vox--2020-06-23--Why it’s so damn hot in the Arctic right now

Over the weekend , Verkhoyansk , Russia , hit a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit .
Researchers are still working to confirm the result , which may be recognized as a record high for the Arctic Circle .
And the small Siberian town isn ’ t alone .
Much of Russia has been facing a heat wave in recent days , with multiple locations reporting temperatures as high as 113 degrees on June 19 .
The surprising warmth was also felt in other parts of the Arctic like northern Canada and Scandinavia .
It ’ s part of a pattern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are ordinarily some of the coolest parts of the planet .
The current searing weather of the region stands to have global consequences and foreshadows the future of the Arctic , and the planet , as the climate changes .
Russia is emerging from its hottest winter on record , and since the beginning of the year , temperatures have averaged 12.4 degrees Fahrenheit above what ’ s typical in Siberia .
And this polar heat has led to a string of woes for the region , from a major oil spill stemming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Arctic circle in Russia and Alaska .
Several key factors aligned in recent months to heat up the Arctic .
And they ’ re building on top of long-term warming trends .
That means more of this kind of heat is likely in the future , and so are thawing , fires , and climate disruption .
Why parts of the Arctic are so searingly hot right now The term “ heat wave ” is a relative measure .
What temperatures count as a heat wave differ depending on the regional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as temperatures above the 95th percentile of the historical distribution for a region .
So the bar for a heat wave in the Arctic is considerably lower than in lower latitudes .
But the recent temperatures in the far north would be sweltering just about anywhere .
A heat wave begins with high atmospheric pressure building up over an area .
A downward-moving air column compresses the air that ’ s closer to the ground , holding it still and heating it up .
That high pressure also forces clouds away and around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of light between the ground and the sun .
Over a period of days and weeks , the ground absorbs sunlight , and with stagnant air , heat accumulates and temperatures rise .
“ There ’ s nothing coming in and nothing going out , ” explained Walt Meier , a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder .
“ It ’ s kind of like an oven basically.
” That ’ s the general formula for heat waves around the world .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ contributing to the Arctic one .
In northern latitudes during the summer , there is near-continuous sunlight — even at night .
That allows heat to accumulate faster than in areas that experience sunsets and can cool off in the evening .
Another factor this year was the lack of snow .
With an unusually warm winter , less snow built up across parts of the Arctic , and with a warm spring , much of it melted away sooner than usual .
“ The snow is very reflective of the sunlight , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the snow went away earlier , so then you have the bare ground that can absorb more solar energy.
” The warmer ground also dries out in the heat .
With less moisture , there is less evaporation that can cool the surrounding air .
“ The drier ground and the air over the top of it makes it more susceptible to rapid warming when you have the right conditions like we ’ re seeing now , ” Meier said .
The Arctic heat wave highlights the impacts that lie ahead from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wave , past may be prologue .
Last year , amid temperatures that were 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average for the region , forest fires burned over a near-record area , sending choking smoke into cities like Novosibirsk , Russia ’ s third-largest city .
The plumes even reached the western United States .
Siberia also saw massive fires in 2018 , 2017 , and 2016 .
Forest fires naturally occur in Siberia and can occasionally spark north of the Arctic circle , often ignited by lightning in dry forests in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recent years were unusually large and close to population centers .
The fires burning in the region now could continue to spread as the summer season warms the region further .
One of the overarching trends behind the heat wave and the wildfires is climate change .
Earth as a whole is warming up due to human emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide .
But every place isn ’ t warming up at the same rate ; the Arctic is warming at double the rate of the rest of the planet , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effects of climate change are felt in the region .
The north pole also presents a window into the future for the rest of the world .
Those higher average temperatures mean extreme heat will become even more likely and more intense , exacerbating threats like forest fires as vegetation dries out .
“ The wildfires definitely come from the extreme heat and the dryness , ” Meier said .
The loss of these ancient , slow-growing forests will release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that will take decades to reabsorb , further @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Arctic is also thawing permafrost , which releases even more carbon into the atmosphere .
And while it ’ s summer in the Arctic right now , the region has also experienced heat waves in the winter .
In fact , researchers have found that in general , winters are warming faster than summers .
That ’ s part of the reason why the Arctic is now losing sea ice at its fastest rate in 1,500 years .
Antarctica is also warming up .
Earlier this year , the continent broke two high-temperature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ temperatures poised to rise further , more heat , thawing , melting , and fire lie ahead for the Arctic .
“ This year it ’ s in Siberia .
Next year it might be in Alaska or northern Canada or it might be in Scandinavia , ” Meier said .
“ On average , what we consider to be extreme events are going to become more and more normal.
” Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider @ @ @ @ @ @ @

The Arctic is continuing to swelter in a heat wave, as temperatures around the Arctic Ocean this week top 93 degrees Fahrenheit.
Extremely hot again on the fringe of the Arctic Ocean.
An astonishing + 34 °C has just been recorded at a latitude of 73 °N today in Russia. This is about + 20-25 °C warmer than normal.
Note how much open water there is compared to normal. Sea ice is taking a hit. pic.twitter.com/y0w5PLjkHx — Scott From Scotland (@ScottDuncanWX) June 30, 2020
The recent heat follows an even more stunning data point: Last month, Verkhoyansk, Russia, hit a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers are still working to confirm the result, which may be recognized as a record high for the Arctic Circle. This is a town that holds the record for the coldest temperature above the Arctic Circle, -90 degrees Fahrenheit in 1892.
“That is a fantastical degree,” said Roman Vilfand, head of Russia’s weather service, during a press conference this week.
And the small Siberian town isn’t alone. Much of Russia has been facing a heat wave in recent weeks, with multiple locations reporting temperatures as high as 113 degrees on June 19. The surprising warmth was also felt in other parts of the Arctic like northern Canada and Scandinavia.
It’s part of a pattern of soaring temperatures this year in what are ordinarily some of the chilliest parts of the planet. The current searing weather of the region stands to have global consequences and foreshadows the future of the Arctic, and the planet, as the climate changes.
Russia is emerging from its hottest winter on record, and since the beginning of the year, temperatures have averaged 12.4 degrees Fahrenheit above what’s typical in Siberia.
And this polar heat has led to a string of woes for the region, from a major oil spill stemming from thawing permafrost to early wildfires north of the Arctic circle in Russia and Alaska.
Several key factors aligned in recent months to heat up the Arctic. And they’re building on top of long-term warming trends. That means more of this kind of heat is likely in the future, and so are thawing, fires, and climate disruption.
Why parts of the Arctic are searingly hot right now
The term “heat wave” is a relative measure. What temperatures count as a heat wave differ depending on the regional climate. It’s usually defined as temperatures above the 95th percentile of the historical distribution for a region.
So the bar for a heat wave in the Arctic is considerably lower than in lower latitudes. But the recent temperatures in the far north would be sweltering just about anywhere.
A heat wave begins with high atmospheric pressure building up over an area. A downward-moving air column compresses the air that’s closer to the ground, holding it still and heating it up. That high pressure also forces clouds away and around the column, creating an unobstructed line of light between the ground and the sun.
Over a period of days and weeks, the ground absorbs sunlight, and with stagnant air, heat accumulates and temperatures rise. “There’s nothing coming in and nothing going out,” explained Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It’s kind of like an oven basically.”
