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racefortheironthrone · 1 year

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What are your thoughts on Police Unions and calls to have them thrown out of the AFL CIO?

The last time that police unions actually acted like unions was the Boston police strike of 1919 (that unfortunately catapulted Cal Coolidge into national political prominence). After that, the basic labor relations between the state and police unions began to change in ways that are not recognizable as standard trade unionism.

The shift really began in the 1930s, when the rise of industrial unionism and attendant strike activity scared the shit out of the employers and their allies in government, because the usual Pinkertons and American Legion thugs were not enough to keep a lid on the situation. Hence the need to keep the police unions on the side of the employers rather than allow any possibility of siding with the strikers - thus you start to see police unions getting easily recognized, wage increases getting thrown around like candy, anything to keep the strikebreakers sweet.

However, it particularly morphed during the Second Great Migration (1940s through 1970), when the sudden emergence or at least rapid expansion of black populations in Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western cities scared the shit out of the municipal establishment in similar, yet distinct ways than the earlier union uprising had. In this period, an informal understanding was reached that the elected officials would block, slow-walk, or otherwise frustrate attempts by activists to impose accountability on police through civilian complaint review boards and other mechanisms, in exchange for police making upholding the racial hierarchy one of their enforcement priorities.

The expansion of grievance and arbitration procedures to include shootings and other acts of police brutality, written reprimands and other punishments from management, civilian complaints of abuse of power, officers' misconduct records and the extent to which they could be made public or even shared with future employers - the whole intricate mechanism by which police union contracts were turned into a bulwark against accountability - was part of this quid-pro-quo alliance between the state and police in the face of the emergent civil rights movement.

That's part of what slightly gives me pause about the left critique of police union contracts, because I think this alliance would have been constructed, maintained, and expanded over the decades whether or not police were unionized. The means would have been different, probably exercised through city charters, local ordinances, judicial precedents (even more so), but the ends would be the same. And if activists actually managed to eliminate a police union contract today, I'm absolutely confident that municipal government would rebuild it the next day, because they're absolutely scared of police slowdowns.

As to chucking them out of the AFL-CIO, it's not a bad thing per se, but I do want people to understand that it would be purely symbolic. The AFL-CIO is a union federation, it doesn't really have much in the way of direct authority over member unions, or exclusive access to resources that outpace what the member unions have. To give a historical example, the AFL-CIO expelled the Teamsters back in the 50s for being mobbed-up and it didn't change the Teamsters one bit - they kept on being mobbed-up until the Teamsters for a Democratic Union challenged the Hoffaites in the 70s and the Justice Department went after them with RICO charges in the 80s.

#history #labor history #police unions

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gwydionmisha · 3 months

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#Police #Mathew Bianchi #Police Unions #News

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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The executive director of a police union in California has been placed on leave and is facing federal charges after allegedly importing drugs from overseas and distributing them throughout the country.

Joanne Marian Segovia, 64, ordered thousands of synthetic opioids including valeryl fentanyl that were disguised as chocolates, wedding favors and makeup, according to the criminal complaint filed Monday by the Office of the United States Attorney.

Segovia, who serves as the executive director of the San Jose Police Officers' Association (SJPOA), allegedly used her personal and office computers to order the opioids and made shipments using the union's UPS account, the complaint said.

Segovia has been the executive director of the union, which represents officers with the San Jose Police Department, for nearly 20 years, according to CNN affiliate KGO-TV.

At least 61 shipments containing drugs worth thousands of dollars coming from countries including Hong Kong, Hungary, India and Singapore were shipped to Segovia's home between October 2015 and January this year, according to the complaint.

"The manifests for these shipments declared their contents with labels like 'Wedding Party Favors,' 'Gift Makeup,' or 'Chocolate and Sweets,'" the United States Attorneys Office for Northern California said in a press release.

"But between July 2019 and January 2023, officials intercepted and opened five of these shipments and found that they contained thousands of pills of controlled substances, including the synthetic opioids Tramadol and Tapentadol," the press release said.

In February 2023, Segovia was interviewed by federal investigators but she continued to order drug shipments, including a package in March containing valeryl fentanyl seized by federal agents in Kentucky, according to the complaint.

Segovia has been charged with attempt to unlawfully import valeryl fentanyl and faces up to a maximum sentence of 20 years, according to the complaint.

An attorney for Segovia did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

Segovia has been placed on leave and cut off from all access to the police officers association, San Jose Police Officers Association spokesperson Tom Saggau told CNN in a statement. No other individuals with the association were involved or knew about the scheme, Saggau said.

