As members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees who are committed to fighting racial and economic injustice, we stand in strong support of the Black Lives Matter movement and an AFSCME that is cop-free.

On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer killed 46-year-old George Floyd, a Black man, by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes while he pleaded for air. The Black community repeatedly faces the deaths of loved ones like Breonna Taylor--a Black woman murdered by police while sleeping in her bed--to police violence and anti-Black racism.

AFSCME claims to be dedicated to racial and economic justice, but its coordinated actions, as seen throughout the resolutions process at our union’s 2020 convention in August, move at best to "limit" policies and practices that harm Black and working-class people in an effort to appease rather than radically transform policing.

At convention, AFSCME:

• Refused to consider a resolution to abolish cash bail, a debt and poverty trap for poor Black & Brown people that furthers the wealth gap in America.

• Refused to consider a resolution to end no-knock warrants, which have disproportionately killed and victimized people of color.

• Refused to consider a resolution to redistribute funding from the police to community-based solutions like mental health services, education, and housing.

• Refused to consider resolutions to disaffiliate from its police union locals.

• Instead, AFSCME crafted and passed their own resolution that calls to merely “limit” cash bail and no-knock warrants, refuses to redistribute funding from police, and reaffirms its support of police unions internally.

• Most disturbing of all, AFSCME used this same resolution to reaffirm its material support for all law enforcement officers facing civil suits and court cases for misconduct, even though AFSCME Pres. Saunders said that “union contracts should not be construed as a shield for misconduct or criminal behavior.”

Cop unions do not belong in AFSCME. At its root, policing is both anti-worker and anti-Black: modern policing in the US has its origins in slave patrols, and during the post-Civil War era police regularly engaged in union-busting.

Police unions exist within labor organizations like AFSCME and the AFL-CIO, but share little solidarity with Black and brown people or the poor and working class, as evidenced by their favor among conservatives and support of extreme Right Wing candidates like Trump. Police unions have also advocated for disproportionate funding to militarize police departments, diverting funding away from public services that our communities need.

We believe that police unions will continue to uphold these systems of oppression as long as they exist and hold power. We also believe that the labor movement is a crucial component of racial justice, and that AFSCME cannot continue to benefit from the image and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King while protecting the forces that enable and perpetuate white supremacy by offering mild “reforms” with no real impact -- in fact, that is exactly what happened at AFSCME’s convention in 2016, but our resolutions did nothing to stop the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others.

Dr. King wrote from a Birmingham prison that "freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." In 1968, our union led the drive to win bargaining rights for the sanitation workers of Memphis—an all–African American workforce who were savagely attacked by the all-white city cops during a peaceful demonstration. At the same time, AFSCME was actively organizing cops in other cities.

Now is the time to choose a side--we can no longer have it both ways. As former AFSCME president Wurf once said, ‘this union will go to the wall for you, but if you’re going to be racists or fascists, get lost.’