, the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police elected John Catanzara as president. According to a 2017 report by the United States Department of Justice, the police department in Chicago “engages in a pattern or practice of using force that is in violation of the Constitution,” where “officers’ force practices unnecessarily endanger themselves,” “a pattern...[which] results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.”
And yet, even given the city’s abysmal standard of police conduct, in his 25 years on the force Catanzara has managed to distinguish himself from his peers by being especially awful. According to the Citizens Police Data Project (a database of police misconduct records made public after a lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests), Catanzara has been the subject of 50 complaints, putting him in the 96th percentile for allegations. At the time he was elected to lead the FOP, Catanzara was assigned to administrative duty; according to the Chicago Sun-Times, he is the first president to take on the role while stripped of his official police powers.
In June, when asked about the killing of George Floyd, Catanzara referred to Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions as an “improper police tactic.” “Explain to me how race had anything to do with it,” he went on. “There’s no proof or evidence that race had anything to do with it.” Catanzara has said that any lodge members showing support for protesters could face disciplinary action from the FOP, and perhaps expulsion.
Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is a local chapter of the larger national organization of the same name. The national FOP boasts more than 2,100 such lodges, representing more than 330,000 members, which makes it, according to its website, “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.”
IT ABIDES NO LAW BUT ITS OWN. IT SCORNS THE PERSONHOOD OF ALL BUT ITS OWN BRETHREN. IT DERIDES ALL CREATURES OUTSIDE ITS OWN CLAN.
When Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones—a young man having a mental health episode and his neighbor, who answered the door—Rialmo was fired. The vice president of the Chicago FOP called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which recommended the firing, “a political witch hunt on police officers. The investigations are unfair and politically motivated.”
When Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the FOP defended him. When four of the officers accused of aiding in the cover-up were fired, a different FOP vice president used the decision as an occasion to impress upon police board members that they should not “fall to the pressure of the media or the radical police haters.”
These men were sworn officers of the law. But they did not look at Van Dyke as a convicted murderer who had broken that law. They did not look at him and see police—a social category, a profession, a uniform one puts on and can take off. They looked at him and saw their brother. They saw a different type of being, bound by an oath that transcends civilian understanding. And by virtue of Van Dyke’s being, in their eyes, he could do no wrong.
The same logic underlies the phrase “blue lives matter,” which semantically equates the color of a uniform with the nonnegotiable, unshakable fact of Blackness. It’s a phenomenon not unlike the transfiguration that took place behind the eyes of Darren Wilson. “It looks like a demon,” he told the grand jury in describing Michael Brown. Michael Brown: not man, but beast. Jason Van Dyke: not man, but kin. A brother in the pantheon. A demigod among demigods, his actions deemed necessary and virtuous because they were wrought by his hand, and his hand was necessary and virtuous.
Of course, as Catanzara’s comment about support for protesters demonstrates, it’s not that it’s impossible to be cast out from the brotherhood. The unforgivable sin within the brotherhood is to cast aspersions against the only people whom the brotherhood recognizes as human—its own kind. Shoot a boy in the back, and you can still be in the brotherhood. Side with the people who are asking questions, or raise a fist with them, or kneel before them, or talk to them, and you are out.
Maya Angelou had a thing she used to say—When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Perhaps it’s time for America to heed Angelou’s advice. The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them.
History would suggest that unionism and policing are, at their foundation, incompatible. For one thing, the officers who founded the FOP made it very clear that it was not a union. In the volume The Fraternal Order of Police 1915-1976: A History, a work commissioned by the FOP itself, cofounder Martin L. Toole is quoted as saying, “We are banded together for our own enjoyment!” Founding officers rejected the name “United Association of Police because ‘that name sounded too much like Union, and Union sounded too antagonistic.’ ” These officers sought a way to bargain collectively over issues like wages and hours, without affiliating themselves with labor organizations.
