That’s a superficial analysis. Police departments and other military and paramilitary organizations need to extract their revenues through the bureaucracy of the state. Your municipal PD officer isn’t showing up at your house, hat in hand, and taking collections to fund his beat. He needs the comptroller to impose taxes and the financial sector to move the money and the administration to divvy it out to employees based on rank and tenure.
What’s more, the police require the consent of the public at large. Which means a friendly media and religious community, willing to legitimize their functions. The US occupation in Afghanistan failed, while the Taliban that replaced them consolidated control, because one set of police was seen as illegitimate and another seen as representative of the public will.
Their union makes them unstoppable.
Their union forms a foundation of mutual support and affords individual officers confidence in their security through collective action. But cops are notoriously lazy, stupid, and trigger-happy. When media turns on a police department and the administrative state peels away from them, these institutions disintegrate rapidly.
The reason you don’t see police chiefs walking into the offices of some Fortune 500 companies and announcing “I’m the billionaire now” is rooted in their vulnerability on these fronts.
Unions are meant to bargain against management, which means they may be conciliatory towards capital so long as they can extract concessions from their immediate lenders/capital-owners. This is one problem we see in trade unionism broadly speaking. The American autoworkers union isn’t revolutionary, in large part because it is predicated on the exploitation of natural resources overseas. The SEIU isn’t revolutionary, in large part because the revenues of the companies of the workers they represent are often international shipping, banking, real estate, tech, and government administrators, whose profits are derived from rent-seeking of the public at-large.
Cops are the ur-example of this phenomenon, as their primary role is to surveil and defend private property on behalf of the wealthier tranches of society. The police unions bargain against the elected representatives of the general public for the betterment of their membership. And because their primary purpose is providing heavily subsidized security services for private interests, they are often - implicitly or explicitly - bribed by those interests to weight their coverage towards wealthier quarters.
That said, capital is not “on the side of the police” from an ideological perspective, because the police are still fundamentally a public service administered by a democratically elected administrative system. To that end, police privatization has been a stated goal of libertarian and hyper-capitalist political interests since police liberalization became mainstream in the last century.
This is not nearly at complicated as your making it.
There’s a lot more history to the modern western police state than you’re giving credit. The dynamics are not as straightforward as you make them sound. And the police, as individuals and as an institution, are kept on a much shorter leash than you might realize. Police unions are not simply extensions of capital interests, because they are organized and administered contrary to capital structures. And neoconservative/neoliberal activists have had their eyes on police union abolition for a long time.
The issue is that the purpose of a union is to give power to the powerless, but police already have all the power. Their union makes them unstoppable.
That’s a superficial analysis. Police departments and other military and paramilitary organizations need to extract their revenues through the bureaucracy of the state. Your municipal PD officer isn’t showing up at your house, hat in hand, and taking collections to fund his beat. He needs the comptroller to impose taxes and the financial sector to move the money and the administration to divvy it out to employees based on rank and tenure.
What’s more, the police require the consent of the public at large. Which means a friendly media and religious community, willing to legitimize their functions. The US occupation in Afghanistan failed, while the Taliban that replaced them consolidated control, because one set of police was seen as illegitimate and another seen as representative of the public will.
Their union forms a foundation of mutual support and affords individual officers confidence in their security through collective action. But cops are notoriously lazy, stupid, and trigger-happy. When media turns on a police department and the administrative state peels away from them, these institutions disintegrate rapidly.
The reason you don’t see police chiefs walking into the offices of some Fortune 500 companies and announcing “I’m the billionaire now” is rooted in their vulnerability on these fronts.
Unions are meant to bargain against capital.
Capital is already on the side of police.
This is not nearly at complicated as your making it.
Unions are meant to bargain against management, which means they may be conciliatory towards capital so long as they can extract concessions from their immediate lenders/capital-owners. This is one problem we see in trade unionism broadly speaking. The American autoworkers union isn’t revolutionary, in large part because it is predicated on the exploitation of natural resources overseas. The SEIU isn’t revolutionary, in large part because the revenues of the companies of the workers they represent are often international shipping, banking, real estate, tech, and government administrators, whose profits are derived from rent-seeking of the public at-large.
Cops are the ur-example of this phenomenon, as their primary role is to surveil and defend private property on behalf of the wealthier tranches of society. The police unions bargain against the elected representatives of the general public for the betterment of their membership. And because their primary purpose is providing heavily subsidized security services for private interests, they are often - implicitly or explicitly - bribed by those interests to weight their coverage towards wealthier quarters.
That said, capital is not “on the side of the police” from an ideological perspective, because the police are still fundamentally a public service administered by a democratically elected administrative system. To that end, police privatization has been a stated goal of libertarian and hyper-capitalist political interests since police liberalization became mainstream in the last century.
There’s a lot more history to the modern western police state than you’re giving credit. The dynamics are not as straightforward as you make them sound. And the police, as individuals and as an institution, are kept on a much shorter leash than you might realize. Police unions are not simply extensions of capital interests, because they are organized and administered contrary to capital structures. And neoconservative/neoliberal activists have had their eyes on police union abolition for a long time.