The police union is damaging critical bonds of trust - PBA boss Patrick Lynch's defense of ticket-fixing ‘culture’ hurts the NYPD

Public employee unions are at the heart of the problem again. This tends to be an universal problem with police unions. In the local burg where I live, the police union has closed ranks to keep out a volunteer police auxiliary. They state that the volunteers are to dangerous as amateurs, not professional. Yet most of our surrounding, and some larger more crime ridden towns, have volunteer police auxiliaries and have had them for years with great success.

The real reason is the police union scams the town's taxpayers with high overtime hours and plans to keep them!

PBA boss Patrick Lynch's defense of ticket-fixing ‘culture’ hurts the NYPD — so how about a grassroots recall effort? - NY Daily News

BY HEATHER MAC DONALD November 3 2011

The police union is damaging critical bonds of trust between New Yorkers and the cops who risk their lives to serve them

Of all the blows dealt to the reputation of the NYPD over recent weeks, the worst is self-inflicted. Last Friday, as the Bronx district attorney indicted 11 police officers for fixing tickets on behalf of other officers’ friends and family, hundreds of police union delegates and trustees noisily rallied at the Bronx courthouse in support of the defendants, in a stunning display of contempt for the law. Some of the protesters jeered the district attorney; a few others tried to interfere with cameramen; many held up signs declaring — incredibly — that fixing tickets was part of “NYPD culture.”

There are several possible explanations for such behavior. Each is more disturbing than the last.

Perhaps Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association officials actually believe that they will gain public support for the police by justifying lawbreaking. If so, their disconnect from reality is shocking. An officer’s ability to perform his job, which can entail the use of lethal force, depends on the public’s confidence that he is acting impartially. Throw such impartiality into question and an officer’s moral authority crumbles.

Or perhaps NYPD cops are so hunkered down that they don’t care what the public thinks about them. Cop culture contains a strong bunker mentality, much of it understandable. The media and the political elites have made cops the scapegoats for America’s continuing racial problems, blaming the police, not criminals, for racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Unlike those elites, cops regularly confront the dysfunctions of underclass culture, yet are expected not to be affected by or speak about that sometimes sickening reality. They interact as often with individuals who despise them as with the many law-abiding members of poor communities who support them.

Solidarity under such circumstances is essential to keeping sane on the job. But this solidarity quickly shades into an “us against them” attitude — the “them” encompassing nearly all police supervisors as well as the public — that verges on outright paranoia.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/pba-boss-patrick-lynch-defense-ticket-fixing-culture-hurts-nypd-a-grassroots-recall-effort-article-1.971369#ixzz1cvrA0KhS