And as labor historian Rosemary Feurer told me in an interview, until the 1970s “there was a feeling that police didn’t belong in the union movement. And now I think we have to realize that that is part of our history, from the stark reality that people were confronted with police brutality whenever they tried to assert their rights as union members.” Indeed, the most formative days of the labor movement were marked by police violence against workers. During the 1886 Haymarket Affair, police fired on the crowd during a dispute with striking workers. During the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest labor uprising in American history—thousands of West Virginians led by the United Mine Workers were in armed struggle against thousands of police and National Guardsmen. The local sheriff, Don Chafin, was paid by mine operators to beat, arrest, or intimidate suspected union organizers, a job which each year earned him more than 10 times his annual salary in bribes and helped him maintain a well-funded department. By 1921, his net worth was about $350,000. In the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, police fired on a demonstration of steelworkers, killing 10 and seriously wounding many others, including a baby and an 11-year-old boy. A worker on the scene said that as the injured fell under the hail of bullets, it looked “as though they were being mowed down with a scythe.”
And the institution of policing as a means of violently controlling working persons’ right to economic freedom has deeper roots than even the labor movement itself. The need to attack workers in the name of private interests is historically intertwined, like a double helix, with the need to control, limit, and sanction Black autonomy.
“You will find that this question of the control of labor underlies every other question of state interest,” South Carolinian William H. Trescott told the governor of South Carolina in 1865. The end of the Civil War meant that millions of Black people were transformed from items of property, from which labor could be forcibly and freely extracted, to independent humans with, at least nominally, the agency to do with their labor what they pleased, for their own benefit. “Virtually from the moment the Civil War ended,” writes historian Eric Foner, “the search began for legal means of subordinating a volatile black population that regarded economic independence as a corollary of freedom and the old labor discipline as a badge of slavery.” In the absence of slavery as the means by which Black people could be made to stay in one place and work when and how White people needed them to work, the plantation class looked to the law to ensure that they would. Hence, the Reconstruction-era legislation known as the Black Codes was born. In Mississippi, being Black and not having written proof that you were employed was now illegal. In South Carolina, being Black and having a job other than servant or farmer was illegal unless you paid an annual tax of up to $100. Being in a traveling circus or an acting troupe? Illegal. In Virginia, asking for pay beyond the “usual and common wages given to other laborers” was illegal. In Florida, disrespecting or disobeying your employer was illegal. In some areas, fishing and hunting, or even owning guns, were now banned, as these activities could lessen Black dependence on White people for employment.
And who would enforce these new laws? The police. In some cases, Foner writes, these newly deputized men wore their old Confederate uniforms as they patrolled Black homesteads, seizing weapons and arresting people for labor violations.
Despite this history, those who lead America’s police unions raise a cautionary alarm—that teachers and other public sector workers should be wary of any attempts to curtail police power, lest they find themselves at the center of the next effort to limit union rights. In June, Patrick J. Lynch, who heads the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News drawing a direct connection between efforts to defund the police and a broader labor struggle. “Our brothers and sisters in the labor movement should be very careful. If they support a successful campaign to strip police officers of our union rights, they will see those same tactics repeated against teachers, bus drivers, nurses and other public sector workers across this country.”
But there’s a crucial difference. “How many unions are there where you’re assigned a gun and told you can shoot people?” Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner asked me during a phone interview. “I mean, they have superpowers. They are given superpowers over the lives and freedom of other people. Over the integrity of their bodies.” Krasner told me of two instances in his legal career when he defended women who, after finding their police officer husbands cheating and trying to divorce them, had been arrested by those same husbands. One was arrested twice. The other was arrested alongside her brother, who had tried to defend her. Both women were found not guilty despite police officers testifying against them on the stand. Krasner attempted to sue on their behalf, for monetary damages but also injunctive relief—for the police department to change its policies to require an arrest of a relative or spouse to be overseen by a supervisor.
