Police Unions’ Campaign Donations Block Police Reform Efforts

Last Spring, Suffolk County Executive Steven Bellone and the county legislators approved a dream of a new contract with the Suffolk PBA.  The 6-year pact guarantees yearly pay of $200,000 for every officer with 15 years of experience. That puts police among the top earners in the country. The head of the PBA told Newsday the pay was justified by comparing it to the earnings of athletes who don’t have to risk their lives.

 

Bellone denies that the generous contract had anything to do with the campaign donations he received during his re-election in the fall of 2019. But I’m not buying that. No one donates the kind of money the police unions did without an expectation that their investment is worth it.

 

 Consider that during that last election cycle, police unions gave $40,000 in direct contributions to Bellone, the legal limit. But that was dwarfed by spending on his behalf through a SuperPac, the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation. It donated whopping $830,000 to support his re-election, and $662,000 to re-elect incumbent county legislators.  Because the SuperPac didn’t coordinate directly with the campaign organizations, the donations are unlimited, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

 

This matters not only because of the conflict of interest and ethical blindness it demonstrates. It matters because the county is in the midst of a state-mandated examination of policing in Suffolk prompted by the killing of George Floyd. It has been holding virtual hearings at which hundreds of residents have been both critiquing thepolice and suggesting changes that would require shifting funds that have now been locked into place by the contract, like using social and mental health workers instead of police to respond to mental health crisis situations. Critics would also like it to be easier to fire bad cops, and discipline procedures are at least in part dictated by the contracts. 

 

Legislator Robert Trotta is the only county politician who is trying to correct the situation. A Republican from Fort Salonga, Trotta is also a retired detective, and he told me collecting garbage or tree work is more dangerous than policing in Suffolk County.  He regards the contract and the donations as an ethical conflict of interest that should concern every Suffolk resident. 

 

So he is sponsoring a resolution that would limit direct campaign contributions to no more than $500 for legislators and $3,000 to county-wide officials from employee unions and contractors doing business with the county. Even though it won’t affect the SuperPac donations, It needs to pass if only to demonstrate that the legislators care about the conflict of interest they face. 

 

The same situation is true in Nassau.  Nassau locked itself into an 8 1/2-year contract with the Superior Officers Association, and recently signed a new PBA contract against the objections of reform advocates.  In a demonstration of their clout, Nassau police demanded and got a bonus of $3,000 a year just to accept wearing body cameras, sucking more money out of the county’s budget for public safety. 

Despite what seemed like a very favorable contract, the Nassau police officers rejected the contract. That gives Nassau's leaders the chance to consider the kinds of changes reformers have been advocating.  Long Island United to Transform Policing has issued a call for no new contracts in Nassau County without structural police reform. 

In Suffolk, the contract remains an obstacle to change.

 

Trotta's resolution meanwhile continues to languish as neither Suffolk Republicans orDemocrats have shown any appetite for it. They expect us to swallow the idea that contributions have no influence on their actions. Bellone’s spokesman had the brass to tell Newsday that “ campaign contributions do not influence public policy.” 

 

Legislators who accept funding from police unions could recuse themselves from voting on their contract. County ethics rules require recusal if a legislator would benefit financially from a vote. But donations go to their campaigns, not directly to individuals, so there is no direct financial benefit. As for recusal, it wouldn’t work anyway because “the unions give to everyone, so there would be no one to vote on the contract,” says Trotta. 

 

Suffolk residents struggling to make ends meet will feel the impact of the bonanza enjoyed by the police. Especially during a pandemic, if you give police three times the cost of living increase over 6 years, something else has to give. The proposed 2021 Suffolk budget cuts bus routes, raids money from the Clean Water Fund, and shortchanges many other necessary services. The state controller ranks Suffolk County at number 62 among 62 counties in the state with the worst fiscal situation. 

 

Had Suffolk limited the police raise to just the cost of living, Trotta says $250 million would have been saved. And some of that could have been used to finance a matching fund for public financing of campaigns. The county passed a law creating a public finance fund in 2018, and scheduled it to go into effect next year. 

 

It won’t.  Because there’s no money for it. 

 

Long Island legislators live in fear that the unions will withdraw their support. The only remedy, it seems, is for us voters to get smart and hold their feet to the fire when election season comes around again. In an interview with the Washington Post, Daniel Oats, former Chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division and police chief in several jurisdictions, said:  “there cannot be true (police) reform unless Americans elect politicians willing to take on obstructionist labor leaders.”