That’s the general formula for heat waves around the world. But there are also several unique ingredients contributing to the Arctic one.
In northern latitudes during the summer, there is near-continuous sunlight — even at night. That allows heat to accumulate faster than in areas that experience sunsets and can cool off in the evening.
Number of wildfires in the Arctic part of Yakutia continues to rise, with towns as high north as Chersky and Srednekolymsk reporting fires getting really close and threatening power lines #wildfires2020 #wildfires2020Siberia pic.twitter.com/cJtVbxrKox — The Siberian Times (@siberian_times) June 23, 2020
Another factor this year was the lack of snow. With an unusually warm winter, less snow built up across parts of the Arctic, and with a warm spring, much of it melted away sooner than usual. “The snow is very reflective of the sunlight,” said Meier. “This year, the snow went away earlier, so then you have the bare ground that can absorb more solar energy.”
The warmer ground also dries out in the heat. With less moisture, there is less evaporation that can cool the surrounding air. “The drier ground and the air over the top of it makes it more susceptible to rapid warming when you have the right conditions like we’re seeing now,” Meier said.
The Arctic heat wave highlights the impacts that lie ahead from climate change
For Siberia’s heat wave, past may be prologue. Last year, amid temperatures that were 14 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average for the region, forest fires burned over a near-record area, sending choking smoke into cities like Novosibirsk, Russia’s third-largest city. The plumes even reached the western United States.
Siberia also saw massive fires in 2018, 2017, and 2016. Forest fires naturally occur in Siberia and can occasionally spark north of the Arctic circle, often ignited by lightning in dry forests in summer months. But the blazes in recent years were unusually large and close to population centers. The fires burning in the region now could continue to spread as the summer season warms the region further.
One of the overarching trends behind the heat wave and the wildfires is climate change. Earth as a whole is warming up due to human emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. But every place isn’t warming up at the same rate; the Arctic is warming at double the rate of the rest of the planet, which is why some of the earliest effects of climate change are felt in the region. The north pole also presents a window into the future for the rest of the world.
Those higher average temperatures mean extreme heat will become even more likely and more intense, exacerbating threats like forest fires as vegetation dries out. “The wildfires definitely come from the extreme heat and the dryness,” Meier said.
The loss of these ancient, slow-growing forests will release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that will take decades to reabsorb, further warming the planet. Warming in the Arctic is also thawing permafrost, which releases even more carbon into the atmosphere.
And while it’s summer in the Arctic right now, the region has also experienced heat waves in the winter. In fact, researchers have found that in general, winters are warming faster than summers. That’s part of the reason why the Arctic is now losing sea ice at its fastest rate in 1,500 years.
Antarctica is also warming up. Earlier this year, the continent broke two high-temperature records within a week.
With average temperatures poised to rise further, more heat, thawing, melting, and fire lie ahead for the Arctic. “This year it’s in Siberia. Next year it might be in Alaska or northern Canada or it might be in Scandinavia,” Meier said. “On average, what we consider to be extreme events are going to become more and more normal.”


vox--2020-06-23--TikTok offered details about how its most popular feed works. Experts seem unimpressed.

Faced with longstanding questions and speculation about how its popular “ For You ” feed works , TikTok released some details about how the feed works in a blog post last week .
The move comes amid a broader effort by TikTok to appear more transparent , especially as the company faces accusations of both political and aesthetic censorship as well as growing pressure from lawmakers in the United States over TikTok ’ s relationship with its Beijing-based parent company , ByteDance .
But TikTok ’ s post told a familiar story about how feed algorithms work .
According to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ variety of factors based on how users engage with the app influence what ends up in their For You feed ; some of those factors matter more than others ; and they ’ re all in service of a secret , technical sauce that the platform uses to make the best guess as to what it predicts users will want to see .
This workflow is not so different from the way other social media platforms , like Facebook , describe their feeds .
Companies like TikTok generally want to maximize engagement and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helps them sell advertisements .
Exactly how they do that is meant to be a bit of a mystery .
Among other things , not revealing everything that happens behinds the scenes helps companies dictate users ’ understanding of certain feeds and their conception of algorithms in general .
So while we now know a little bit more about how TikTok ’ s algorithm works , what TikTok chooses not to share is perhaps more important .
“ The more that they can keep close to the vest , the more ambiguous it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cotter , a doctoral student at Michigan State University who studies public awareness of algorithms .
“ Without the heat on them , they ’ re kind of able to design and redesign as they see fit without being sort of weighed down by either regulation , lawsuits , [ and ] users.
” Of course , TikTok is by no means unique in choosing to not reveal the exact formula behind its algorithm .
But its not-so-big reveal about the For You algorithm serves as a reminder that when platforms say they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their algorithms work , they ’ re often not telling us that much .
And as long as they don ’ t reveal exactly how these algorithms impact users — and different types of users — people take it upon themselves to figure out how social feed algorithms work .
Some may draw conclusions those platforms don ’ t necessarily agree with .
TikTok sounds a lot like platforms describing how their feeds work In its recent blog post , TikTok explained that everyone ’ s For You page is unique , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explicit information that informs what videos they might see in the future .
Some factors , like whether you watch longer videos to the end , matter more than others , such as whether a viewer and a creator are based in the same country .
For users who are just starting on the app , their initial preferences — their stated interests , their response to a general video feed , and so forth — help inform what the For You feed looks like .
As TikTok collects more information from that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shows up in the For You feed continues to be adjusted based on what the algorithm thinks they ’ d be interested in .
Predictive models are also involved , similar to many other recommendation systems .
“ When you decide to follow new accounts , for example , that action will help refine your recommendations too , as will exploring hashtags , sounds , effects , and trending topics on the Discover tab , ” TikTok said in its blog post .
The company says that a user ’ s feedback , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can also play a role in what appears in the For You feed .
TikTok may also prevent certain types of content , such as “ graphic medical procedures or legal consumption of regulated goods ” from ending up there .
Acknowledging that filter bubbles can be a problem , TikTok says that it also tries to diversify users ’ feeds .
Notably , the company said that the follower counts of a user posting a video — as well as the view counts of previous videos posted by that user — don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up in the For You feed .
The company did admit that “ a video is likely to receive more views if posted by an account that has more followers.
” But how revealing is what TikTok shared ?
Not very , explained some researchers .
Marc Faddoul , a research scientist at the University of California Berkeley , said in an email that what TikTok discussed was , “ from a research perspective , useless.
” Faddoul added that “ everything they say is obvious ” and flagged as unsurprising “ the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ will decrease the prominence of similar content [ and ] listing all the types of user interactions which ‘ might ’ be used to personalize the recommendations.
” The details in TikTok ’ s recent post also largely match up with how companies have previously characterized the algorithms that drive their own feeds .
Consider how Facebook describes the factors that play into its News Feed .
Facebook acknowledges that “ thousands of signals that may be considered for News Feed Ranking , ” and “ some things have a smaller influence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ similar to what we know about Instagram ’ s algorithm as well .
Cotter , from Michigan State , also noted that a lot in TikTok ’ s post “ very closely resembles what we ’ ve seen from companies in the past.
” She pointed to her previous research on a series of Facebook blog posts meant to describe the News Feed .
Cotter and her colleagues found that the company was more focused on explaining why the feed works as it does , rather than exactly how .
