How the Police Benevolent Association Became a Political Force

By Chris Hayes

Among the many other unusual events we have experienced in 2020, the NYPD’s Police Benevolent Association (PBA) has endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly, PBA president Pat Lynch declared his organization’s support for Donald Trump, viewing the president as the only man who can save the NYPD officers “fighting for [their] lives out there.” While presidential endorsements are relatively uncommon for the PBA, its explicit involvement in politics dates back more than half a century to the late 1960s. We commonly think of the police as having a variety of powers — detention, arrest, violence — but we often fail to consider the ways that they can and do exert political power. Today’s PBA is a thoroughly political organization, willingly going to war with mayors across the decades and spectrum, including Dinkins, Giuliani, and De Blasio, and has been quite successful in fending off oversight and accountability at both local and state levels.[1]

In the 1960s, activists began demanding changes to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Formed in 1953, the three-man panel was comprised of police officials who took and investigated citizens’ complaints against officers, issuing disciplinary recommendations to the commissioner, who had complete and final say over the outcome. NYPD officers resented the review board’s existence and the department’s leadership was never committed to its robust functioning. Increasingly, progressive activists viewed it as a rubber stamp panel that offered the public little in the way of actual accountability. Many doubted the objectivity of the panel, believing police would look out for one another and dismiss complaints, regardless of validity. To counter this perceived lack of neutrality, proponents of reforming the review board demanded either adding a plurality of civilians to the existing board or abolishing it and creating a new board that operated independently of the NYPD.

In April 1964, reform Democrats on the city council proposed a new all-civilian board, but Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. opposed it in support of his police chief and successfully blocked this legislation from ever coming to a vote. Much like the widespread calls for police reform in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, had it not been for continued police violence and a spectacular episode of unrest and protest, there likely would not have been any changes to the review board at all. In July 1964, the streets of Central Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant exploded in response to the police killing of James Powell, a fifteen-year-old African American boy. For six days, residents of the two neighborhoods fought police, looted stores, and destroyed property. After nearly a week of upheaval, one man was dead, hundreds were injured, police had arrested more than 500, and nearly 700 businesses were damaged, with costs to the city topping $4 million. During the unrest, officers resorted to firing live rounds almost immediately and did so for the duration of the conflagration, giving credence to activists’ claims that the NYPD was a violent, unreasonable unit in need of reform. In the uprisings’ aftermath, the demand for a panel of civilians to review citizen complaints against police grew louder and more pressing, but the police commissioner, the mayor and their allies successfully continued their resistance throughout 1964.[2]

Courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library

However, 1965 was a mayoral election year and review board reform became a significant issue in the campaign, ultimately helping to secure Republican John Lindsay’s victory. In May of 1966, Lindsay chose the middle path to change. He added four civilians in addition to the three NYPD officials already composing the board, as opposed to removing the police altogether. The PBA, William F. Buckley Jr.’s Conservative Party, and other allies launched immediate legal challenges and collected tens of thousands of signatures from New Yorkers to secure a ballot question in November on banning civilians from any oversight role of the police. The PBA and its allies continued their attacks, with firebrand PBA president John J. Cassese pronouncing that “you won’t satisfy these people until you get all Negroes and Puerto Ricans on the board and every policeman who goes in front of it is found guilty.” The Daily News went further, professing the board would be “infested sooner or later with cop-haters, professional liberals, representatives of pressure groups and the like, to the great detriment of the police force.” Cassese threatened mass resignations in response to the modified board, which is now a standard tool of police resistance.[3]

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library

The PBA had only been a recognized bargaining unit since 1958, when Mayor Wagner followed in the footsteps of his senator father, Robert F. Wagner Sr., and signed an executive order, the “Little Wagner Act,” which permitted unions to enter into collective bargaining with the city for the first time. For decades prior, the PBA was an aid society for officers’ widows and children, engaging in politics mostly through backroom negotiations with state politicians. However, in 1966, responding to Lindsay’s alterations of the CCRB, the PBA entered in formal politics for the first time, and did so with the skill and force one would expect from a union that had been operating in this realm for decades. It had been employing Norman Frank, a Madison Avenue advertising executive, as its public relations consultant since its early days as a union, and vowed to spend the entire contents of its treasury, $1.5 million, to defeat Lindsay’s board. This was in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars outside groups committed to raise for ads, rallies and campaign literature.[4]

As the November referendum moved closer, the PBA and its allies resorted to emotional appeals and groundless accusations. One pamphlet claimed with no evidence that “Too many good policemen are retiring from the force rather than submit to the rule of amateur Civilian Review Boards!” Cassese, too, had already tried to fearmonger voters about mass officer retirement: “I don’t think you’ll have a Police Department after one year of such a board,” and “If we don’t do something now and take care of this situation, maybe there’ll be nobody left in this great city of ours.” Utilizing the mantle of anticommunism in the midst of the Cold War, he also claimed that “Communism and Communists are somewhat mixed in this fight. If they are not in the forefront, they are making hay while the sun shines… If we wind up with a review board we will have done Russia a great service.” America’s global nemesis, he chided, “should send a medal to the City of New York and say, ‘thank you for accomplishing what I haven’t been able to do these many years.’” He was not alone in his beliefs as other police organizations and various far-right individuals and groups supported his appeals to Cold War fears.[5]