“The answer that I got from the city is nope. We’re not going to do any of that. Dealing with the police department, contract negotiations…we’re not even going to get into it. So we’ll just pay you more money,” Krasner recalls. “So you know, that kind of told me everything I needed to know. It was an overwhelming imbalance of power. It’s a city I think that in many ways is so politically compromised by its relationship with police unions that they have for a very long time pretty much given them anything they wanted.” Krasner believes that the situation is exacerbated by the fact that in Philadelphia, the FOP allows retired officers to be voting members. “The police union is the voice of the past,” says Krasner, “and in Philly the past is Frank Rizzo,” the 1970s-era Philadelphia mayor who openly told his supporters to “Vote White.” Before becoming mayor, Rizzo was police commissioner. During his campaign, Rizzo promised his supporters that after he was elected, he would “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”
Rachael Rollins, district attorney of Suffolk County (which includes Boston as well as nearby Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop) agrees with Krasner, telling me that police are “the only section of our municipal local, state, or federal government that has the lethal and legal authority to kill you with no oversight.” For this reason, she dismisses Lynch’s comparison between police unions and teachers unions. “If a teacher strangled George Floyd as an 11-year-old,” Rollins said, “no D.A. would even wait a nanosecond to charge that teacher with a homicide. We would be shocked and appalled. But when police do it, we have been so triggered to believe law enforcement, right? To not question them…. When you have the authority to do something as final as death without oversight, you are different than any other union we are talking about.”
Beyond this point—police carry guns and are permitted by the state to kill people—is a deeper distinction: the task of policing itself as intrinsically counter to the ideology of a union. “A union is supposed to protect the rights, and the labor movement is supposed to protect the rights, of all working people,” said Sheri Davis-Faulkner, a program director at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. “The point is to be lifting up all working people. That is the work. Collective bargaining and having bargaining units, that is a part of it. But it’s also pushing an ideology that people should not be exploited.” Police unions do not and cannot promote this ideology, because doing so would require them to confront “the infrastructure that has been built for them to be policing Black bodies and protecting White communities,” Davis-Faulkner told me.
“In its best formulation, the labor movement has been about the concept of solidarity,” says Feurer, who studies political conflict and the labor history of the late 19th and 20th centuries at Northern Illinois University. “And so that is the key conundrum here. Is that if you’re an entity that’s sworn against solidarity, you can put your foot on the neck of a working-class person. It is the cardinal issue that we’re facing right now…what do you do with a group of workers that are in your movement whose purpose is a state purpose? Whose purpose is to deny protest rights, and to deny solidarity?”
In Minneapolis, after the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests, Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, wrote a letter to membership in which he said: “I commend you for the excellent police work you are doing in keeping your coworkers and others safe during what everyone except us refuses to call a riot…. What has been very evident throughout this process is you have lacked support from the top. This terrorist movement that is currently occurring was a long time build up which dates back years.”
In August 2019, when Daniel Pantaleo—the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner—lost his job, Lynch, the PBA president, condemned the decision. “The police commissioner needs to know he’s lost his police department,” he said at a press conference. Lynch declared that if Pantaleo could be labeled “reckless,” the condemnation could be applied to any police officer and warned that the commissioner would “wake up tomorrow to discover that the cop haters are still not satisfied, but it will be too late.”
After Tamir Rice was killed, Jeffrey Follmer, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, told MSNBC that “this shooting was justified. It was tragic that it was a 12-year-old. But it was justified.”