Nicolas Kayser-Bril , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that focuses on algorithmic decision-making , came to a similar conclusion .
“ The language reminds me of what Facebook and Google write in their ‘ Why am I seeing this ad ?
’ sections : we learn that ‘ a number of factors ’ are at play , ” Kayser-Bril said in an email .
“ Absent an independent audit of TikTok ’ s algorithm , there is no reason to believe that we know more about it after reading the statement ( we certainly know more about how the company would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but this is a wholly different thing ) .
” TikTok would not say how many total factors can influence the feed .
The blog post simply says that “ recommendations are based on a number of factors ” and provide different categories of those factors .
So what kinds of information would be helpful in actually understanding how TikTok and its For You algorithm ?
Christo Wilson , a computer science professor at Northeastern , argues that the nuances of how the software understands content is most revealing .
“ You ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the nitty-gritty details of what kind of features or variables are going into recommendations , ” Wilson said .
“ They look at hashtags .
That ’ s , like , the most obvious thing .
But are they looking at things like sentiment ?
” TikTok ’ s blog post didn ’ t just come out of nowhere .
Users have long been engrossed in figuring out how to get videos in the For You feed .
Some TikTok influencers have even turned to making videos to share their tips on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and some have attempted to run their own pseudo-experiments to see what gets people onto the page .
Overall , the inner workings of the For You algorithm are at least a somewhat significant source of interest on the app itself .
Videos with the # TikTokAlgorithm hashtag have garnered more than 130 million views .
All that is great for TikTok , which wins when people spend more time on its app trying to figure out how its algorithm works in an attempt to go viral .
As Vox ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Investigative reporting revealed other factors that might have previously been at play within the feed — factors that went unaddressed in TikTok ’ s recent blog post .
Earlier this year , the Intercept obtained internal policy documents that encouraged content moderators to limit videos appearing in the “ For You ” feed that were deemed “ undesirable , ” including those featuring people with an “ abnormal body shape ” and “ ugly facial looks.
” TikTok also reportedly reached out to some high-profile users of its app to update them about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political speech on its livestreaming feature .
TikTok content moderators based in the US similarly told the Washington Post that they were instructed by TikTok staff based in Beijing to censor political speech as well as content deemed “ vulgar.
” These reports echoed content moderation documents acquired by the Guardian in 2019 as well as earlier reporting from the German site Netzpolitik that TikTok had discriminated against people with disabilities , as well as LBGTQ and fat people .
“ The guidelines referenced were a misguided attempt to reduce cyberbullying , drafted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they had long been out of use by the time that article was published , ” a TikTok spokesperson told Recode .
“ Today , we take a nuanced approach to moderation , including building out a global team with deep industry experience and working with an external content advisory council of subject matter experts.
” TikTok announced earlier this month that it would stop using content moderators based in China .
This was around the same time that the company faced accusations of political and racist censorship in the midst of anti-police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it had job postings for content moderation staff in cities including São Paulo , Brazil , and Seoul , South Korea . )
In May , TikTok users participated in a campaign that intended to highlight the work of black users as well as raise awareness of censorship on the platform .
TikTok released a statement in June , acknowledging the campaign and committing to invest in “ moderation strategies to better handle potentially violative content , ” while pledging “ to make sure [ its policies and practices ] do not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who they are.
” TikTok also has a transparency problem , but it ’ s not alone TikTok has also been working to quell criticism that its platform isn ’ t transparent .
The company released its first transparency report in 2019 , detailing government requests for data and content removal .
Notably , China was not on the list .
TikTok also announced this year that it would launch a transparency center in Los Angeles focused on “ moderation and data practices.
” The company ’ s recent blog post about the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that center will eventually be able to learn more about how its algorithms operate and review the company ’ s source code .
But its recent blog post doesn ’ t add up to complete transparency .
Algorithm Watch ’ s Kayser-Bril said “ such statements are just a declaration of intent ” and that the transparency standard ought to be an independent audit , in which researchers are given access to production servers and databases .
Kayser-Bril noted that the company ’ s mention of providing access to the source code was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” but still not sufficient .
Notably , TikTok would not say who those researchers are or will be , or if they ’ d be provided data beyond the company ’ s source code .
Faddoul , the Berkeley researcher , suggested that TikTok should provide estimates of how much impact factors like view count have in the For You algorithm as well as explicit guidelines that moderators consider , including the weight that moderator decisions have on the algorithm .
TikTok has not released content moderation enforcement statistics , which would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is taken down and for what reasons ( Facebook does this in its community standards enforcement reports ) .
Faddoul added that details in the internal content moderation documents flagged by the Intercept include ones that TikTok itself should be publicly disclosing .
While TikTok does lay out its community guidelines , the company doesn ’ t seem to release a content enforcement report ( Facebook does ) .
While TikTok does acknowledge how the For You feed generally works , the platform doesn ’ t discuss the impact that the feed has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have raised concerns about censorship , for instance , and questions about the true influence of content moderators as well as the total number of factors that can actually influence what shows up in the For You the feed remain unanswered .
Ultimately , Cotter said , to really understand how an algorithm works , you need empirical analysis — a study of how the system impacts users — to see what it ’ s doing and how that affects users .
This type of research is sometimes conducted by platforms themselves and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even if TikTok were doing empirical analyses , it ’ s not clear whether the company would be acting on it .
Earlier this year , the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook failed to act on internal research finding that the site was making people more divisive and polarizing .
Social media companies aren ’ t necessarily compelled to answer to outside researchers either .
A recent audit of the Instagram algorithm reportedly found that pictures that featured more bare skin were more likely to be boosted on the platform .
Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ questions , which were sent about a month before the study was published by AlgorithmWatch .
A day after publication , Facebook criticized the study as flawed and explained that the platform surfaces “ posts based on interests , timeliness of posts , and other factors to help people discover content.
” So what ’ s the point of TikTok , Facebook , or any social media giant publicly announcing some vague details about how their algorithm works ?
“ They ’ re PR memos , ” says Cotter .
“ They ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the way they want them to be presented and establish the rubric for how they should be evaluated.
” Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network .
All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Faced with longstanding questions and speculation about how its popular “For You” feed works, TikTok released some details about how the feed works in a blog post last week. The move comes amid a broader effort by TikTok to appear more transparent, especially as the company faces accusations of both political and aesthetic censorship as well as growing pressure from lawmakers in the United States over TikTok’s relationship with its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance.
But TikTok’s post told a familiar story about how feed algorithms work. According to TikTok’s recent announcement, a variety of factors based on how users engage with the app influence what ends up in their For You feed; some of those factors matter more than others; and they’re all in service of a secret, technical sauce that the platform uses to make the best guess as to what it predicts users will want to see. This workflow is not so different from the way other social media platforms, like Facebook, describe their feeds.
Companies like TikTok generally want to maximize engagement and time spent on their platform, which helps them sell advertisements. Exactly how they do that is meant to be a bit of a mystery. Among other things, not revealing everything that happens behinds the scenes helps companies dictate users’ understanding of certain feeds and their conception of algorithms in general. So while we now know a little bit more about how TikTok’s algorithm works, what TikTok chooses not to share is perhaps more important.
“The more that they can keep close to the vest, the more ambiguous it is to understand,” said Kelley Cotter, a doctoral student at Michigan State University who studies public awareness of algorithms. “Without the heat on them, they’re kind of able to design and redesign as they see fit without being sort of weighed down by either regulation, lawsuits, [and] users.”
