When they expressed insubordination by turning their backs on the Mayor, that signalled to me that they have no respect for authority. This is exactly the kind of people that do not belong on a police force. I can't imagine why they weren't all fired. They certainly don't deserve any of the respect that they get, nor their pensions.
Every single one of those officers should have been fired on the spot. I'm no fan of de Blasio, but he's the democratically elected mayor of New York. Turning your back to him is turning your back to the people who elected him.
I would have loved to see that happen... but that's probably not practical, considering the shear amount of cops who did that. This video makes it seem like there was a good thousand of them or something: http://nypost.com/2015/01/04/cops-again-turn-their-backs-on-...
Ignoring for the moment that the union certainly wouldn't allow such firings this also seems like a 1st amendment issue. What does the court have to say about expressions of speech in this context?
The military forbids its members from making political statements while in uniform. The police should probably have the same rule. If you want to campaign for/against someone, do it out of uniform.
On the other hand, when the mayor shows up at a police funeral to give a speech while the press is there, that's clearly a political statement. It doesn't seem fair to use the police as props (implying their support) while you have a rule saying they can't make a statement in reply.
The first amendment doesn't apply to my employer as I work for a private company, so you are right there. But is that true for cops who work for the government? I'm honestly not sure.
When you are on the job for the government, you are acting as a government representative and not a private person. You can be fired for what you say while on the job.
However, the police unions would never allow such a thing.
First of all, we aren't even talking about the police saying anything out loud. We're talking about them turning their backs on the mayor while at a funeral which, while not verbal speech, is clearly a form of expression that would fall under the 1st amendment.
Second, I suspect that a majority of the officers in question were not on the job while attending that funeral.
The first amendment does apply to your employer in that he can't muzzle you, or have you beaten up from speaking out. The worst your employer can do is fire you, which happens often, and that's fine.
In fact my employer can muzzle me. I've signed various documents over the years that prevent my from speaking about my employer (or past employers) in various ways.
And the fact that my employer can't have me beaten up has nothing to do with the 1st amendment. That would be assault no matter what their motivation.
The fact that your employer can't have you beaten up is because assault is illegal, not because of your first amendment rights. The first amendment protects you from being thrown in jail by the government for your speech.
Calling it insubordination is too generous. Turning their backs on their mayor in such setting is downright juvenile. It shows level of deep rooted rotten mob mentality that permeates the force.
It seems peculiar to American discourse that wrongdoing in a job should be countered by firing rather than retraining or reform.
Anyway, police departments generally have a hard enough time already finding and keeping staff. Firing them en masse requires replacing them en masse. Who polices the city while you're looking for and training a heap of new recruits?
And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it by the people.
> And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it by the people.
Oh, they still have rights when in uniform. Eg at the most basic, the right not to be killed. But you are right about the free speech. Just like any other employee in their capacity as an employee, only more so.
In the first link, the case is about a memo written as part of the employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (district attorneys don't wear uniforms, and the word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).
In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person". It's abundantly clear that these police turning their backs on the mayor at a funeral over a political stoush between the parties are not acting as voices of the government. No reasonable person would even remotely think that the police turning their back on the mayor is 'what the government message is'. Those police are clearly not 'speaking' in an official government capacity (and literally are not speaking at all).
I have no great love for the police, but the correct path forward is a fair view, not a knee-jerk 'fire them all on principle'. This thread is full of knee-jerk hysteria, but the irony is that so many people are calling for an end to multiple people's careers because, while not on duty, the were literally standing still while facing the incorrect direction. Ironic because it's supposedly a reaction against undue application of power, and yet the punishment for facing the wrong way is termination, regardless of whether or not that officer has abused power elsewhere.
> In the first link, the case is about a memo written on duty as part of the employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (and the word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).
The facts are not identical, but the facts are sufficiently similar that you could cite that case as precedence for arguing that the facts in question here should be treated similarly. The lawyer I linked to certainly thinks so. Are you a lawyer?
> In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person".
