The line of duty collapses into me

A Special Research Project on police unions

It all started with jury duty.

Back in April of 2024, I got summoned to federal jury duty in New Haven. My time in actual jury duty was mostly a lot of waiting around and reading the book I brought with me (if you’re wondering, it was An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, and it was good but not great) or standing in line waiting for something. They asked us all basic questions, then pulled individual people in for follow-up questions based on our answers to the initial questions. One of the basic questions was if we knew any lawyers, to which I said I was in law school and knew many lawyers. During individual questioning, the judge asked directly if I wanted to serve on a jury. I told him I wouldn’t mind, but I was concerned about missing class time with finals coming up in a month if the trial was an extended one. I was dismissed not long after a lunch break, along with most others there - I think they selected 10 or 12 from a pool of about 50 people.

However, some of the questions they asked of prospective jurors piqued my interest. I was a good prospective juror so I didn’t look anything up before I was dismissed, but later I found the details. It was a defamation case brought by police officers for the city of Shelton who had been fired - some for misconduct related to a Bridgeport police officer being accused of domestic abuse in Shelton, some for allegedly staging photos of officers changing clothes in the department parking lot. The fired officers claimed the termination letters and statements the police chief and mayor of Shelton made to the media about the firings had deliberately false and inflammatory statements. The jury that was selected eventually awarded four out of the five police officers damages.

Thinking about the case after reading some media coverage, I was torn on the actual firings. The officers who had been accused of staging photos said they were protesting COVID-19 restrictions at the time that prevented them from using the bathroom in the police headquarters. That seemed to me like something they should be able to protest - that’s part of their working conditions. But the other allegations were much more serious. Two officers responded to a report of sounds of a woman being thrown to the ground and crying and screaming, but didn’t fully investigate. The alleged abuser was a Bridgeport police officer who had previously been accused of domestic violence four times, and after the Shelton police left, the abuser sexually assaulted the victim. A third officer who investigated allegedly omitted facts from his report about the other two officers’ inaction. I read that a separate labor case had ordered those officers reinstated, and that seemed wrong to me - it looked an awful lot like they’d protected a fellow police officer credibly accused of serious wrongdoing instead of the victim they were supposed to protect. The kind of thing we really need to be able to fire cops for.

I’d done some reading on police unions before, mostly during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, though never any in-depth research. I’d seen criticisms of police union contracts for having negotiated investigative and disciplinary provisions that seemed to make it very difficult to hold officers accountable for excessive use of force, as well as some police union leaders making racist comments toward Black Lives Matter protesters and victims of police brutality. But I felt conflicted about this. I support unions! I came to law school to defend workers’ rights to organize! Aren’t police officers still workers?

So I sent a note to my labor law professor. I described the case and then asked this question, which turned out to be far more important to the next year than I ever could have imagined:

“One thing that sometimes rattles around my brain, which the case in question brings up, and I would absolutely love to discuss with you at some point in the future is: how do we square police reform with actual teeth with protecting police officers' labor rights? I'm convinced that doing both is possible within a collective bargaining framework, but as currently constituted, it seems like the unions are often incredibly hostile to that idea - and not without some reason, since meaningful reform would have to make it way easier to fire cops. What are your thoughts on this? Are there any examples, or even theoretical frameworks, of what it would look like to do this well?”

We had an office hours appointment for the next week to talk about something else, so he suggested that we add it to our agenda then. I responded “That sounds great (even though I have the sinking feeling you’re going to tell me I should turn this into a research project or journal note). See you Wednesday!” The entirety of his response was a thumbs-up, which was notably not a denial.

At the actual office hours appointment, we talked a bit about the paucity of legal scholarship on police unions and reform. Most labor law scholars mainly study private sector labor law. It makes sense - private sector workers’ unionization and collective bargaining rights are all covered under a single federal statute, the National Labor Relations Act, but the NLRA doesn’t cover public sector workers. Instead, public sector workers are covered by a patchwork of state laws which vary wildly in how much protection they offer their state and local government employees, including police officers. However, this means there are new issues arising, such as the 2011 Wisconsin and Ohio efforts to restrict most public sector workers’ bargaining rights (which, to be fair, my professor wrote about) or the role of police unions in police violence and reform, that most labor law professors aren’t as well-equipped to study in depth. Which meant that as far as we knew, there wasn’t some other brilliant legal scholar who had solved the whole thing in a law journal somewhere. We also agreed on two basic ideas as a starting point: police reform would be very unlikely to succeed without some buy-in from rank-and-file police officers and their unions, and we’d all probably be better off if most existing police unions were nuked from orbit.

My professor encouraged me to pursue this line of study and offered me a parallel to think about: teachers’ unions also largely shouldered the blame for struggling schools, faced rampant attacks in the name of education reform, and are in a similar position to police officers in that they have to deal with some of the toughest problems in America (like poverty and mental illness) without being equipped to actually solve those problems and yet get the blame when those issues make their jobs hard to do well. However, people have begun to warm up to teachers’ unions in the past decade-ish, and he suggested I could explore that as well as police unions.

Professor Fischl also cautioned me that this could be a major project, well beyond the scope of a student research paper. (I don’t remember the exact words, but I think he may have said “this could be a book.”) I don’t know if he realized this at the time (if not, he certainly does now), but I am not easily dissuaded from doing something I really want to do by people pointing out that it’ll be a lot of work.