Of course, TikTok is by no means unique in choosing to not reveal the exact formula behind its algorithm. But its not-so-big reveal about the For You algorithm serves as a reminder that when platforms say they’re telling us more about how their algorithms work, they’re often not telling us that much. And as long as they don’t reveal exactly how these algorithms impact users — and different types of users — people take it upon themselves to figure out how social feed algorithms work. Some may draw conclusions those platforms don’t necessarily agree with.
TikTok sounds a lot like platforms describing how their feeds work
In its recent blog post, TikTok explained that everyone’s For You page is unique, and users provide the app with implicit and explicit information that informs what videos they might see in the future.
Some factors, like whether you watch longer videos to the end, matter more than others, such as whether a viewer and a creator are based in the same country. For users who are just starting on the app, their initial preferences — their stated interests, their response to a general video feed, and so forth — help inform what the For You feed looks like. As TikTok collects more information from that user and users like them, what shows up in the For You feed continues to be adjusted based on what the algorithm thinks they’d be interested in. Predictive models are also involved, similar to many other recommendation systems.
“When you decide to follow new accounts, for example, that action will help refine your recommendations too, as will exploring hashtags, sounds, effects, and trending topics on the Discover tab,” TikTok said in its blog post.
The company says that a user’s feedback, like tapping “not interested,” can also play a role in what appears in the For You feed. TikTok may also prevent certain types of content, such as “graphic medical procedures or legal consumption of regulated goods” from ending up there. Acknowledging that filter bubbles can be a problem, TikTok says that it also tries to diversify users’ feeds. Notably, the company said that the follower counts of a user posting a video — as well as the view counts of previous videos posted by that user — don’t directly influence whether they end up in the For You feed. The company did admit that “a video is likely to receive more views if posted by an account that has more followers.”
But how revealing is what TikTok shared? Not very, explained some researchers.
Marc Faddoul, a research scientist at the University of California Berkeley, said in an email that what TikTok discussed was, “from a research perspective, useless.” Faddoul added that “everything they say is obvious” and flagged as unsurprising “the fact that clicking on ‘not interested’ will decrease the prominence of similar content [and] listing all the types of user interactions which ‘might’ be used to personalize the recommendations.”
The details in TikTok’s recent post also largely match up with how companies have previously characterized the algorithms that drive their own feeds. Consider how Facebook describes the factors that play into its News Feed. Facebook acknowledges that “thousands of signals that may be considered for News Feed Ranking,” and “some things have a smaller influence over what you see.” This seems similar to what we know about Instagram’s algorithm as well.
Cotter, from Michigan State, also noted that a lot in TikTok’s post “very closely resembles what we’ve seen from companies in the past.” She pointed to her previous research on a series of Facebook blog posts meant to describe the News Feed. Cotter and her colleagues found that the company was more focused on explaining why the feed works as it does, rather than exactly how.
Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a reporter at AlgorithmWatch, a nonprofit that focuses on algorithmic decision-making, came to a similar conclusion.
“The language reminds me of what Facebook and Google write in their ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ sections: we learn that ‘a number of factors’ are at play,” Kayser-Bril said in an email. “Absent an independent audit of TikTok’s algorithm, there is no reason to believe that we know more about it after reading the statement (we certainly know more about how the company would like its algorithm to be seen, but this is a wholly different thing).”
TikTok would not say how many total factors can influence the feed. The blog post simply says that “recommendations are based on a number of factors” and provide different categories of those factors.
So what kinds of information would be helpful in actually understanding how TikTok and its For You algorithm? Christo Wilson, a computer science professor at Northeastern, argues that the nuances of how the software understands content is most revealing.
“You’d have to get a lot more of the nitty-gritty details of what kind of features or variables are going into recommendations,” Wilson said. “They look at hashtags. That’s, like, the most obvious thing. But are they looking at things like sentiment?”
TikTok has an image problem
TikTok’s blog post didn’t just come out of nowhere. Users have long been engrossed in figuring out how to get videos in the For You feed. Some TikTok influencers have even turned to making videos to share their tips on how to reach the For You feed, and some have attempted to run their own pseudo-experiments to see what gets people onto the page. Overall, the inner workings of the For You algorithm are at least a somewhat significant source of interest on the app itself. Videos with the #TikTokAlgorithm hashtag have garnered more than 130 million views.
All that is great for TikTok, which wins when people spend more time on its app trying to figure out how its algorithm works in an attempt to go viral. As Vox’s Rebecca Jennings wrote earlier this year:
Its algorithm serves trending content to a wide audience, so even accounts with a handful of followers can go hugely viral within the span of a few hours. Followers are racked up far more quickly than on other platforms, so having tens of thousands of them is relatively standard for anyone who’s had even a minor hit.
Investigative reporting revealed other factors that might have previously been at play within the feed — factors that went unaddressed in TikTok’s recent blog post.
Earlier this year, the Intercept obtained internal policy documents that encouraged content moderators to limit videos appearing in the “For You” feed that were deemed “undesirable,” including those featuring people with an “abnormal body shape” and “ugly facial looks.” TikTok also reportedly reached out to some high-profile users of its app to update them about changing rules, and the company censored political speech on its livestreaming feature.
TikTok content moderators based in the US similarly told the Washington Post that they were instructed by TikTok staff based in Beijing to censor political speech as well as content deemed “vulgar.” These reports echoed content moderation documents acquired by the Guardian in 2019 as well as earlier reporting from the German site Netzpolitik that TikTok had discriminated against people with disabilities, as well as LBGTQ and fat people.
“The guidelines referenced were a misguided attempt to reduce cyberbullying, drafted for use in limited countries, and they had long been out of use by the time that article was published,” a TikTok spokesperson told Recode. “Today, we take a nuanced approach to moderation, including building out a global team with deep industry experience and working with an external content advisory council of subject matter experts.”
TikTok announced earlier this year it would stop using content moderators based in China to screen content from outside that country. (As of Monday, it had job postings for content moderation staff in cities including São Paulo, Brazil, and Seoul, South Korea.)
In May, TikTok users participated in a campaign that intended to highlight the work of black users as well as raise awareness of censorship on the platform. TikTok released a statement in June, acknowledging the campaign and committing to invest in “moderation strategies to better handle potentially violative content,” while pledging “to make sure [its policies and practices] do not inadvertently limit exposure for creators based on who they are.”
TikTok also has a transparency problem, but it’s not alone
TikTok has also been working to quell criticism that its platform isn’t transparent. The company released its first transparency report in 2019, detailing government requests for data and content removal. Notably, China was not on the list. TikTok also announced this year that it would launch a transparency center in Los Angeles focused on “moderation and data practices.” The company’s recent blog post about the For You algorithm said that experts visiting that center will eventually be able to learn more about how its algorithms operate and review the company’s source code.
But its recent blog post doesn’t add up to complete transparency. Algorithm Watch’s Kayser-Bril said “such statements are just a declaration of intent” and that the transparency standard ought to be an independent audit, in which researchers are given access to production servers and databases. Kayser-Bril noted that the company’s mention of providing access to the source code was “a step in the right direction” but still not sufficient.
Notably, TikTok would not say who those researchers are or will be, or if they’d be provided data beyond the company’s source code.
