Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police. Furthermore, you really don't want to pick a fight with police unions. What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike? It's against the law in many places, but if the police are on strike, who's going to enforce that? There is a very significant risk that you'd have to call up the National Guard just to maintain public order. And even then, how many National Guardsmen does California have? How many LEOs? And most of those National Guardsmen are not actually trained in law enforcement. In effect you would be declaring martial law. It's not worth it.

Perhaps your "democracy" needs more than 2 parties.

"What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?"

The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike (there are many forms of strike and some of them do not involve stopping all work, for example, work-to-rule).

Like France?

I live in Europan country with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartism, and that's one option how to make things less antagonistic. There is lot of negotiations going on before the strike happens, and it mostly gets averted.

The current dynamic is akin to children playing one feuding parent against the other in a broken overly-adversarial marriage. You need a minimum of about 4-5 independent voices in order to facilitate civil public discourse.

Has this been demonstrated through mathematical/statistical models?

LEOs hold a sacred role of trust in our society - they maintain the potential application of the use of lethal force. With that power must come the most severe of guardrails, to which unionization is completely antithetical. Our civilian control of the military is internationally lauded, but we lack full civil control of our own law enforcement.

I think the way to go about this is to break up the law enforcement departments into smaller scoped independent roles with enough potential redundancy to be able to institute reforms via divide and conquer. Remake law enforcement from the ground up in this way, and deny the new institutions public unionization by law.

If the existing police unions strike, they must be dealt with as severely as mutinous armed forces would be; they should be subject to a court marshal form of adjudication with the same penalties that a military officer would face for desertion and endangering public safety.

Start building new parallel law enforcement institutions now, prepare for how to maintain civil order in the face of a strike, then start dissolving the old institutions. It’d also probably be wise for the FBI to maintain a comprehensive database of federal, state and local LEOs in case some go underground and attempt to undermine these efforts through domestic terrorism.

I can understand for example limiting striking by law or similar ordnances to uphold order and democracy. Is this all the parent is talking about?

But isn't a union basically a private organisation formed by citizens by their own free will?

What does it mean for a political organization, eg a party, to go after something like that? I mean from liberal/freedom of the individual POV.

I'm most certainly missing something important here and me being european/nordic shows ;)

It’s also not purely a matter of private association. Often there are laws encouraging or mandating collective bargaining for certain public sector jobs. These laws are often what keeps unions in business, since those laws protect them and allow them to eg sign collective bargaining agreements that effectively require public employees to join the union (or at least pay dues to it) as a condition of keeping their jobs. It was the repeal of these laws that Gov. Walker faced political pushback for in 2011.

The unions and their membership have a financial conflict of interest when it comes to public public that impacts incarceration rate. Prison unions have, for example, lobbied extensively to keep various drugs criminalized in states where the public was going in another direction.

It's obviously a difficult subject with a lot of concerns to balance, but the posters here are just arguing that the problems of private prisons are not all unique to private prisons-- the employees of public prisons (and their orgs) have some of the same kinds of conflicts of interest.

In the former case, harsh laws are good for them, same as the private scenario. But in the latter case -- fewer prisoners on the same budget -- more permissive laws would be an unconditional win. I don't know which way it actually works, just spelling out an unstated assumption that's being made upthread.

A larger motivating factor - and this is pure speculation - might be more closely related to angering an institution with such a capacity for unchecked initiation of violence (ie, that ones person, home, or family may be in danger of direct violence).

> When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.

> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.

https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...

There are a number of factors to take into account when giving credit to such studies:

- Is there enough observations to have statistically significant results? (i.e. do we have enough occurences of police strikes to really have meaningful results? can we have overwelmingly influencing factors not present in the studied samples: I guess it would likely highly depend on the city where the strike happens also)

- Did the sample properly allowed the isolation of the variable being studied against other influencing factors?

- What is the collinearity between the variables used for the regression? (i.e. if violence complaints are made on the spot, then less police means harder to fill complaints, it doesn't necessarily mean less violence)

"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" has a good introduction to the challenges of such studies, and discusses a bit the particular case of police.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right, I don't think either of these options is better than the other.

And yet such numbers are dropped all the time. I also do not see callouts for number drops being consistently applied. For example in political subreddits sees number drops without callouts when it supports the lean of the subreddit and number drops with callouts when it does not.