"Last Friday we were informed by federal authorities that one of our civilian employees was under investigation for distribution of a controlled substance and the POA has been fully and completely cooperating with the federal authorities as they continue their investigation," Saggau said. "The Board of Directors is saddened and disappointed at hearing this news and we have pledged to provide our full support to the investigative authorities."

#us politics #news #cnn #2023 #Joanne Marian Segovia #valeryl fentanyl #San Jose Police Officers' Association #police unions #importing drugs #drug trafficking #San Jose Police Department #California #KGO-TV #United States Attorneys Office for Northern California #police the police #war on drugs

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sixbucks · 1 year

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I love labor unions.

But…

Police unions are damaging American society.

I hate them, protecting criminal cops.

But…

Where’s the union for the Memphis cops? Haven’t heard a peep.

(Perplexed sigh)

I needed to get that out there.

#police unions #Memphis #racism?

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starblaster · 9 months

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"but if you're pro-union, why are you anti-cop-union?" because cops are not laborers. what cops do is not labor. they are enforcers of the laws that oppress laborers and exist solely to protect capital. don't bother me with stupid questions.

🛑 STOP asking me to make the post rebloggable. i refuse to let a bunch of anticommunists, libertarian anarchists, neoliberal spooks, and other pro-cop fascists pass around their bad-faith additions on a post if i can help it (which i can, by disabling reblogs) while others of you are saying some really misguided, off-topic shit, and it’s pissing me off.

please get your facts straight before embarrassing yourselves on the internet. for fucking ONCE in your lives.

i am not “redefining labor” i SAID that cops are not LABORERS (EXPLOITED WORKERS) unionizing to receive better working conditions for the betterment of their fellow workers. they actually DO participate in collective bargaining, and OTHER, ACTUAL LABOR UNIONS also use collective bargaining power to protect their members! if you argue otherwise, i’m sorry but that is a lie. and also NOT what i was FUCKING SAYING! that's not the point of this!! the derailing and misunderstandings of what a LABOR UNION IS that occurred in the short time this post was rebloggable was too insane not to shut off reblogs!

COP unions, LIKE I SAID IN THE ORIGINAL/ABOVE POST, ARE UNIFIED IN DIAMETRIC OPPOSITION TO THE LIBERATION OF WORKERS, AS IN PEOPLE WHO DO LABOR (WHICH DOES NOT INCLUDE THE LITERAL ARMED PROTECTORS OF CAPITAL)

NO OTHER UNION BASHES, KILLS, OR ARRESTS STRIKING WORKERS LIKE COP (OR PRISON GUARD) UNIONS DO.

if you agree with the post so much that you NEED it on your blog or whatever, post a screenshot of the original post with this part cropped out and leave me the fuck alone! THANK YOUUU!!!!!!!

and to the wiseasses saying screenwriters and actors "aren't laborers, either," are you just fucking stupid actually?

#some of you need to pick up a fucking book once in a while. my god.#labor unions organize and collectively bargain in opposition to capital and the ruling class #police are the tools of that ruling class #they are the guardians of capitalism itself #they are the weapons of the state

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kropotkindersurprise · 6 months

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October 30, 2023 - Tens of thousands of striking garment workers took to the streets in Bangladesh, demanding fair wages. Many of the workers make clothes for big Western brands, but get paid only around 75 dollars a month. The unions are demanding a tripling of the wage. [video]/[video]

#bangladesh #strike #workers #industrial action #unions #working class #gif #2023 #riot police #garment workers #police #tear gas

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the-quasar-literata · 2 years

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#police #police unions #this has been a queue'd post

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spaceshipsandpurpledrank · 1 year

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If you go far enough left you get your guns back.

#talkin #tik tok #the south #rednecks #progressive politics #right wingers #rrevisionist history #labor unions #unions #acab #fuck the police

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the-bibrarian · 1 year

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Paris, yesterday (03/23/23). This is an excerpt from a video by journalist Amar Taoualit posted on twitter

This is what they’re doing to a peaceful, registered-with-the-proper-authorities march.

You can hear protesters shouting “children! there are children!” and “that’s my grandfather! my grandfather is on the ground!”

I think some families felt safe going because traditionally, union-backed, “registered” marches are peaceful and the riot police waits until they officially end, when only the more radical protesters are left, to attack. Not saying that is fine, but there was a tacit agreement for peace during the first hours of a protest. (That’s exactly what happened in Lyon yesterday, and there were also a few kids among protesters. It ended up being fine but it made me very anxious to see them, and it looks like I was right to worry.)

Things turned extremely violent in the night. I don’t feel like chronicling it, but suffice to say there were more that 900 fires in Paris. I don’t know what to think of the overwhelming silence from international media on the subject.