Faddoul, the Berkeley researcher, suggested that TikTok should provide estimates of how much impact factors like view count have in the For You algorithm as well as explicit guidelines that moderators consider, including the weight that moderator decisions have on the algorithm. TikTok has not released content moderation enforcement statistics, which would include concrete figures of how much content is taken down and for what reasons (Facebook does this in its community standards enforcement reports).
Faddoul added that details in the internal content moderation documents flagged by the Intercept include ones that TikTok itself should be publicly disclosing. While TikTok does lay out its community guidelines, the company doesn’t seem to release a content enforcement report (Facebook does).
While TikTok does acknowledge how the For You feed generally works, the platform doesn’t discuss the impact that the feed has actually had on users. Black creators have raised concerns about censorship, for instance, and questions about the true influence of content moderators as well as the total number of factors that can actually influence what shows up in the For You the feed remain unanswered.
Ultimately, Cotter said, to really understand how an algorithm works, you need empirical analysis — a study of how the system impacts users — to see what it’s doing and how that affects users. This type of research is sometimes conducted by platforms themselves and not released to the public. But even if TikTok were doing empirical analyses, it’s not clear whether the company would be acting on it. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook failed to act on internal research finding that the site was making people more divisive and polarizing.
Social media companies aren’t necessarily compelled to answer to outside researchers either. A recent audit of the Instagram algorithm reportedly found that pictures that featured more bare skin were more likely to be boosted on the platform. Facebook didn’t answer the researchers’ questions, which were sent about a month before the study was published by AlgorithmWatch. A day after publication, Facebook criticized the study as flawed and explained that the platform surfaces “posts based on interests, timeliness of posts, and other factors to help people discover content.”
So what’s the point of TikTok, Facebook, or any social media giant publicly announcing some vague details about how their algorithm works?
“They’re PR memos,” says Cotter. “They’re trying to present these systems in the way they want them to be presented and establish the rubric for how they should be evaluated.”
Correction: A previous version of this post stated that TikTok stopped using content moderators in China earlier this month. In fact, the practice stopped earlier this year. The post has been updated to clarify the timing and scope of the change.
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.


vox--2020-06-24--How police unions became so powerful — and how they can be tamed

How police unions became so powerful — and how they can be tamed Share All sharing options for : How police unions became so powerful — and how they can be tamed In the wake of George Floyd ’ s killing by now-former Minneapolis Police Department ( MPD ) officer Derek Chauvin , few have been inclined to defend Chauvin or his colleagues who stood by and watched as he suffocated Floyd to death .
Few , that is , except Bob Kroll .
In a letter to membership , Kroll — the president of the MPD ’ s police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police brutality as a “ terrorist movement ” and defended the officers who killed Floyd and were subsequently fired , arguing they were “ terminated without due process ” and lamenting , “ What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd.
” ( Floyd had a criminal record , but mostly for nonviolent drug and theft charges . )
Kroll ’ s statements illustrate a central challenge in American efforts to transform policing : Police unions , the groups that represent police officers , are a powerful force @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police accountable .
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told the New York Times that Kroll and his union are a major reason it ’ s hard to bring order to the Minneapolis Police Department , saying they create a “ nearly impenetrable barrier ” to reform .
It ’ s not just in Minneapolis .
Around the country , as protesters take to the streets to condemn police violence and demand change , police unions have emerged as the protesters ’ most vocal and implacable foe .
In Buffalo , the city ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actively defended officers who pushed 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino to the ground .
When the officers who pushed Gugino were seen leaving their arraignment on felony assault charges , a large crowd of police union members and sympathizers was seen cheering them on .
In New York State broadly , police unions led opposition to newly signed legislation that prevents police from hiding misconduct complaints and criminalizes chokeholds .
These are hardly aberrations .
Police unions in general have become the most vocal interest group opposing criminal justice reforms and especially reforms to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Historically , they have , unlike most unions , been profoundly conservative institutions that uphold a particular white ethnic , “ law and order ” -focused variant of right-wing politics .
They have been among Donald Trump ’ s most fervent allies ; Kroll spoke at a Trump rally in 2018 , and the International Union of Police Associations has already endorsed Trump for reelection .
The foregrounding of police unions ’ role in the warping of American law enforcement has also prompted some difficult conversations on the left .
The presence of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s unapologetically right-wing and hostile to Black communities has tested the limits of solidarity from more left-wing unionists .
As long as police forces exist , police unions will exist in some form as well , even if just as political pressure groups .
It is therefore natural to think that reforming police unions in some way must be part of the broader agenda of changing policing in America .
They are among the biggest stakeholders in the way the system works now ; without addressing their power , other reforms may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brief history of police , unions , and police unions The creation of police unions was a somewhat ironic twist in American labor history , University of Minnesota labor historian Will Jones tells me , given that the creation of urban police forces was largely spurred by a desire to contain union activism and protest .
“ The whole creation of the police force in the late 19th century was largely in response to labor conflict , ” Jones says .
Police departments emerged and evolved as adjuncts to the sheriff ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Pinkertons ) that bosses typically enlisted to fight union activists .
The anniversary of the Haymarket affair of 1886 , in which an unknown assailant threw a bomb at Chicago police and the police responded by opening fire on a crowd of labor demonstrators , is still commemorated on May 1 as International Workers ’ Day in numerous countries worldwide .
Union demonstrators and police would square off repeatedly in ensuing decades : in Cleveland in 1894 , Philadelphia in 1910 , Minneapolis in 1934 , Chicago in 1937 , and Hilo @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many other incidents .
The anti-union role of police began to ebb in the first half of the 20th century with the coming of the New Deal and the Great Migration of Black workers from the South to Northern cities , says Aaron Bekemeyer , a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard whose dissertation documents the emergence of police unions in Philadelphia and nationally .
The New Deal , especially the National Labor Relations Act ( NLRA ) of 1935 , legalized a lot of union activity , including strikes , and so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from local police to federal bureaucrats .
The Great Migration , in turn , gave urban police another population to police , namely Black people .
“ Policing of Black neighborhoods , drug policing , gang policing become what these big-city police forces do , ” Bekemeyer says .
The trend of allowing public sector unions began in New York City , when Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. , the son of Sen. Robert Wagner who wrote the National Labor Relations Act , issued regulations that allowed collective bargaining by municipal employees in 1958 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and many states came after that .
In 1962 , the federal government under John F. Kennedy legalized collective bargaining for its employees .
The spread of this idea helped fuel the growth of teachers unions , sanitation workers unions , and other public employee unions — including police unions .
The rise in violent crime in the 1960s , riots in places like Watts in 1965 , Detroit and Newark in 1967 , and nationwide in 1968 , and the rise of tough-on-crime policing targeted at Black neighborhoods also enhanced the political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police unions say , ‘ Hey , we ’ re the ones doing this work and protecting you , implied white listener , from dangerous Black people , and you need the gains unions need .
Union interests are public interests , ’ ” says Bekemeyer .
While the jobs are very different in obvious ways , the rhetoric parallels arguments that teachers unions under leaders like Al Shanker were making to the public around the same time : that the demands teachers were making would help students and parents too , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ solidarity .
“ The stakes are very different because the jobs are very different , but it ’ s useful to see the police union movement as one of the most successful examples of social movement unionism , ” Bekemeyer notes .