 

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Crisis Intervention Teams, Unarmed Traffic Patrols, Would Make Suffolk Policing Safer, More Fair

 

Thanks to this virtual world we now inhabit, going to the meeting about policing in Suffolk County was so easy that about 90 people showed up Nov. 4, the day after Election Day.  Everyone got an earful of interesting ideas to make people safer, as well as some deeply felt criticism of police culture as still gripped by white supremacy.

This is what a discussion about “defunding the police” actually sounded like.

 It was the second such session held since Oct. 27, with six more to follow before Christmas. Anyone can register to just listen or talk.

Although it was intended to focus on the 2^nd police precinct in Huntington, speakers were not limited to only Huntington matters.

Terrell Dozier, of Long Island United To Transform Policing and Community Safety spoke of the entire county when he maintained that there are two traffic systems here: one for whites and another for Blacks and Hispanics. He said training is not the answer, calling instead for structural changes: use of more unmanned traffic control systems like speed cameras, speed bumps, better road design; and replacing armed police with unarmed civilians to enforce traffic laws. An installment payment system for traffic violation fines, and a sliding fee scale would be helpful, he said. 

Of course, a major allegation is that traffic stops are a result of police bias.  Helen Boxwill, co-chair of the Huntington Anti-Bias Tax force, quoted from the 2014 Department of Justice Consent Agreement that Suffolk County signed. It called for an annual analysis of traffic stops to determine racial and ethnic disparities. An analysis of data from 2018 to 2019 by the Finn Institute for Public Safety was released recently—the first since the consent agreement was signed.  

It found that Black drivers were three times as likely to be searched, either the driver or the vehicle, as whites who were stopped. Blacks were more likely to be restrained, ticketed or subject to use of force than whites, the study also found, while it was less likely that police would find contraband in stops of Blacks than in stops of whites. Despite these findings, the report concluded there was "no evidence" of racial or ethnic bias in traffic stops. This was based in part of a "veil of darkness" theory that during the daylight Black drivers would be stopped more often than at night. 

Helen criticized the Finn Institute as lacking objectivity, and called on the county to end its relationship with the organization. She said the time has come "for the DOJ Agreement to be codified” into law by the county legislature. 

Several other speakers focused on how mentally ill, addicted and homeless people can be helped when they are in a crisis without getting involved with the criminal justice system. Jayette Lansbury from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Huntington, argued for non-police teams of independent first responders. These teams would be expert in de-escalation. A representative of Long Island Untied for Police Reform said the group has developed a proposal for creation of such teams and offered to provide it to the county. The Family Service League’s Dash Program was mentioned as a model for such teams. It includes a mobile response unit operating 24/7, a dedicated phone number and specialists.

 Aaron Johnson, a teacher from North Babylon, spoke about a police culture whose underlying ideology, he believes, is white racism. “Police protect white neighborhoods, but they are an occupying force in our neighborhoods,” he said. The slogan “Blue Lives Matter” came as a reaction to “Black Lives Matter,” and that’s racist he said.

 The listening sessions are part of Suffolk County’s response to a state mandate to re-imagine and reform policing, with the goal of presenting a plan to the county legislature by spring next year. The task force for the project is co-facilitated by Vanessa Baird-Street, a Deputy County Executive and Jon Kaiman, also a Deputy County Executive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Defund the Police

 

I heard the demonstrators demanding, “Defund the police!” They can't be serious, I thought.  The very notion seems radical and dangerous on its face, and if carried out would surely leave us vulnerable to violence in our homes and streets. And that's the pitch, of course, that Trump is using to try to get re-elected as a law-and-order President, this from a man who regularly bends and breaks the law, and whom I hope to see some day making a perp walk.

But is he right about de-funding the police? The question is as urgent here in my home Suffolk County as it is in Minneapolis where George Floyd died.

New York  Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered  every municipality in the state to conduct a comprehensive review of the role of the police in public safety. A plan for “reform and reinvention,” says the order, must be completed, presented for public comment and passed by the County Legislature by next April 1, according to the Governor’s order. 

What are we paying for?

For me to weigh the idea of de-funding, it's necessary to ask first what we are exactly funding in the first place. What do our police actually do on a routine basis for all the money we spend on them, an especially relevant question here in Suffolk where police are paid more than any other force in the country.

