Their profession is heavily unionized. Culturally, they have more in common with bus drivers than business executives. Many come from working-class backgrounds.

Yet on the beat, police come in contact with — to question, to arrest, to brutalize — the most disadvantaged. This presents a problem for radicals. If the Left stands for anything, it’s worker emancipation and labor militancy. But police and others in the state’s coercive apparatus, workers themselves in many respects, are the keepers of class society. Their jobs exist to maintain social control and protect the status quo.

The introduction of unions to this portion of the state raises additional concerns. Can “coercive unions” ever advocate for the broader working class, rather than members’ narrow self-interests? Or are police unions irredeemably reactionary?

It’s easy to focus on the individual over the institution. Not a few police officers are drawn to the profession out of a desire to “serve the public.” Many genuinely want to serve, and take great pride in their chosen occupation. Police don’t have to enjoy breaking up protests; they don’t have to be racists or hate homeless people. But once they decide to do their jobs, institutional exigencies overwhelm personal volition. When there’s mass resistance to poverty and inequality, it’s the cops who are summoned to calm the panic-stricken hearts of the elite. They bash some heads, or infiltrate and disrupt some activist groups, and all is right in the world again.

Such is the inherent defect of law-enforcement unionism: It’s peopled by those with a material interest in maintaining and enlarging the state’s most indefensible practices.

It’s hard to imagine how it could be any different. Chicago teachers, exemplifying the kind of social-movement unionism that defends the working class broadly, organized the community before their strike by trumpeting a vision of equitable education. The Left cheered. How could anything similar be achieved by prison guards? A police strike would appear to signal an incipient authoritarianism, cops untamed by democratic dictates. How could empowering police — increasingly militarized and shot through with a culture of preening brutality — yield anything but stepped-up repression? How could the traditional socialist goal of worker self-management result in anything but a dystopia of metastasizing prisons, imperious cops, and Minuteman-esque border-patrol guards? The best we can hope for from police, it seems, is passivity.

As Kristian Williams documents in Our Enemies in Blue , professionalized policing arose in the United States amid urbanization in the 1820s and 1830s. Controlling “dangerous” classes (principally of the industrial working variety), more than ameliorating any pronounced spike in crime, was the reason for its formation. The institution had its roots in slave patrols, which were established to control the behavior of slaves — the “dangerous” classes of that day.

In the late 1800s, when more workers bandedtogether to improve their situation, elites once again blanched. Police broke up strikes, confiscated pro-labor newspapers, and arrested radicals. States like Pennsylvania set up forces to deal with labor stoppages. Free speech and free association were subordinated to private property.

In this respect, little has changed. The activist who is doing anything of value expects to be under surveillance, and is on the lookout for agents provocateurs. Where capital is concerned, cops are custodians, and the First Amendment is flotsam.

Other subtler — primarily ideological — forms of policing have long existed. The police officer, border patrol guard and corrections officer only step in when abstract injunctions need to be made tangible. When all attempts to modify citizens’ behavior have failed, they appear — to intercept undocumented immigrants forced from their home countries by Global North-favoring trade agreements, to watch over incarcerated drug dealers from deindustrialized wastelands. When they exercise their power, it’s far from subtle; they are the state’s monopoly on violence incarnate. And they have a vested interest in seeing their power increase unchecked.

When police unions have widened their gaze beyond issues like compensation and working conditions, it’s been almost exclusively to advance conservative ends. “Police,” as Williams puts it, “organize as police, not workers.”

They’ve bitterly opposed civilian review boards (and, if established, have sought to undermine them). They’ve fought the placement of names and badge numbers on officer uniforms. They’ve resisted rooting out police misconduct. “The modern police union movement,” criminologist Samuel Walker argues, “originated largely in reaction to the civil rights movement and its criticisms of police conduct during the 1960s. . . . Any local unions originated or at least became more militant in response to specific police-community relations initiatives in the 1960s.”

And police unions aren’t even the worst actors.

In the hovel of coercive unionism, the California prison guards union (the California Correctional Peace Officers Association) is the leader. The organization has long defined itself as separate from the mainstream labor movement. Politically, the California prison guards aren’t wedded to the Democratic Party, and institutionally, they’re not affiliated with either of the nation’s labor federations. The association has proven its ability to parlay mass incarceration into increased political power, membership, and dues. They bankroll “victim’s rights” groups, they fight anti-incarceration referenda, they funnel millions to Democrats and Republicans who adopt law-and-order stances.

When tougher sentencing became the new norm several decades ago, the organization was small — membership totaled about five thousand, and their budget didn’t crack a half a million dollars. They now represent more than thirty thousand correctional officers. In 2008 alone, they spent nearly $5 million to elect sympathetic candidates and, more importantly, to defeat a ballot measure seeking to reduce the prison population through treatment instead of incarceration. Other prison-guard unions have benefited from the prison boom, but none have been able to capitalize on the carceral state as well as the CCPOA. The union looks at the marginalized and sees an opportunity for enrichment.

Two of the CCPOA’s ideological cousins are the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) and the National ICE Council. Unlike the CCPOA, the two are inhabitants of the House of Labor — they’re member unions of the American Federation of Government Employees, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. On immigration, however, they’ve bucked the federation’s pro-reform line (a line that has already conceded far too much to the Right).

Above all, both organizations are interested in more enforcement — despite the Obama administration’s deportation of undocumented immigrants at a faster rate than any previous president. The two groups’ preferred term for undocumented immigrants is “illegal aliens,” of course. ICE Council President Chris Crane, the New York Times wrote in June, has been “the most frequent witness on Capitol Hill during this year’s immigration debate and the favorite expert of conservative critics of the Senate measure.”

On top of trying to scuttle any path to citizenship, the border-patrol union has resisted efforts to restrict its violent mandate. “If you don’t throw rocks at Border Patrol agents,” the NBPC’s charming vice president said in November, “you won’t be shot.”