Indeed, for American policing to function, physical assault is an important tool, but as important is intimidation—the threat of physical assault and the psychological terror it engenders. And for those tools to work, they require the premise of impunity, elevating the police officer as a different kind of being, one unencumbered by the laws of civic comportment or even the basic laws of reality. It requires not only that Alabama state troopers beat John Lewis after he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, fracturing his skull—it requires a system that defines Lewis as the criminal in that scenario, and the trooper as the guardian of safety and order. It requires not only that a Chicago police officer, guarding a statue of Christopher Columbus this past July, be able to punch 18-year-old Miracle Boyd in the mouth, knocking out her front teeth—it requires us to see the video and know that the officer will go unnamed and unpunished. It requires not only that a New York City police officer crack 20-year-old Dounya Zayer’s head against the pavement, causing her to have a seizure—it requires a commanding officer to watch and do nothing. It requires Lynch to refer to the officer who shoved Zayer as someone “whose boss sent him out there to do a job, who was put in a bad situation during a chaotic time,” and to refer to the decision to charge him with assault as “dereliction of duty.” For the police to act as they do, and for the body politic to accept it, requires not only fear or force but a reconfiguration of the very fabric of reality as we know it.
“Part of what fascist politics does,” explains philosopher Jason Stanley, “is get people to disassociate from reality.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that such politics craft an alternate universe—an unreality. “It is not so much the barbed wire,” says Arendt, “as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure.”
When I was in college, I was a resident assistant, which meant that in some instances I was the first responder when someone had been sexually assaulted. I once confronted a young man who was the president of one of the fraternities where a resident of mine had recently…she thought, she wasn’t sure…she had woken up, in the attic, she told me. Alone. She didn’t know where he had gone, or….
I asked: How could you choose to call someone your brother when you know they are capable of something like that? He looked away.
This was the wrong question. The whole point of the brotherhood is that it enables a willful not knowing. The brotherhood swallows all other planes of reality that could pose an existential challenge. I had asked the wrong question, because the answer to how can you call someone your brother when he does something like that is: Because he is my brother. The brotherhood is a self-contained universe, with its own physics, its own gravity. Within a band of brothers, there is no law that supersedes the law of the brotherhood itself. To be part of a brotherhood is not to be a “member” of something—for membership is fleeting, and outside oneself. To be part of a brotherhood is not simply to be a workaday person who belongs to a collective corps, but to be reborn as a new type of thing, nestled in a selfhood intimately woven among other selfhoods, moving as one through a world in which you trust nothing but one another, because your self has become inextricable from all those other selves you call brother.
In the brotherhood, there is no such thing as wrongful police action. A member of the brotherhood cannot err any more than a dropped apple can fall toward the sky. The man who choked Eric Garner to death can never be “reckless.” All police work is “excellent police work.” The death of a 12-year-old boy is “justified.” You watch the video again. He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.
In the days after my city rose against the clouds, I woke to a news item that made me laugh out loud. When desperate and angry and tired people were breaking windows across the South Side, a group of police officers had broken into the campaign offices of Representative Bobby Rush. The surveillance footage is almost cartoonish. The officers ate popcorn. They made coffee. As Chicago burned, they napped on the couch.
When the incident became public, Catanzara told the press that Rush or his staff had asked the officers to come. He told local news that Rush was “an absolute liar, a piece of garbage” and that anyway, the coffee and popcorn were bought with taxpayer money, and the officers were taxpayers, were they not?
Of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s criticism of the officers, Catanzara said: “Shame on her for ever questioning their valor and the heroism and the officers of CPD to make it sound like they were letting other officers get the crap beat out of them while they sat there and slept. That is a disgusting accusation. She owes the men and women an apology for even implying that was.”
I read the statement. I looked again at the picture of the sleeping officer.
He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.
A union is a pact, wrought among the human. Among the fallible. And there can be no error in the brotherhood. And the brotherhood can never be reformed, because reform requires fidelity to something external, and the brotherhood has fidelity only for itself. This is the unreality of the brotherhood. And as long as police are endowed with near-absolute state-sanctioned power, it is our unreality. We live behind its gates.
Eve L. Ewing is a poet and sociologist whose 2019 collection, 1919, inspired this issue’s title. See more from V.F.’s THE GREAT FIRE project here.
Profile | Narendra Modi
The Conversation