Criticism of science seems to be unequally applied, and given how important equal application of criticism is to science being reliable, it creates a reliability problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Galanwe said phry was "very malicious", which is actually and not just tenuously a personal attack. Do you plan to delete their comment as well? Interesting standards on HN.

Edit: I've tracked down the comment you're referring to and indeed, no moderator saw it. I've replied to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20964408. In the future, if there's a comment you're concerned about, you should either flag it or email us at [email protected].

If you haven't checked specifically with us about a post, please don't draw conclusions about HN moderation—those are almost always non sequiturs. People usually jump to the idea that we secretly support the one side (where they didn't see us moderate) over the other side (where they did). That is reading patterns into randomness.

Edit: Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

No, it's a general attack on anyone that cites horseshit.

Hardly-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"),[1] short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

You failed at the "genuine discussion" part by citing pop econ horseshit.

It occurred to me that the result is not necessarily unexpected if it were due to under reporting (i.e. during the slowdown there was less opportunity to report major crime and therefore reports fell). The researchers discuss that in the paper. I don't have time to read the paper in detail and come to a conclusion one way or another, but I thought it might be of interest to people who might not otherwise click on an La Times link.

doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0211-5

Answer the phone Show up Take the person’a claim seriously, encourage the person to formally complain Actually write up the complaint Actually file it

I’m really skeptical those things wouldn’t be altered by a slowdown, it wouldn’t be much of a slowdown, in my opinion, without altering these things.

Edit: I understand it might be in principle possible to control for a slowdown, if you had many many other slowdowns to use as data points.

There is a non-trivial risk of violent, even armed conflict if there really was a police strike and the National Guard was called in to restore order. That’s not something a state governor wants on their record.

edit: Do you have any articles to recommend that would shed some lights on this matter ?

Do you have some sources ? (I don't live in the US, but I find the idea that guards somehow lobby fascinating)

>...The CCPOA is deeply involved in a variety of political activities. Most spending is done through political action committees.[citation needed] Although its membership is relatively small, representing only about one tenth the membership of the California Teachers Association, CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California. The union spends heavily on influencing political campaigns, and on lobbying legislators and other government officials. CCPOA also hires public relations firms and political polling firms.

... >Lobbying efforts and campaign contributions by the CCPOA have helped secure passage of numerous legislative bills favorable to union members, including bills that increase prison terms, member pay, and enforce current drug laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_...

>...ROUGHLY HALF OF the money raised to oppose a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana in California is coming from police and prison guard groups, ...

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/ca-marijuana-measure/

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=california+prison+guards+lobby

And yet I see this constantly on almost every thread. What is it with HN and asking for sources on everything?

True, I could google for it but then I am on an hunt to discern the truths and the lies and to understand why someone lies or tells the truth to whom and how it is pertinent to the original request (and there's the bubble search, of course).

The thing is, I don't know - in that case - if it's obscure or not.

Plus, our comments aren't born in a vacuum. Parent likely has additional information or an outlook on the subject that I wouldn't find (or more likely find but likely dismiss because of a lack of context) in a 15 minutes google search.

Then, on the other hand, you actually have snipers around here who are quick to derail conversations by not participating, not giving information or sharing outlook and just shooting "Sources ?" and then never coming back to the thread.

You have to trust me on that one but I assure you I don't do that.

Now, asking for sources is most of time a given when someone makes extraordinary claims meant to shut an argument (eg: "X is bad 98% of time don't talk about X" when everyone was considering X safe from the get-go).

edit: I should have asked something like "Do you have an article to recommend that would shed some lights on this matter ?". The "Do you have sources ?" is a bit harsh and inquisitive, my bad.

edit (2): On the other hand, I clicked your link, without looking at the URL, thinking "ah cool, this person is telling me that in this case a simple google search will yield pertinent results. But all I got was a "fuck you, use google".

Ideally, citing your sources should be done without being asked.

And, when asked, people want to know which sources you have used, not the ones they can find for themselves. So even if you think it's common knowledge, we want to see the base of your thinking.

Do you have a source for why that would be ideal ?

While it seemed annoying at first, I quickly came to love the fact that this happens. I feel like this might be a natural tendency starting to be developed in the wake of fake news, and opinion-generating bot armies on the rise.

Better to ask for a source one time too many, than one time too little.

Imagine a layperson read a news article about a complex topic in your field and instantly discovered a trivial easy win.

What are the odds they’d be correct?