Police unionism is just a very different kind of social movement unionism than that involved in , say , collaborations between civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin and union leaders like United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther during the postwar years .
Bekemeyer notes that police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tended disproportionately in the 1950s through 1970s to be working-class “ white ethnic ” conservatives : mostly Irish , but occasionally Italian or Polish , too .
“ It ’ s a broader white ethnic politics that uses the language of tradition , neighborhood integrity , hard work , etc.
, to defend segregated institutions that they benefit from , from schools to certain union jobs in the trade to religious institutions , ” Bekemeyer says .
This pattern comes through across the country , but Bekemeyer ’ s case study of Philadelphia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ politician there embodied this identity better than any other American official of the time : Frank Rizzo , who served as Philadelphia police commissioner from 1968 to 1971 and mayor from 1972 to 1980 .
Rizzo was about as blatant a racist as led a major American city in the modern era .
During his 1978 reelection bid , he urged supporters to “ Vote White ” ; he fervently fought efforts to desegregate Philadelphia schools and build public housing in white neighborhoods .
In a deposition , he stated he “ considered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black housing in that most tenants of public housing are Black .
Mayor Rizzo therefore felt that there should not be any public housing placed in White neighborhoods because people in White neighborhoods did not want Black people moving in with them.
” This extended to Rizzo ’ s governance of the police .
He once famously declared that his treatment of protesters would “ make Attila the Hun look like a fa**ot.
” As commissioner , he ordered a raid on Black Panther headquarters in which suspects were publicly stripped in front @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ordered police to beat stationary protesters with nightsticks .
On this , police unions were mostly a strong ally , echoing the role they would play in many cities as representatives of white ethnic conservative interests in ensuing decades .
Alphonso Deal , a Black police officer in Philadelphia who began a separate union for Black officers who faced discrimination from leaders like Rizzo , once tried to run for the presidency of the Fraternal Order of Police local in the hope of breaking the police out of this mold , but Bekemeyer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ FOP was more interested in resisting affirmative action measures that it viewed as allowing officers who hadn ’ t “ earned their place ” to get in ahead of the white ethnics the union represented .
The Philadelphia case is especially vivid , but you see examples of this kind of behavior from police unions around the country from the 1960s to the present .
In one particularly glaring case , the Patrolmen ’ s Benevolent Association ( since renamed the Police Benevolent Association for gender equality reasons ) rioted around City Hall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s first and to date only Black mayor , to protest Dinkins ’ s plan to create a civilian review board to oversee the police .
Ten thousand protesters , mostly off-duty cops , appeared , and more than 4,000 broke through police barricades , surrounded City Hall , and took over Brooklyn Bridge .
Protesters hurled the n-word and other racial slurs at Black people nearby , including city councilor Una Clarke .
One hears similar rhetoric , albeit with the sharp edges sanded down a bit , out of police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the notion that police are the one barrier between civilization and chaos .
“ The scenes we witnessed earlier this month — burning police vehicles , looted storefronts and violent clashes between protesters and police officers — will remain etched in New Yorkers ’ collective memory .
They are symbols of a breakdown in our social contract that none of us want to see repeated , ” Pat Lynch of New York City ’ s Police Benevolent Association declared in a statement on June 17 .
Where police unions fit into use @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surprising , given both police unions ’ historic conservatism and their charge of defending members against unjust or arbitrary discipline , that defending and preventing discipline against police who kill or wound unarmed civilians , particularly Black civilians , has become a major preoccupation of police unions since the Black Lives Matter movement ’ s emergence .
Tellingly , when the International Union of Police Associations endorsed Trump for president in late 2015 , they specifically cited as a root cause what they viewed as the Democratic presidential candidate ’ s slander of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2014 shot 18-year-old Black teenager Michael Brown to death in Ferguson , Missouri .
“ Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims , ” union president Sam Cabral wrote .
“ Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder , despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary.
” ( A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder , and the US Department of Justice declined to prosecute him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the DOJ also found a pattern of racial bias and brutality in the Ferguson police department . )
In local cases , this attitude has translated to a defense of officers who kill or wound innocent civilians .
The Louisville Metro Police Department has been limited to just announcing its “ intention ” to fire Brett Hankison , a detective who shot his gun 10 times during the raid that killed Breonna Taylor , rather than actually firing him outright .
This limitation is largely because of the city ’ s contract with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ multiple opportunities to appeal .
He is first allowed a “ pretermination hearing ” with counsel , and then , once terminated , an appeal to the police merit board , of which Hankison himself is a member .
In extreme cases , this resistance to discipline has translated into “ depolicing , ” in which police forces cease making arrests as a protest against civilian leaders and activists whom they perceive as demonizing police .
The NYPD conducted a work slowdown in late 2014 and early 2015 over perceived disrespect from Mayor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fell during the slowdown according to a subsequent study analyzing the period ( but that might just be because the slowdown was limited to low-level offenses ) .
PBA president Pat Lynch called for another slowdown in 2019 when the police commissioner fired officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death five years earlier .
In Baltimore , a police slowdown known as “ the pullback ” ensued after the district attorney indicted officers for the death of Freddie Gray in 2015 ; many analysts , like ProPublica ’ s Alec MacGillis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ homicides in 2015 at least in part to police just giving up on their jobs .
There is also some limited evidence that police unions themselves make use of force problems worse .
University of Chicago Law School ’ s Dhammika Dharmapala , Richard McAdams , and John Rappaport looked at a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision that gave collective bargaining rights to sheriffs ’ deputies .
They use police departments , which were unaffected , as a control group , and find that in the wake of the decision , misconduct violations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not in police departments .
That suggests that collective bargaining itself caused a rise in misconduct , perhaps by making sheriff ’ s deputies feel like they could get away with it .
Another study by economists Rob Gillezeau , Jamein Cunningham , and Donna Feir , which has yet to be published but was discussed by one of its authors on NPR ’ s Planet Money podcast , used the varying times at which different states rolled out collective bargaining rights to police unions starting in the late 1950s to see if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police killings .
They found it did , Gillezeau told NPR : Another study by Oxford ’ s Abdul Rad found that police union contract provisions protecting police are correlated with greater police abuse , though the study warns that it ’ s hard to prove the relationship is causal .
Another way to look at this question is to examine the text of police union contracts .
In 2018 , Stephen Rushin , a law professor at Loyola University Chicago , examined 656 police union contracts and found that “ the vast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ability to appeal disciplinary sanctions through multiple levels of appellate review .
At the end of this process , the majority of departments allow officers to appeal disciplinary sanctions to an arbitrator selected , in part , by the local police union or the aggrieved officer.
” Rushin notes , “ While each of these appellate procedures may be individually defensible , they combine in many police departments to create a formidable barrier to officer accountability.
” Rushin has found similar problems examining provisions of police contracts not related to the appeals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rules giving officers a heads-up that they will be interviewed by internal affairs detectives or other investigators in a few days about a case of potential wrongdoing .
“ Most people , including myself , would say if you provide officers with delays telling them we ’ ll interview you in two days , that probably is a barrier to accountability , ” Rushin told me .
“ Notifying that you ’ re about to talk gives them time to compare stories ” and potentially come up with fake alibis or other lies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , however : Notification that enables an officer to obtain legal representation seems like an essential due process provision , but notification long enough to enable cover stories goes too far .
