It’s time to deal with the elephant in the room – and it’s not defunding the police. We need to deal with the unions and their refusal to fire even their worst bad actors. They think the way to stay in power is by defending their members from being fired even for being incompetent or worse, much worse, when actually most of their honest, hardworking members want those people fired and out of their ranks. Union leaders are just not listening to their own members – but what’s new?
I believe we should get rid of existing unions and figure out how to empower working people to organize themselves. I believe that unions have lost their way just like they did in the 40s when they were corrupted with blatant criminals like Jimmy Hoffa. The criminals running the unions aren’t blatant thugs like the Teamster bosses but even so they have been locked up by the dozens over the last few years for financial crimes rather than burying their opponents in cement. When 90% of the unions’ political donations go to one party that’s corruption – we should demand that unions lower their dues and let the let the members donate the money where they want. Stealing union members money and ‘donating’ it to corrupt politicians is the same as stealing the members’ vote.
The police and teachers unions stand out as the most corrupt of the lot.
A bad teacher can hurt as many people and destroy as many lives as a bad cop.
The unions, the leadership and the rank and file, know which of their members are bad teachers and bad cops and the unions actively intervene to prevent discipline much less firing these bad apples. The police chiefs know who they need to fire – the people that have 10 investigations in their jacket over things they’ve done wrong and should have been fired for any one of them a long time ago. I’m thinking like everybody else about that Minneapolis cop who had so many things in his jacket including other deaths he was related to. If the police chief, who must have known about this bad cop, had been able to fire him all this chaos and destruction would’ve never happened. There’s a bigger story here which is that if we can get the unions to do the right thing we can even the playing field. I think we will get much better people in office if they know they can do something about the bad apples in their organizations. Some police departments may actually need to be defunded – for example in many resort areas there are way too many police considering that there is no real crime but they can afford a huge Police Department so that’s what they spend their tax money on. it’s that simple – the rich communities are over-policed with higher-quality cops while the people who need good police the most are the minority and disadvantaged communities.
You want to take away the police and make the lives of poor people worse so you can feel better? We have idiots suggesting this stuff – entitled, unelected idiots saying we should defund the police in minority communities. We do need to get rid of the bad actors. If the police chief of any major city could fire 50 of his worst cops tomorrow he or she would make their police force more efficient and better run overnight. I believe that most police chiefs are trying their best to do community involvement, and they have done a great job overall. But all it takes is one incident like Minneapolis to allow the wrong organizations to fire up and do their thing.
Black lives do matter and the Black Lives Matter movement could do so much good talking and working with the police chiefs and telling them what they want done better in their communities and then helping the police make it happen – together. Then I could support them completely but simply calling for defunding the police is going to cost a lot of lives of people with every shade of skin color and that’s what matters to me.
The old phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face’ comes to mind when I hear this loose and really rather simple and stupid talk about defunding the police. Yes, defund their war toys for sure. Nobody likes to see police dressed up like Darth Vader rolling down city streets in armored war machines. But if we took all that military equipment money and spent in on doubling the salaries of the good cops and putting them back on neighborhood foot patrol then I think we would see more of the kind of community policing we all agree is the best solution to this deep problem in our society. Oh – and yes – we should definitely defund the police unions.