I put the idea on a back burner for a bit - after all, 1L spring finals were approaching, then the law journal write-on competition, then my summer internship. I didn’t have much time to devote to research for something that I wasn’t getting course credit for or putting on my resume!

But as fall classes started, my thoughts returned to the project. One of the few requirements for upper-level classes at UConn Law is that you have to complete an upper-level writing requirement. There’s a few different ways you can fulfill this. You can write a research paper for a class that requires or allows it in lieu of a final exam. You can publish a note in a law journal. Or you can undertake what we call a Special Research Project (SRP), where you complete a research paper independently under the supervision of a professor…and you can see where this is going.

(Side note: I would later learn that the legal brief we write for the asylum clinic I took this year can, with some paperwork and finagling, count as the upper-level writing requirement. I don’t regret my choices, but I am just a little salty that no one told me before I enrolled in the SRP course. I could have saved myself so much work! Even though I’m very bad at actually saving myself from any work!)

I met with my professor a few times over the fall semester to put a plan together. He suggested a couple of books and scholars whose work I could read as a starting point and helped me navigate the process of arranging SRP credit for the spring. To meet the requirement, I would need to submit a “scholarly paper” at the end of the spring semester of at least 30 pages. My professor and I would plan to meet weekly or every other week to discuss how the project was going and what I needed. The rest was up to me.

I’d done a bit of preliminary reading over the fall while pulling together the basic outline for the project, but early in the spring semester, my project was to find and read just about anything I could get my hands on about police unions. That meant court cases dealing with police reform attempts and police union rights, publicly available compilations of police collective bargaining contracts and police violence, news articles detailing reform efforts and police union responses, and other scholarly work discussing police unions. When reading scholarly work in particular, I would look for the works that the authors I was reading were citing most frequently, then go read those works (and so on). Later, I added to this by reading about teachers’ unions, particularly the education reform efforts that ended up pushing students into charter schools (often non-unionized) and some of the successful teacher strikes of the 2010s that fought back against this trend. (A favorite book I read during this process was A Fight for the Soul of Public Education, telling the story of the Chicago Teachers’ Union 2012 strike. Incredibly detailed and compelling.)

This was a lot of reading, but it was also fun. I described my process at first as “magpie-like” - before I thought about what conclusions to draw and how to stitch the disparate threads together, I was just looking for shiny interesting things to read and ponder. The only drawback is that between research and class reading, I haven’t read a book just for fun since winter break.

I did have to force myself out of “read ALL the things!” mode at some point and keep myself on track to actually write, so my professor had me put together a paper outline not long before spring break. The stated goal of this was “I want you to wake up the first Saturday of spring break and start writing,” which I…didn’t quite live up to. However, the outlining process was really helpful for deciding what was most important in what I’d read and what I wanted to explore more in writing, and made for an incredibly useful guidepost when I did sit down to write. I’m also a people-pleaser and a sucker for praise, so it was extra motivating when my professor told me he liked the outline a lot.

While I was outlining and beginning to write, I also spoke with a few law professors who had broken the mold and devoted serious research to police and other public sector unions. I was really nervous about this at first - I felt intimidated about talking to people who knew much more about the subject than I did - but I shouldn’t have. When I reached out to them over email and video conferencing, they were happy that I was also interested in the subject and eager to share their ideas and help refine my own. Labor law seems to attract all the nice people!

It was tough juggling the research project with everything else I took on this semester. I’m still working on the asylum clinic I started in the fall, since our client’s hearing is May 21, and I have three regular classes in addition to the credits I’m earning for the SRP and asylum work. (Even my professor, who like me often takes on more work than is necessary or wise, looked a bit horrified when we were trying to pick a deadline for the paper and I described my May schedule of brief and evidence filing, exams, and the hearing.) I was also looking for a summer job and staying involved in several extracurriculars on campus.

Often I would find myself trying to “triage” my schedule and delaying writing since something else was more urgent, but as it got closer, I was able to carve out more writing time. The weekend before it was due, I went to Rhode Island on Friday night (my sister and her partner invited me to TopGolf, their new favorite) and then holed up in my apartment Saturday through Monday just writing. (We don’t need to talk about how much DoorDash I ordered that weekend.)

Yet on Monday, April 28…well, really just after midnight, so technically Tuesday, April 29…I finished drafting. My wonderful friend Laura very kindly gave me a thorough proofreading, suggesting places where I could strengthen my arguments, tightening my language, and pointing out unnecessary digressions. (This was in addition to her earlier contribution of helping me find all the times a certain New York Times columnist turned failed gubernatorial candidate trashed teachers’ unions.) And after some revisions on Wednesday and one final review of my 200+ footnotes, I submitted it.

I’m really proud of it and hope to publish it. I’m going to submit it to a scholarship competition and also for publication in the Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal, which I work on. I worked really hard on this paper and I think it came out well. There were a few things I wanted to explore but just didn’t have the time to, and I know that I haven’t singlehandedly solved the problem of police unions and reform, but I think I did really well with what I had.

Now I’m working on final exams (took Evidence today, not feeling especially confident since I had very little prep time between the SRP paper and asylum filing but it wasn’t too bad) and preparing for my asylum hearing. Really looking forward to a short break after that hearing!