Much of the difficulty in studying police unions is in how to think about these kinds of provisions , Rushin told me .
“ One thing I ’ ve learned going through this process is what one person calls due process , another person calls a problematic provision , ” he says .
“ A lot is in the eye of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Beyond the difficulty police unions present as a state and local policy matter , they pose a particularly grave challenge to the labor movement at large .
The American left and labor have been close allies for more than a century , and often the struggle for racial equality and labor rights went hand in hand ( see , for instance , A. Philip Randolph , whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized Black passenger train stewards to fight for both Black equality and economic gains ) .
“ The whole creation of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ century was largely in response to labor conflict ” Some on the left want to abolish both police and the unions who organize them .
Kim Kelly , a labor journalist and vocal activist within Writers Guild of America , East ( of which I am also a member ) , led the charge to push police unions out of the labor movement in a New Republic article .
Activism from her and others led WGA-E to call on its parent federation , the AFL-CIO , to disaffiliate from the International Union of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and academic labor activists are also opening up to the idea of sharply limiting police union power , recognizing this as an unusual case .
A group of faculty at Cornell ’ s Industrial and Labor Relations school — Ifeoma Ajunwa , Virginia Doellgast , Shannon Gleeson , Kate Griffith , and Verónica Martínez-Matsuda — argued in a public statement that the labor movement “ must also acknowledge that contemporary police unions have contributed to racism.
” Benjamin Sachs , the Kestenbaum professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ published a blog post suggesting openness to limiting what issues police unions can legally bargain over , perhaps excluding from bargaining matters like discipline for police who beat or kill civilians .
“ The consequence of police abusing [ collective bargaining ] power is that people end up dead , ” Sharon Block , executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law and a member of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama , told me .
“ That is happening at a significant rate and that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rest of the public sector ” or unionism generally .
So far , these efforts have come to little .
The AFL-CIO itself has firmly resisted calls to disaffiliate , and no limitations on police unions were included in House Democrats ’ call to reform policing .
Moreover , there are many in the labor movement who think calls for purging or outlawing police unions go much too far and risks endangering other public sector workers , like teachers , whose collective bargaining rights have been threatened in recent decades .
“ If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American labor history where labor groups kicked out other labor groups over fundamental disagreements about strategy , about priorities , it generally didn ’ t turn out well for the cause of labor , ” Catherine Fisk , a law professor at UC Berkeley and a prominent voice on labor law , told me .
There are two extremes on the police union debate .
On one end of the spectrum , there ’ s the attitude of local police union leaders like Pat Lynch and Bob Kroll , who state they are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fight almost every measure , even mild ones , meant to rein in police misconduct .
On the other is abolishing police and police unions , as advocated from the left by labor radicals like Kelly , or simply abolishing the unions , as advocated by many right-wing opponents of public sector unions generally .
If police still existed in this world , they would of course be allowed to form organizations that advocated for their interests .
But police departments would not be obliged to negotiate with those organizations on pay and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unionized jurisdictions today .
Most police union experts I spoke with , though , fell in the middle : They believe that police unions can be usefully reformed without being abolished .
There are a number of possible models for this kind of reform .
The organization Campaign Zero , co-founded by activists DeRay Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe , has been a leader in pushing for police union contract transparency ; much of the research above relies on contracts they ’ ve surfaced publicly .
They recommend a bevy of contract changes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in many union contracts or state laws known as Law Enforcement Officers ’ Bills of Rights ( LEOBRs ) , which provide similar protections to police officers as contracts do but are implemented as state legislation instead .
Problematic provisions in contracts and LEOBRs include mandates that delay interrogations of officers ( as Rushin highlighted ) , the ability to appeal to an arbitrator partially chosen by the police union , and bans on investigating misconduct that happened more than 100 days in the past .
Rushin has proposed allowing the public to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state governments .
That way , the public can exert pressure on city leaders not to yield to police union demands about discipline .
A 2017 Reuters investigation found that in a number of cities , such as San Antonio , city leaders have given police unions concessions as an explicit trade-off for not offering high pay or limiting pay cuts .
“ If that trade-off is publicly visible , that our failure to compensate is causing cities to give significant concessions on discipline , ” Rushin notes , then public pressure might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rather than reducing accountability .
L. Song Richardson , the dean of UC Irvine School of Law and an eminent criminal law expert , and Berkeley ’ s Catherine Fisk have proposed a system of “ minority unionism ” for police departments .
The idea is to use the increasing racial diversity of many police departments to push for useful reforms by enabling the creation of groups like , say , a Black Lives Matter organization within a police department that also has the right to bargain around disciplinary issues with the department @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police union leadership could also form and gain power ; Richardson and Fisk note that PBA president Pat Lynch faced energetic reelection challenges in the wake of his inflammatory statements about Eric Garner ’ s killing , suggesting a real minority within the NYPD was dissatisfied with his leadership .
Black police officers , in polling data , seem to have vastly different political beliefs and are much more sympathetic to claims of racial discrimination than white officers .
Pew Research Center found that while 92 percent of white officers say the US @ @ @ @ @ @ @ give blacks equal rights with whites ” ; only 29 percent of Black officers agree .
Beyond minority unionism , Fisk has another idea to better align cities ’ incentives in bargaining : using Congress to partially overrule Monell v. Department of Social Services , a relatively obscure 1978 Supreme Court decision that among other holdings found that local governments can not be forced to pay up in civil suits due to the actions of their employees .
Suppose that a FedEx deliveryperson pushed you onto the sidewalk , causing a head injury @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be liable in a civil suit , and so would FedEx .
But it ’ s different with government .
Qualified immunity generally protects police officers and other public employees from lawsuits ; meanwhile , a principle called “ vicarious liability ” protects police departments and city governments from such lawsuits .
Fisk argues that Congress should reverse Monell and allow governments to be held liable for police officers ’ misconduct .
The most dramatic reform , short of outright abolishing collective bargaining rights for police unions , is one that Harvard ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Boston Globe has editorialized in favor of : limiting police unions to simply bargaining on wages and hours , not on discipline .
This change is already the law in Massachusetts .
( Fisk argues this would go too far .
“ There ’ s two sides to the contract ; why are we focused only on what unions are asking for rather than focusing on what cities are asking for ?
” she says . )
Reforming police unions is hardly the only important task in efforts to reform the police generally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that something significant has to change in these organizations .
If not , they will remain unaccountable lobbies that frustrate even mild efforts to reform police departments and save the lives of unarmed civilians .
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How police unions became so powerful — and how they can be tamed
Share All sharing options for: How police unions became so powerful — and how they can be tamed
In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by now-former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin, few have been inclined to defend Chauvin or his colleagues who stood by and watched as he suffocated Floyd to death. Few, that is, except Bob Kroll.
In a letter to membership, Kroll — the president of the MPD’s police union — referred to protesters outraged by police brutality as a “terrorist movement” and defended the officers who killed Floyd and were subsequently fired, arguing they were “terminated without due process” and lamenting, “What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd.” (Floyd had a criminal record, but mostly for nonviolent drug and theft charges.)
Kroll’s statements illustrate a central challenge in American efforts to transform policing: Police unions, the groups that represent police officers, are a powerful force that stands in the way of holding police accountable. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told the New York Times that Kroll and his union are a major reason it’s hard to bring order to the Minneapolis Police Department, saying they create a “nearly impenetrable barrier” to reform.
