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There are two reasons officers get injured or killed. The officer never had control of the situation; or the officer lost control of the situation. If you apply this to what is happening in today’s economy, with demands for concessions from police unions that include major reductions in health insurance for actives and retirees, multi-tiered pensions or forcing 401Ks on new hires, and replacing sworn officers with civilians, private contractors and technology, the police union leadership that is crushed by the employer will face the same postmortem.
Did the police union leadership ever have control of the situation; or did the police union leadership lose control of the situation?
If any police union leader out there is still ignoring the realities of the economic downturn, I would be surprised. What will not surprise me is how many have not properly accessed the new reality.
1. Do you believe the budget cuts currently impacting policing are simply a cyclical event?
2. If it is a cyclical event, was it caused by today’s bad economic times and when the economy improves will the cuts be removed?
3. If the economy improves, do you believe state and local governments will continue to pay wages, benefits and pensions that far exceed comparable private sector jobs?
4. Or do you believe it is a sign of a global structural or paradigm shift?
If you answered “Yes” to questions 1-3, and “No” to question 4, then I can only read your postmortem one day and say I told you so.
The road to hell is paved with such powerful unions such as the coal miners, steel workers and auto workers, who have been driven to the edge of irrelevance.
No amount of money, members or self-imposed importance to society can stop a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift started decades ago as employers started weighing the cost of sworn officers against what they really needed a sworn officer to do for that amount of money.
Then it started speeding up as police wages and benefits reached new highs driven by the shortage of qualified applicants. No one really cared about the costs and the impact on taxpayers who were funding health and pension benefits, and wages that far exceeded any private sector comparables.
Well, the party is over. Nine of every ten private sector employees is at-will; pays for their own health insurance, if any; has no retiree health insurance until Medicare; and will retire maybe at 65 on what, if anything, they have saved in their depleted 401K plans.
You can argue all day about how you risk your life and Joe Taxpayer does not, but it is not resonating.
I have been preaching that police unions need to start thinking about how to control and manage the paradigm shift. You hear the alarm ringing. Are you going to get up or hit the snooze button?
Ron DeLord is special counsel to the 18,000-member Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas. He served for 30 years as its president and is the author of numerous books and articles on police unions. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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