The corruption and incompetence of the NYPD is staggering.

2 years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected 100s of hours of cops talking about their jobs. Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city. They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.

2014-10-25: NYPD still as corrupt as ever, unsurprisingly, by the canonical expert Frank Serpico.

40 years on, my story probably seems like ancient history to most people, layered over with Hollywood legend. For me it’s not, since at the age of 78 I’m still deaf in one ear and I walk with a limp and I carry fragments of the bullet near my brain. I am also, all these years later, still persona non grata in the NYPD. Never mind that, thanks to Sidney Lumet’s direction and Al Pacino’s brilliant acting, “Serpico” ranks No. 40 on the American Film Institute’s list of all-time movie heroes, or that as I travel around the country and the world, police officers often tell me they were inspired to join the force after seeing the movie at an early age. In the NYPD that means little next to my 40-year-old heresy, as they see it. I still get hate mail from active and retired police officers.

2015-06-09: I don’t agree with all the proposals, but yes to killing police unions.

History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police: Ending cash bail, Overturning police bills of rights, Abolishing police unions, Crowding out the police in our communities, Disarming the police.

2014-12-22: So awkward for De Blasio to crush a union that is out of control

He is not running the city of New York. He thinks he’s running a fucking revolution

2014-12-24: Collective bargaining for government jobs is absurd, and needs to be eradicated.

If police officers were at-will employees (as I’ve been at every job I’ve ever held), none of the cops mentioned above would now be walking the streets with badges and loaded guns. Perhaps one or 2 of them deserved to be exonerated, despite how bad their cases look. Does the benefit of being scrupulously fair to those individuals justify the cost of having more abusive cops on the street?

I’d rather see 10 wrongful terminations than one person wrongfully shot and killed. Because good police officers and bad police officers pay the same union dues and are equally entitled to labor representation, police unions have pushed for arbitration procedures that skew in the opposite direction.

2015-12-04: Police unions are the worst and the ones most in need of being destroyed.

The Chicago police union has filed a motion to allow the department to erase any complaint record of police misconduct that’s older than 4 years. The union is asking for this right just as the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times have filed in court for the right to data on police misconduct complaints going back to 1967 —which the city already agreed to fork over in an earlier consent decree. It will be interesting to see how the city can forge a new early-warning system if it can’t actually track early warnings from years back.

2016-02-07: Yet more reasons:

Contracts between police and city authorities, leaked after hackers breached the website of the country’s biggest law enforcement union, contain guarantees that disciplinary records and complaints made against officers are kept secret or even destroyed.

2016-07-15: There won’t be any progress with police violence until police unions are destroyed.

Let’s take the counterfactual but very similar “In Defense of Military Unions.”

Doesn’t sound like a great idea, does it? The reason is simple: militaries and paramilitary organizations like the police are coercive instruments of state power. Since at least the 1500s, It’s been recognized as fundamentally important to stability that that coercive power remain in the hands of the state. And since the Roman republic, it’s been recognized as critically important to democracy that that power be utterly subordinate to democratic institutions.

This is why the military offers recruits only 2 options: take the terms which are offered or remain a civilian. It’s why the military severely curtails soldiers’ civil rights. Because everything we care about in our society depends on the consensual illusion that political power comes from somewhere other than the barrel of a gun.

Police are less dangerous, but not much less. Police unions create contractual relationships with the state. Those contractual relations have the force of law. And that private law supervenes on democratic attempts to create police accountability, because — in criminal matters — the management of police departments is the very authority to which the police are accountable.

In all other labor organizing, labor and management are negotiating over the usual subjects of contracts: how much is labor paid; what are the conditions of retirement or disability; how many hours are worked, and when. But the primary subject of negotiation between police unions and city governments is policing strategy and citizens’ civil rights.

It is utterly impermissible for governments to negotiate with private parties about civil rights in a way that actually supervenes on public law.

2018-01-24: The reasons to disband these corrupt organizations are mounting.

The city’s police-officers’ union is cracking down on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards distributed to cops to give to family and friends. The rank and file are livid.

2021-10-13: There’s also rampant overtime fraud:

The NYPD has blown past annual budgets every year for at least 20 years, almost entirely due to overtime costs. Those extra hours also drive up the city’s pension obligations. In fiscal 2020, New York City police officers logged more overtime hours than any other big city in the US, and violent crime rates still went up.