Anyway, I know that in principle we should all be able to protest and the police shouldn’t attack, and we’re supposed to be a democracy and we shouldn’t bow down to wanna-be autocrats that want to suppress our voices, etc.

La réalité c’est que pour quelques temps en tout cas, il faut laisser nos enfants à la maison, et que si vous êtes âgé, malade (asthmatique !), déjà blessé, personne handicapée, etc. il vaut peut-être mieux passer votre tour pour ces manifs-là. Il y a d’autres façons d’agir.

Notamment, je suis sûre que les syndicats ont besoin d’aide logistique et d’argent, et LFI, dont les députés sont sur le terrain, sur les piquets de grève, a certainement toujours besoin de plus de militants (j’ai pas ma carte chez eux pour être claire, mais je pense que c’est le parti qui soutient le plus sincèrement le mouvement).

Les députés LFI Louis Boyard (au centre) et Carlos Martens Bilongo (à droite), dans une manifestation le 20 mars. Photo de @teamroscoes (merci !!)

La député LFI Mathilde Panot au piquet de grève des éboueurs de Vitry-sur-Seine le 16 mars (photo de son twitter)

^ these are pictures of lawmakers from the leftist France Unbowed party participating in protests.

#i feel like crying #j’ai envie de pleurer #compatriotes comment ça va aujourd’hui?#tw violence #france #protests #french politics #strike #unions #police violence #police brutality #social justice #up the baguette #réforme des retraites #video #edited because I misheard the shouts about a protester’s grandfather

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republicansaredomesticterrorists · 3 months

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If you’ve ever gone to protest a Republican event you can see them passing out signs to the actors they hired from Craigslist. You can also see them changing hats and t-shirts and then parading in front of their hired Nazi videographers who will later edit it into a propaganda video. The high point comes when their provacateurs deliberately fire up non-white counter protesters and then portray them as violent radicals in their edited video clips.

#republican assholes #traitor trump #crooked donald #trump #Trump propaganda #Trump fake union rally #labor unions support democrats #ACAB police unions support trump

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Hypothetical AI election disinformation risks vs real AI harms

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Feb 27) in Portland at Powell's. Then, onto Phoenix (Changing Hands, Feb 29), Tucson (Mar 9-12), and more!

You can barely turn around these days without encountering a think-piece warning of the impending risk of AI disinformation in the coming elections. But a recent episode of This Machine Kills podcast reminds us that these are hypothetical risks, and there is no shortage of real AI harms:

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/311-selling-pickaxes-for-the-ai-gold-rush

The algorithmic decision-making systems that increasingly run the back-ends to our lives are really, truly very bad at doing their jobs, and worse, these systems constitute a form of "empiricism-washing": if the computer says it's true, it must be true. There's no such thing as racist math, you SJW snowflake!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/aoc-algorithms-racist-bias.html

Nearly 1,000 British postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud by Horizon, the faulty AI fraud-hunting system that Fujitsu provided to the Royal Mail. They had their lives ruined by this faulty AI, many went to prison, and at least four of the AI's victims killed themselves:

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

Tenants across America have seen their rents skyrocket thanks to Realpage's landlord price-fixing algorithm, which deployed the time-honored defense: "It's not a crime if we commit it with an app":

https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-fixing-case-big-landlords-real-estate-tech

Housing, you'll recall, is pretty foundational in the human hierarchy of needs. Losing your home – or being forced to choose between paying rent or buying groceries or gas for your car or clothes for your kid – is a non-hypothetical, widespread, urgent problem that can be traced straight to AI.

Then there's predictive policing: cities across America and the world have bought systems that purport to tell the cops where to look for crime. Of course, these systems are trained on policing data from forces that are seeking to correct racial bias in their practices by using an algorithm to create "fairness." You feed this algorithm a data-set of where the police had detected crime in previous years, and it predicts where you'll find crime in the years to come.

But you only find crime where you look for it. If the cops only ever stop-and-frisk Black and brown kids, or pull over Black and brown drivers, then every knife, baggie or gun they find in someone's trunk or pockets will be found in a Black or brown person's trunk or pocket. A predictive policing algorithm will naively ingest this data and confidently assert that future crimes can be foiled by looking for more Black and brown people and searching them and pulling them over.

Obviously, this is bad for Black and brown people in low-income neighborhoods, whose baseline risk of an encounter with a cop turning violent or even lethal. But it's also bad for affluent people in affluent neighborhoods – because they are underpoliced as a result of these algorithmic biases. For example, domestic abuse that occurs in full detached single-family homes is systematically underrepresented in crime data, because the majority of domestic abuse calls originate with neighbors who can hear the abuse take place through a shared wall.

