One day a magazine telephoned me and asked if I would write an article saying that labor unions should be illegal.
“What are you, crazy?” I asked. “I used to be editor of the Forward.” The paper had been, among other things, a tribune of the Free Trade Union Movement that cracked communist rule in the East bloc.
There has to be someone to speak for the rank and file.
This is one of the issues as a new federal district judge, Analisa Torres, gets set to rule on whether the city can settle the stop-question-and-frisk case. The police unions are opposed to the proposed settlement. They want a seat at the table to defend the good name (and working conditions) of The Finest.
Judge Torres has her work cut out for her. The sages of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already made it clear they’ll be watching every move. Meantime, a separate contest has broken out in state courts over the question of whether the City Council can expose our officers to personal liability in profiling cases.
It used to be that when the cops did something wrong — as was alleged in the stop-question-and-frisk cases — the victim could sue the city. If the city lost, it would have to pay damages and suffer other consequences. In most cases the cops as individuals were shielded from being sued personally.
In August, the council decided to strip the cops of that protection. It passed Local Law 71. It allows civil suits against individual officers for “bias-based profiling.” They can’t be sued for damages. But a cop could be forced to pay the plaintiff’s legal fees. Given what lawyers charge, that could be a catastrophe.
It also turns out to be a major departure. The council insists its motive is making a safer city. But what it’s done is declare that a hapless cop not only could be ordered to pay a criminal’s lawyers but he could also be forced to pay personally for expert witnesses hired to testify against him.
The Constitution may say a person can’t be forced to testify against himself. The City Council says you can be forced to pay for someone else to testify against you.
So a cop deciding whether to slap the cuffs on some thug would have to worry about, in effect, losing not only his career but his life’s savings. Mayor Bloomberg vetoed the measure. The council overrode him. The law went on the books. The mayor, in a rare move, sued the council, saying it had over-reached.
The mayor was joined in that suit by the unions for both the sergeants and the patrolmen. The law, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch later said in a statement, “penalizes our members and the public rather than addressing bad policies.”
By then Bill de Blasio was elected mayor.Suddenly, the police unions were left alone to defend the cops. The new mayor had moved across the table to sit next to the City Council. The unions are now asking whether the council, in passing Local Law 71, had pre-empted the state Legislature.
It’s the state, after all, that established the Law on Criminal Procedure. It sets certain rules that all police departments and prosecutors in the state must follow. The City Council and the mayor are arguing that the latest fight isn’t about criminal procedure. Instead it’s about civil rights.
This is one of those things that sounds high-minded but opens a huge new front against the police. If upheld it would provide the city a way to embroider state criminal procedures without going to the state Legislature. So the City Council lawsuit could emerge as quite a case.
The council — and the new mayor — are arguing that the police can’t complain, because they didn’t complain when the Human Rights Law was passed. They say, in effect, Local Law 71 is but an extension of the principles of the Human Rights Law, originally passed in 1945.
If so, someone should be able to get the constitutional questions before the courts. “There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anyone, anywhere, anytime,” Calvin Coolidge famously said in 1919. That was over whether policemen could strike.
This case is over whether the police can peacefully petition in a court of law. More power to them when the only ones willing to stand up for the rank and file are their own unions.