The anti-review board campaign’s greatest hit. Daily News, September 26, 1966

In the weeks leading up to the referendum, the Independent Citizens’ Committee against Civilian Review Boards, a group of conservative state politicians and businessmen, published a number of full-page ads in the sympathetic Daily News. One featured a white woman in curlers looking anxiously out a window with the caption, “All mothers wait up at night! We can’t take chances… not with our children!” The text of the ad used crime statistics to inspire fear in voters, claiming the new review board would suddenly render the police unwilling to do their jobs. An October appeal employed a photograph of a policeman with one hand tied behind his back. Its most memorable campaign visual depicted a young white woman emerging from a subway entrance, alone on a dark street, looking lost and helpless. The reader is left to imagine what may happen. Mayor Lindsay correctly characterized the ad as “an attempt to incite racial tensions,” which was the point. Crime and race, particularly Blackness, have a long association in the white American mind. By the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement had succeeded in making explicitly racist language from public figures unacceptable. Instead, conservatives turned to coded messages, such as “law and order,” to speak about race without expressly doing so. Street crime in New York City had been rising year over year, and in a city with a high degree of residential segregation that forced people into living such separate lives, it was easy for white New Yorkers to conjure a dehumanized image of the faceless Black criminal, depravedly roaming the streets, looking for his next victim.[6]

These moves paid off with a landslide victory against the board on Election Day. The referendum succeeded by a margin of nearly 540,000 out of just over two million votes. Norman Frank, the PBA’s PR consultant, characterized the win as “a mandate to create and pursue a meaningful program for the furtherance of understanding between the community and the police.” Frank urged those who believed in either an all-civilian review board or one of the hybrid versions to move on and “join hands in a citywide effort to promote cooperation and understanding at all levels.” He vowed the PBA would “devote the same energy and fervor” it expended in its campaign against the board to “restore the confidence of minority groups” in the NYPD. It is unclear that anyone, including Frank, believed what he was saying. In his victory speech at the Sheraton-Atlantic in Midtown, Cassese exclaimed “Thank God we saved this city.” Apparently feeling quite accomplished that evening, he also claimed to have saved the nation, and quoted Abraham Lincoln twice, including the last line of the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln proclaims that government of, by and for the people will not perish from the earth.[7]

Today, the union’s leadership is once more lashing out at efforts to make officers more accountable, issuing hyperbolic, overwrought statements guaranteeing ruin and doom for the city should the city or state follow through with any reforms that impact the ways in which police officers desire to do their jobs, whether criminalizing chokeholds or publicizing disciplinary records. In May of this year, the state was moving to repeal Section 50-a of its Civil Rights Law, which all but sealed police personnel records from lawyers, journalists, and the public. Pat Lynch, the current PBA president, contended a repeal would result in the certain murder of officers at their homes despite the fact that state law prohibits the release of personal information, such as a home address. He is following a well-worn playbook, one that the PBA and its allies wrote in 1966. The current PBA is an overtly political entity, and a sophisticated one at that. It has spent over $1.4 million in the last five years on campaign contributions and to hire lobbyists. Despite the repeal of 50-a in early June, the PBA and unions representing other ranks in the NYPD have so far been successful in preventing the city from publishing a searchable online repository of NYPD disciplinary records. In its more than sixty years as a labor union, the PBA has been remarkably effective in shielding officers from accountability and external scrutiny, painting its members as embattled soldiers who are perpetually on the brink of collapse, ever in struggle with cynical politicians eager to sacrifice them. That strategy has consistently worked for decades, and the PBA is demonstrating that it still does.[8]

Chris Hayes teaches history in the Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

[1]Bill Sanderson. “NYC Police Union Endorses Trump Re-election Bid.” Daily News 14 Aug 2000.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-pba-endorses-trump-20200814-pzuvzzp37nc7tpd53ojq3rbkhi-story.html Trump, of course, has been president for four years, during which time Lynch claims the situation for police has seriously deteriorated, so it is unclear why another four years would improve their lot. Christopher Robbins. “Police Unions Hated Giuliani & Bloomberg Too.” Gothamist 22 Dec 2014. gothamist.com/news/police-unions-hated-giuliani-bloomberg-too

