On September 14, 2004, a scene unfolded in the West Loop that would have been unthinkable a few decades before. The city unveiled a 3,200-pound bronze sculpture commemorating the Haymarket Affair of 1886. A seminal moment in international labor history, the Haymarket Affair started as a labor strike for an eight-hour workday and ended in a violent confrontation between demonstrators and police. Someone threw a bomb, four workers and seven cops were killed, dozens of people were injured, and more than 100 arrested. Ultimately seven people accused of inciting the riot were sentenced to death based on scant evidence in a trial criticized for its prejudice against the defendants. For the next century, the city of Chicago commemorated the events at Haymarket Square with a massive statue of a police officer, which was periodically vandalized or destroyed. After two consecutive bombings by the Weathermen between 1968 and 1970, the statue was moved to Chicago Police Department headquarters, where it stands to this day.
In 1919, the AFL-chartered Boston police union went on a five-day strike demanding recognition from the city, which led to chaos and rioting in the streets and the deployment of the State Guard in response. As Woodrow Wilson put it, the police strike was “a crime against civilization” and the AFL suspended its attempts to unionize cops for decades in its aftermath. Meanwhile, police remained the principal response of governments and businesses to labor unrest. In 1937, during what became known as the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago, cops shot live rounds into striking steel workers and their families, killing ten and injuring dozens more.
As historian Megan Marie Adams documented in her 2012 dissertation on Chicago police unionization, between 1969 and 1970 CPD officers killed 79 people, and thousands reported being beaten and injured by cops. Three-quarters of those killed by police were Black, and Chicago cops killed people at a rate three times higher than those in other major cities. But, even though internal affairs investigations sustained less than 3 percent of brutality charges, discipline for minor violations tended to be swift and severe. Renault Robinson, the head of the AAPL, put it this way in a 1971 speech: “You will get more time for being late than killing somebody accidentally.”
Over the years, the FOP has negotiated increasingly complex contracts and won steady salary increases for its members as well as sweeping protections against misconduct allegations, all the while staunchly supporting even the most disgraced members of the force. In her research, Adams found that in 1992 the FOP won cops pay for “off-duty police dog care” while the next year it dedicated its Saint Patrick’s Day parade float to Jon Burge, who’d led a ring of detectives in torturing suspects for two decades. The union has done precious little to help the department root out corrupt cops or protect whistleblowers who went out on a limb to expose them. Until the Laquan McDonald scandal, the union capitalized on a trusting and complacent local media to spin official narratives about police killings and has fought tooth and nail to keep officers’ misconduct records hidden.
“When unions bargained contracts that excluded Black workers from employment or that relegated Black workers to inferior jobs, the law stepped in and stripped unions of the right to use collective bargaining in these ways,” he wrote. Sachs argued that “police unions have abused the power of collective bargaining in indefensible ways” and suggested curtailing their power by opening bargaining sessions to the public, changing state laws to allow police forces to have multiple unions or “minority union bargaining,” and limiting “the range of subjects over which police unions have the right to bargain.”
Avendaño said that so far she’s been disappointed by organized labor’s response to the current political moment and hopes to see bolder statements calling out police unions from national labor groups like the AFL-CIO.
