So what's the deal with cops (esp. Boston)?

[mrgorth]

You know, I'm Irish Catholic. Lots of my family were cops. I like cops as long as they're not abusing their power. Don't cops have union? Aren't unions usually democratic?

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/8553928.htm

BOSTON - The Republican-friendly police union in Boston is threatening to play "bad cop" at the Democratic National Convention this summer even as hometown candidate John Kerry prepares to accept his party's nomination for president.

The 1,400-member Boston Police Patrolmen's Association plans a picket to help induce the city to accept its pay demands - an in-your-face tactic to embarrass the city and convention delegates usually sympathetic to union efforts. In the past, the union has held true to its threats by picketing state party gatherings.

The police association, which has a long tradition of endorsing Republican candidates for president, has played havoc with presidential politics before. In 1988, it delivered a blow to Democrat Michael Dukakis' bid by endorsing Republican George Bush. The image of the elder Bush standing with uniformed officers in Boston sent a symbolic message nationwide that their hometown candidate was soft on crime.

I mean, is it just all the machismo?

[prodigal_green]

1. NYC cops have applied for a permit

to demonstrate against the Republicans.

Which do you think looks worse?

[Warpy]

2. Boston cops are a breed apart

...and tended to swing to the hard right during the 1960s and stayed there during the busing fiasco int he 1970s. They live outside the city in places like West Roxbury and Hyde Park, working class suburbs. They are GOP because they are still fighting the unwashed hippies, even though most of those hippies fled the city 25 years ago, abandoning it to yuppies who gentrified all the old rooming houses back into chichi mansions.

Boston is home to lots of colleges, big and small, and those cops spend a lot of their time curtailing the exuberance of the average college kid away from home for the first time. They see the Young Repuglican types as being more orderly (even though the only difference is that they get toasted and puke all over everything while dressed in suits and ties). This may be another reason they cling to the GOP. GOP drunks wear the uniform of the ruling class.

Like any cops, there are good ones and bad ones and the majority in the middle. The above may explain why they're suckers for the wrong party.