But the majority of algorithmic harms are inflicted on poor, racialized and/or working class people. Even if you escape a predictive policing algorithm, a facial recognition algorithm may wrongly accuse you of a crime, and even if you were far away from the site of the crime, the cops will still arrest you, because computers don't lie:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/texas-macys-sunglass-hut-facial-recognition-software-wrongful-arrest-sacramento-alibi/

Trying to get a low-waged service job? Be prepared for endless, nonsensical AI "personality tests" that make Scientology look like NASA:

https://futurism.com/mandatory-ai-hiring-tests

Service workers' schedules are at the mercy of shift-allocation algorithms that assign them hours that ensure that they fall just short of qualifying for health and other benefits. These algorithms push workers into "clopening" – where you close the store after midnight and then open it again the next morning before 5AM. And if you try to unionize, another algorithm – that spies on you and your fellow workers' social media activity – targets you for reprisals and your store for closure.

If you're driving an Amazon delivery van, algorithm watches your eyeballs and tells your boss that you're a bad driver if it doesn't like what it sees. If you're working in an Amazon warehouse, an algorithm decides if you've taken too many pee-breaks and automatically dings you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

If this disgusts you and you're hoping to use your ballot to elect lawmakers who will take up your cause, an algorithm stands in your way again. "AI" tools for purging voter rolls are especially harmful to racialized people – for example, they assume that two "Juan Gomez"es with a shared birthday in two different states must be the same person and remove one or both from the voter rolls:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/

Hoping to get a solid education, the sort that will keep you out of AI-supervised, precarious, low-waged work? Sorry, kiddo: the ed-tech system is riddled with algorithms. There's the grifty "remote invigilation" industry that watches you take tests via webcam and accuses you of cheating if your facial expressions fail its high-tech phrenology standards:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

All of these are non-hypothetical, real risks from AI. The AI industry has proven itself incredibly adept at deflecting interest from real harms to hypothetical ones, like the "risk" that the spicy autocomplete will become conscious and take over the world in order to convert us all to paperclips:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Whenever you hear AI bosses talking about how seriously they're taking a hypothetical risk, that's the moment when you should check in on whether they're doing anything about all these longstanding, real risks. And even as AI bosses promise to fight hypothetical election disinformation, they continue to downplay or ignore the non-hypothetical, here-and-now harms of AI.

There's something unseemly – and even perverse – about worrying so much about AI and election disinformation. It plays into the narrative that kicked off in earnest in 2016, that the reason the electorate votes for manifestly unqualified candidates who run on a platform of bald-faced lies is that they are gullible and easily led astray.

But there's another explanation: the reason people accept conspiratorial accounts of how our institutions are run is because the institutions that are supposed to be defending us are corrupt and captured by actual conspiracies:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

The party line on conspiratorial accounts is that these institutions are good, actually. Think of the rebuttal offered to anti-vaxxers who claimed that pharma giants were run by murderous sociopath billionaires who were in league with their regulators to kill us for a buck: "no, I think you'll find pharma companies are great and superbly regulated":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Institutions are profoundly important to a high-tech society. No one is capable of assessing all the life-or-death choices we make every day, from whether to trust the firmware in your car's anti-lock brakes, the alloys used in the structural members of your home, or the food-safety standards for the meal you're about to eat. We must rely on well-regulated experts to make these calls for us, and when the institutions fail us, we are thrown into a state of epistemological chaos. We must make decisions about whether to trust these technological systems, but we can't make informed choices because the one thing we're sure of is that our institutions aren't trustworthy.

Ironically, the long list of AI harms that we live with every day are the most important contributor to disinformation campaigns. It's these harms that provide the evidence for belief in conspiratorial accounts of the world, because each one is proof that the system can't be trusted. The election disinformation discourse focuses on the lies told – and not why those lies are credible.

That's because the subtext of election disinformation concerns is usually that the electorate is credulous, fools waiting to be suckered in. By refusing to contemplate the institutional failures that sit upstream of conspiracism, we can smugly locate the blame with the peddlers of lies and assume the mantle of paternalistic protectors of the easily gulled electorate.

But the group of people who are demonstrably being tricked by AI is the people who buy the horrifically flawed AI-based algorithmic systems and put them into use despite their manifest failures.

As I've written many times, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, but we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

The most visible victims of AI disinformation are the people who are putting AI in charge of the life-chances of millions of the rest of us. Tackle that AI disinformation and its harms, and we'll make conspiratorial claims about our institutions being corrupt far less credible.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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