[2] Fred Powledge, “Brutality Cases Urged for Study,” New York Times 7 April 1964: 24; “Seek Board to Review Cop Cases,” New York Amsterdam News 11 April 1964: 5; Ruth Cowan, The New York City Civilian Review Board Referendum of November 1966: A Case Study of Mass Politics, (Thesis (Ph. D.) – New York University, 1970), 117.Other notable instances of publicized police violence: The Guinean government accused two officers of having “brutally beaten” its ambassador in the back of a squad car in August, 1961. When the police shut down a nonviolent anti-nuclear testing protest in Times and Duffy Squares in March 1962, many of the dozens they arrested complained of brutality. In November 1963, a police officer shot and killed two Puerto Rican men in the back of his patrol car, claiming one of them pulled a gun. Robert Conley, “Guinea Charges Police Bias Here,” New York Times 29 Aug 1961: 1, 19; “Guinean in Fracas Back at U.N.  Post,” New York Times 23 Aug 1961: 7; “City Asked to Sift Envoy Bias Charges,” New York Times 3 Sep 1961: 49; New York Civil Liberties Union letter from Executive Director George E. Rundquist to Professor Norman Dorsen Re: Civilian Complaint Review Board; 21 May 1962; American Civil Liberties Union Records, The Roger Baldwin Years, Box 68, Folder 2; Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Will Lissner, “Brutality Study Pushed by Police,” New York Times 17 March 1962: 8; Farnsworth Fowle, “3 Atom-test Foes Convicted Here,” New York Times 22 May 1962: 12.

[3] Eric Pace, “Booth Condemns Cassese Remark,” New York Times 19 May 1966: 40; “NAACP Assails PBA Review Board Stand,” New York Amsterdam News 21 May 1966: 24; Roy Wilkins, “Advice to Mr. Cassese,” New York Amsterdam News 28 May 1966: 16; “Mayor Gets Police Board Nominations,” New York Times 29 May 1966: 42; “A Promise Kept,” New York Amsterdam News 16 July 1966: 14; Jackie Robinson, “Civilian Review Board Fight,” New York Amsterdam News 16 July 1966: 15; Letter from Ross Guglielmino to Arnold Hoffman, 17 June 1964; John Vliet Lindsay Papers (MS 592). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Box 374, Folder “Rochester – Police Advisory Board.” Cassese believed, regarding African Americans, “For 100 years these people were entitled to their rights and for 100 years they didn’t receive them to a degree, although up north I know that we were doing pretty good because we worked with them and we associated with them and we got along with them.” Newsmakers broadcast transcript, WCBS, 7. Lindsay Papers.

[4] Charles R. Morris, The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment, 1960-1975, (New York: Norton, 1980), 87-91; “New Group Fights Police Review Unit,” New York Times 2 Aug 1966: 21; David Burnham, “Frank, Denying Impropriety, Quits P.B.A. Post,” New York Times 7 June 1969: 18. People sent in money from out of state to defeat the board, including the Chicago Police Association, that city’s equivalent of the PBA. Algernon D. Black, “New York City – Civilian Complaint Review Board/1966,” 4; Algernon D. Black Papers; Box 26, Civilian Complaint Review Board – 2; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

[5] “If You Want a Safer New York…” Lindsay Papers, Box 369, Folder “Literature, Police Review Board, 1966.” WINS editorial, “Civilian Review Board – #2.” 12-13 July 1966. Lindsay Papers, Box 369, Folder “Editorials.” Klein, Lindsay's Promise, 228; “Police Head Likens Review Board Backers to Hitler and Mussolini,” The Herald-News 31 Aug 1966: 23. The presidents of the national and New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police both agreed and publicly asserted communists were behind review board campaigns. Newsmakers broadcast transcript, WCBS, 10. Lindsay Papers.

[6] ICCACRB newspaper advertisements; Algernon D. Black Papers; Box 26, Civilian Complaint Review Board – 3; “Myths about the Review Board,” 1, 4. Lindsay Papers, Box 242, Folder “Civilian Review Board Clippings.” “Review Board Battle Page.” New York Daily News 27 Oct 1966: 48; Woody Klein, Lindsay's Promise: the Dream That Failed: A Personal Account, (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 228; Thomas R. Brooks. “25,000 Police against the Review Board.” New York Times Magazine 16 Oct 1966: 37.

[7] Bernard Weinraub, “Police Review Panel Killed by Large Majority in City,” New York Times 9 Nov 1966: 1, 23; Dick Schaap, “Police Celebrate;” New York World Journal Tribune; 9 Nov 1966; Algernon D. Black Papers; Box 26, Civilian Complaint Review Board – 4. Joe Flaherty, writing in the Village Voice, witnessed Cassese’s speech and wrote, “If there had been a speech teacher with a gun in the audience we would have had the Ford [sic] Theatre all over again.” “Strange Bedfellows Bust up a Board;” Village Voice; 17 Nov 1966; Algernon D. Black Papers; Box 26, Civilian Complaint Review Board – 4; John Garabedian, “The Review Defeat: An Analysis,” New York Post 10 Nov 1966: 45.

[8] https://www.thecity.nyc/2020/6/1/21277684/nyc-pba-police-union-poised-to-tap-warchest-to-shield-nypd-discipline-records-amid-george-floyd; https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/court-allows-very-temporary-stay-publication-nypd-misconduct