Could you please provide me some examples? I figure if California's prisons were 200% of capacity, there's no shortage of work for the prison guards anyway.

Much of the concept is that the prison's are at 200% capacity because of the perverse incentives for the state (prosecutors, police, judges) to fulfill the private contract minimums.

Mandatory minimums and the 3 strike rule are suspected to be related to private prisons contracts.

Then of course there could be plenty of hidden stuff like more prison crowds means some one selling food(I hear animals eat better food than inmates) to the prison likely makes more money, and hence better bribes/commissions in the chain of people involved.

Eventually it comes down to profit per person. And they'd like to make it up on scale.

I'm not sure how/why you figure that, or how it's at all relevant.

I'm not sure how/why you figure that because "over capacity" != "will build new prisons / hire new guards". I.e., it's not at all impossible for there to be prisons that are over-capacity and also a decline in the number of prison guard jobs.

It's not relevant because the entire point of unions is to counter-act the effect of supply/demand dynamics on labor (see: "there's always another scab"). Just because there's "no shortage of work for the prison guards" doesn't mean they will lobby against changes to laws that might one day create such a shortage.

I mean I get the initial point, some police unions are an especially vile proponents of an expansion into a police state, its just not really about working conditions. Its political lobbying. In Germany you can see it every time more competences for the police are discussed in parliament. You have some police unions giving legit feedback if someone bothers to ask them, how those competences are a bad idea and are not needed. And then you have speakers for other police union (with a catchy union name to seem more important) where you can see they have the right party membership and are looking for a career in politics. As a result you can see them in every news report that wants to bring across a certain message.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_Bi...

More members equal more funding.

More members equal more possibility of existing members to become senior.

The power of unions (for a certain sector) in a given society scales proportionally to number of people involved in them.

However, the power of private companies (certain sector) in a given society is proportional to revenue of that sector.

Since the power of unions in monetary terms can be bounded from above by total wages in the sector, we can see that this is always less than the revenue of the sector.

In other words, in capital intensive industries, unions have less relative power.

The point is, the "willingness of some industry to live" is the interest of more people than just employees of that industry. It's also all the people taking a cut one way or another, that is owners, rentiers and potentially all the people involved in providing assets for the industry.

I suspect the American culture of "being tough on crime" isn't really about prison-employee unions, but has historical roots in the colonization of the American frontier.

...except when you can both be a member of a union and also exercise your vote.

I wasn't aware that in the USA joining a public sector union meant giving up your right to vote ;-)

I think it seems counter-intuitive to you but you cannot articulate why. I was also surprised when I realized it.

Or think about it this way: All citizens in democratic society are free to enter any number of associations that advocate for their interests. For example, unions. But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power, in particular, it doesn't affect the "one person, one vote" principle of democratic elections.

> your vote has always larger weight in society than your union membership.

Yes, but the next step in your logical deduction is flawed because union membership does not necessarily dilute the power of your vote to signal other preferences (at least in countries with secret ballots and no proxy voting).

You're comparing these two things as if there's some sort of trade-off or mutual exclusivity. There isn't, especially in countries where politics is dominated by two parties such as the USA.

Here's how those mechanics tend to play out in the USA. A union voter leverages their union membership to make kings in the primaries. Then, after winnowing the field to a list of candidates who exclusively support their union's major priorities, union members are free to use their vote to exercise preference on other issues. That's not hypothetical -- it's exactly what happens in most US states with strong public sector LEO unions.

> But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power

But this is obviously false when broadened to include all associations.

Politics in literally every modern democracy is dominated by associations called political parties. That's not an accident, and it's not like that status quo happened without opposition. A lot of politicians in the history of democracy have attempted to limit the role of associations in democratic processes, and they mostly failed.

I don't really understand the argument you're making. Maybe your logical deductions are bulletproof, but in that case, there must be something wrong with your premises. Because hundreds of years of extraordinarily compelling empirical evidence contradict your final conclusion.

Large associations of voters really do have more power than the sum of their votes. Maybe not "theoretically", but certainly "actually" and "empirically".

If the government takes more input from associations than from voting, I think it's a reasonable conclusion. (See also my comment about tripartism above.)

But what seems to me closer to the truth is that people simply heavily underestimate the power of their vote.

Parties are still highly effective at consolidating power in countries with many parties.

And I don’t remember prison guard unions being the ones principally pushing for 3 strike laws. Most of those went through when it was politically advantageous to be backing them, unlike now.