You took that out of context. "Person" here means the private person, not the cop representing himself as a cop. The paragraph goes on to say, "the speech of a person who presents himself in his official governmental capacity is no longer the individual’s free speech, but the official person’s speech. And the latter is not free."
Speaking of taking things out of context, did you read the rest of my paragraph, which talks about private speech versus official capacity, and matches the context surrounding my quote from the article?
in his official governmental capacity were the words - the funeral/protesting police were not on the clock on active duty, and as I said, no-one sane would confuse their message with a governmental message, official or unofficial.
Are you a lawyer?
?
It's clear neither of us are. So what? You're still misreading the second article re: private vs offical personage. That article is not saying what you're claiming it says. And as a result, the first link you provided is also not supporting your claims. The lawyer you linked to says absolutely nothing about uniforms - the term (and concept) 'uniform' appears nowhere in the article, but it does talk about the loss of freedom of speech when speaking in an official capacity.
And no, 'in uniform' is not the same as 'official capacity'. In none of these cases are they equivalent: the district attorney doesn't wear a uniform; Novara's phone call was about abusing his official capacity, and he could have been in the nude when he called, for all it mattered; the police turning their backs at the funeral are clearly not acting as a government voice and couldn't be confused to be doing so.
There are limits. You probably wouldn't object to a police officer being fired when it's discovered they have 5,000 posts on Stormfront expressing solidarity for their Aryan brothers in their struggle against multicultural impurity.
These police officers expressed contempt in an organized, planned way for anyone who would hold police officers accountable for murders committed on the job. They essentially declared that they expect 100% support from their boss in the executive branch, no matter the illegality of their conduct, and committed to staging a standing strike in protest, and to publicly shunning their boss at a funeral. It's a power play that a nation of rights & laws cannot permit, if it wants to remain one.
You know what? We can find other people to be police officers. Ones which aren't so abusive of the people they're supposed to be serving, and so privileged to a lack of consequences for this abuse, that they're on the edge of a coup against the elected civilian government.
Are you serious? Members of the police force are prevented from to expressing their opinion while in uniform, they are sworn to duty. If they do it anyway, that way lie the Freikorps of the Weimar Republic. As the grandparent says, these guys need the equivalent of a dishonourable discharge.
Yes, a peaceful, static protest by simply facing the other way while uniformed but off the clock - at a funeral for a colleague - is totally the basis of a new Nazi state and the tens of millions of deaths it caused.
What would you expect would happen to you if you made such a brazen, public display of disrespect against your executive management? Would you have your job after?
They certainly could have gone on strike, when they were not on the clock.
They have strong unions. That allows them lots of things regular workers don't get. Unionized workers get these kinds of benefits --not that I agree with unions, as I think they are past their expiration date, but the strong ones provide great extra-work related benefits.
Similarly longshores get pretty sweet benefits too.
Dock work is pretty backbreaking - I'm in favor of people who do that year round, rather than four weeks to make some extra cash for the summer one time like I did, getting good pensions and good health care. You only have one spine and it's gotta last you a lifetime.
It involves a couple of cranes and a lot of moving stuff that's too light to justify bringing the crane over but still seriously heavy, at least where I was (Italy).
I don’t think there is too much non-containerized goods coming in through the major US ports these days. Handling goods via small ports are still back-breaking work around the world though.
Yes, they should be free to express their opinions. But free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. One could make a case that that sort of behavior could be considered insubordination and grounds for termination.
> Yes, they should be free to express their opinions. But free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
That's bad analysis. Free speech means freedom from government-imposed consequences, and since their employer is the government, being fired would be a government-imposed consequence. (For the same reason, public universities cannot discipline students for their protected speech.) Rather, the correct reason these cops should be fired is because they legally do not have the right of free speech when in uniform - see my other comment up-thread.
Fair enough, my analysis wasn't sufficiently specific. I agree that gov't employees should be free from government-imposed consequences if they are critizing policy. In contrast directly disregarding one's boss, while working in an official capacity, should not necessarily be free from government-imposed consequences (i.e., that should be a sanctionable offense). Obviously there's a divding line betwen the two, so it depends where that line is drawn (and where one places the actions of those officers on that spectrum).