Fortunately, the FBI keeps statistics that bear on the question. The statistics show that very little of a police officer’s day is directly devoted to the kind of crime fighting dramatized by television and movies. I like such shows from old classics like Hill Street Blues to Major Crimes and CSI to historic ones like Murdoch Mysteries. But according to FBI statistics for 2016, for each of the 701,000 police employed that year, on average, less than two (1.78) violent crimes were reported. Again, that's per year, and includes murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. But reports, few as they were/officer, resulted in even fewer arrests--only a little more than half a million arrests, or less than one arrest/year for each officer.

As for property crimes, for each officer, on average, less than one property crime per month (11.3/year) was reported. That includes burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson. And, these reports resulted in less than two arrests/officer through that whole year. 

Now, I'm not minimizing the importance of fighting such crime, but the statistics lead to the question of what exactly police officers are doing every day. That is a complex and layered question, and the answers, of course, include highway and traffic patrol, crowd control, and patrol of neighborhoods. In New York City, neighborhood patrol involved millions of stops-and-frisks until recently that have been found not to reduce crime while oppressing Blacks and other minorities. 

According to Alex Vitale, a sociology professor, author of The End of  Policing and the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, the police are actually spending a lot of their time trying to solve all sorts of community problems like drug addiction, homelessness, and mental health crises that they are ill-equipped to handle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBazDnubww

Such problems could be better handled by those trained for the job: social workers, housing specialists, and mental health workers who are now among the lowest-paid of workers.  

It is especially notable that the highest number of arrests each year are for drug abuse violations, a result of our on-going War on Drugs. This so-called war was started by Richard Nixon, according to historians, as a racist and political tactic to continue the discriminatory effects of Jim Crow laws that could no longer be enforced due to public outrage. This suggests that decriminalizing drug use would eliminate the need for all this police intervention, not only eliminating the arrests of drug users and traffickers themselvs, but also cutting the number of thefts and burglaries by drug users desperate for money to support their addiction.

Professor Vitale argues that police have been given too many roles than they can safely fulfill with the limited tools at their disposal. Through training and practice, they turn to coercion, violence and the threat of violence to solve problems.  This is why we have so many tragic outcomes, such as a mentally ill person undergoing an episode of schizophrenia who is confronted by an armed police officer, and the situation gets out of control. Police should be the last resort in such cases, not the first. But when a mentally ill person becomes threatening, there is no one but the police to call.

Reforming the Police

But why not simply reform the police instead of de-funding? Minneapolis tried all the recommended reforms, and yet George Floyd died under the knee of an officer. The city now plans to replace its police with a department of community safety and violence prevention, which will prioritize a "public health-oriented approach" to situations involving the mentally ill and drug abusers. 

Vitale asserts that reforms including de-escalation training, body cameras and anti-bias training cannot solve the fundamental problem: modern policing in the United States is a continuation of what began as slave and border patrols that have been used to control and harm Black people and other minorities for generations. In 2016, Terrence Cunningham, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, apologized at the group’s annual conference for the historical mistreatment of communities of color, calling it a “dark side of our shared history” that must be recognized and overcome. Cunningham noted that police have historically been a face of oppression, enforcing laws that ensured legalized discrimination and denial of basic rights.

In recent years, modern policing has become even more dangerous because of militarization—officers in gear developed to protect soldiers in war zones, tank-like vehicles and weaponry designed to stop enemies—not our own citizens. The 2016 apology by Cunningham appears in Re-imagining Public Safety: Prevent Harm and Lead with the Truth A five-step policy plan for policing in America, https://policingequity.org/images/pdfs-doc/reports/re-imagining_public_safety_final_11.26.19.pd published by The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. This is but one of many blueprints for reinventing our systems for public safety that have been around for years but have been ignored.

 It has become clear to me that there is no substitute for wholesale re-organization of how we keep our communities safe. Addicts and people suffering from mental health problems should be handled by professionsals trained to do so. And, if we de-criminalize drug use and prostitution, we eliminate not only all the arrests for those crimes, but also eliminate the incentive for millions of burglaries and robberies.

Yes, we can de-fund and be safer and have money left over to invest in our communities. The question now is whether, even with continuing demonstrations and new public consciousness, our leaders will be able to make the fundamental changes to policing that will prevent an endless repetition of tragic police killings. ##