-By Warner Todd Huston
Last week 16 dirty New York cops went on trial for all sorts of criminal behavior. From dealing drugs, to assault and grand larceny, and “unrelated corruption,” these cops are proving to be some very crooked characters. But fellow officers don’t care about that. They have ginned themselves up to act like the punks and scumbags they are supposed to be putting behind bars all due to their police union and its agitation over the trials.
Even The New York Times seemed shocked by the venomous treatment these union thugs cops were delivering to the District Attorneys handling the case. Certainly these crooked cops are innocent until the prosecution proves its case, but these union toughs don’t care to let the law take its course. They want to storm the gates like the barbarians they are.
These so-called police officers even began to accost the media as the defendants left the courtroom. Says the Times, “The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.”
The Times was afraid of what this says about the city’s thin blue line.
The outpouring of angry officers at the courthouse had faint echoes of a 1992 march on City Hall by off-duty officers to protest Mayor David N. Dinkins’s call for more independent review of the police. And it raises unsettling questions about the current mind-set of the police force.
It says that they care more about their union than they do about the law. that’s what it says.
Of course, there is a hint of why this union thuggery has erupted so boldly. Walter Russell Mead explains:
Together with a string of other recent cases, the Bronx case suggests that a culture of corruption and entitlement has spread through the ranks of the thin blue line. Worse, it is clear that police union officials are the mainstay of the illegal ticket fixing enterprise, so much so that prosecutors considered indicting the union as a corrupt organization under racketeering laws. The police demonstration in the Bronx was apparently orchestrated by the union, which sent text messages to officers urging that they show up to support colleagues involved in ticket fixing. “It’s a courtesy, not a crime,” was the slogan.
As Mead notes, this is the attitude of all sorts of professionals that hide malfeasance in their compatriots.
That’s what doctors and lawyers think when they cover up professional wrongdoings by their guild brethren. It’s what investment bankers think when they pass on inside information to favored clients — a courtesy not a crime.
Exactly right. It’s the same argument you used to give your mother when you were caught doing something wrong. “But my friends all do it, Mom,” you would weakly argue. Remember her reply? “Would you jump off a bridge if they did it too?”
This is what happens when you allow public servants to unionize. They cease instantly caring about serving anything but the privileges dreamed up by their union bosses. Law? Who cares. Respect? Screw that.
Unions should never have been allowed for public employees, most especially for cops, firemen, and first response emergency workers. And before 1960 they weren’t. Unions are a failed and dangerous experiment for pubic employees and one it is about time was ended.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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