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Malevolent Associations: Understanding Florida Law Enforcement Union Power Through a Fundamental Analysis of Police Violence
Felde, Daniel
Felde, Daniel
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Abstract
Contemporary critiques of police unions typically highlight the unions’ abilities to obstruct accountability and reform processes. This paper examines police unions from an alternate perspective, focusing on how they cause harm by expanding the institution of police. Through a review of the concepts, history, and contemporary impacts of policing, I interpret the police as fundamentally an institution of violent oppression. I use this assessment to reframe the harmful impacts of police unions as organizations that expand their institutional power by using collective bargaining power to increase police funding. To extend this evaluation, I conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of collective bargaining on law enforcement budgets in Florida. Using fixed-effects regression analysis, I find that the introduction of collective bargaining rights led to a 29.5% increase in sheriffs’ office budgets and a 1.3% increase in the proportion of law enforcement budgets of total jurisdiction budgets.
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Date
2021-01-01