It’s not just in Minneapolis. Around the country, as protesters take to the streets to condemn police violence and demand change, police unions have emerged as the protesters’ most vocal and implacable foe.
In Buffalo, the city’s Police Benevolent Association president John Evans has actively defended officers who pushed 75-year-old protester Martin Gugino to the ground. When the officers who pushed Gugino were seen leaving their arraignment on felony assault charges, a large crowd of police union members and sympathizers was seen cheering them on. In New York State broadly, police unions led opposition to newly signed legislation that prevents police from hiding misconduct complaints and criminalizes chokeholds.
These are hardly aberrations. Police unions in general have become the most vocal interest group opposing criminal justice reforms and especially reforms to police discipline and use of force. Historically, they have, unlike most unions, been profoundly conservative institutions that uphold a particular white ethnic, “law and order”-focused variant of right-wing politics. They have been among Donald Trump’s most fervent allies; Kroll spoke at a Trump rally in 2018, and the International Union of Police Associations has already endorsed Trump for reelection.
The foregrounding of police unions’ role in the warping of American law enforcement has also prompted some difficult conversations on the left. The presence of a segment of a union movement that’s unapologetically right-wing and hostile to Black communities has tested the limits of solidarity from more left-wing unionists.
As long as police forces exist, police unions will exist in some form as well, even if just as political pressure groups. It is therefore natural to think that reforming police unions in some way must be part of the broader agenda of changing policing in America. They are among the biggest stakeholders in the way the system works now; without addressing their power, other reforms may never get off the ground.
A brief history of police, unions, and police unions
The creation of police unions was a somewhat ironic twist in American labor history, University of Minnesota labor historian Will Jones tells me, given that the creation of urban police forces was largely spurred by a desire to contain union activism and protest.
“The whole creation of the police force in the late 19th century was largely in response to labor conflict,” Jones says. Police departments emerged and evolved as adjuncts to the sheriff’s departments and private detective agencies (like the Pinkertons) that bosses typically enlisted to fight union activists.
The (rough) anniversary of the Haymarket affair of 1886, a protest against anti-union violence by police in which an unknown assailant threw a bomb at Chicago police and a firefight broke out, is still commemorated on May 1 as International Workers’ Day in numerous countries worldwide. Union demonstrators and police would square off repeatedly in ensuing decades: in Cleveland in 1894, Philadelphia in 1910, Minneapolis in 1934, Chicago in 1937, and Hilo, Hawaii, in 1938, among many other incidents.
The anti-union role of police began to ebb in the first half of the 20th century with the coming of the New Deal and the Great Migration of Black workers from the South to Northern cities, says Aaron Bekemeyer, a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard whose dissertation documents the emergence of police unions in Philadelphia and nationally.
The New Deal, especially the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, legalized a lot of union activity, including strikes, and so shunted the task of managing labor conflict from local police to federal bureaucrats. The Great Migration, in turn, gave urban police another population to police, namely Black people. “Policing of Black neighborhoods, drug policing, gang policing become what these big-city police forces do,” Bekemeyer says.
The trend of allowing public sector unions began in New York City, when Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., the son of Sen. Robert Wagner who wrote the National Labor Relations Act, issued regulations that allowed collective bargaining by municipal employees in 1958. Wisconsin followed suit in 1959, and many states came after that. In 1962, the federal government under John F. Kennedy legalized collective bargaining for its employees. The spread of this idea helped fuel the growth of teachers unions, sanitation workers unions, and other public employee unions — including police unions.
The rise in violent crime in the 1960s, riots in places like Watts in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, and nationwide in 1968, and the rise of tough-on-crime policing targeted at Black neighborhoods also enhanced the political power of police unions: “The police unions say, ‘Hey, we’re the ones doing this work and protecting you, implied white listener, from dangerous Black people, and you need the gains unions need. Union interests are public interests,’” says Bekemeyer.
While the jobs are very different in obvious ways, the rhetoric parallels arguments that teachers unions under leaders like Al Shanker were making to the public around the same time: that the demands teachers were making would help students and parents too, and thus teachers deserve the public’s solidarity.
“The stakes are very different because the jobs are very different, but it’s useful to see the police union movement as one of the most successful examples of social movement unionism,” Bekemeyer notes.
Police unions and white ethnic conservatism
Police unionism is just a very different kind of social movement unionism than that involved in, say, collaborations between civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin and union leaders like United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther during the postwar years.
Bekemeyer notes that police officers, especially in the Northeast, tended disproportionately in the 1950s through 1970s to be working-class “white ethnic” conservatives: mostly Irish, but occasionally Italian or Polish, too. “It’s a broader white ethnic politics that uses the language of tradition, neighborhood integrity, hard work, etc., to defend segregated institutions that they benefit from, from schools to certain union jobs in the trade to religious institutions,” Bekemeyer says.
This pattern comes through across the country, but Bekemeyer’s case study of Philadelphia is instructive, largely because one specific politician there embodied this identity better than any other American official of the time: Frank Rizzo, who served as Philadelphia police commissioner from 1968 to 1971 and mayor from 1972 to 1980.
Rizzo was about as blatant a racist as led a major American city in the modern era. During his 1978 reelection bid, he urged supporters to “Vote White”; he fervently fought efforts to desegregate Philadelphia schools and build public housing in white neighborhoods. In a deposition, he stated he “considered public housing to be the same as Black housing in that most tenants of public housing are Black. Mayor Rizzo therefore felt that there should not be any public housing placed in White neighborhoods because people in White neighborhoods did not want Black people moving in with them.”
This extended to Rizzo’s governance of the police. He once famously declared that his treatment of protesters would “make Attila the Hun look like a fa**ot.” As commissioner, he ordered a raid on Black Panther headquarters in which suspects were publicly stripped in front of photographers, and at least once ordered police to beat stationary protesters with nightsticks.
On this, police unions were mostly a strong ally, echoing the role they would play in many cities as representatives of white ethnic conservative interests in ensuing decades. Alphonso Deal, a Black police officer in Philadelphia who began a separate union for Black officers who faced discrimination from leaders like Rizzo, once tried to run for the presidency of the Fraternal Order of Police local in the hope of breaking the police out of this mold, but Bekemeyer describes this attempt as “quixotic.” FOP was more interested in resisting affirmative action measures that it viewed as allowing officers who hadn’t “earned their place” to get in ahead of the white ethnics the union represented.
The Philadelphia case is especially vivid, but you see examples of this kind of behavior from police unions around the country from the 1960s to the present.
In one particularly glaring case, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (since renamed the Police Benevolent Association for gender equality reasons) rioted around City Hall against David Dinkins, New York City’s first and to date only Black mayor, to protest Dinkins’s plan to create a civilian review board to oversee the police. Ten thousand protesters, mostly off-duty cops, appeared, and more than 4,000 broke through police barricades, surrounded City Hall, and took over Brooklyn Bridge. Protesters hurled the n-word and other racial slurs at Black people nearby, including city councilor Una Clarke.
One hears similar rhetoric, albeit with the sharp edges sanded down a bit, out of police unions today. Their rhetoric remains rooted in the notion that police are the one barrier between civilization and chaos. “The scenes we witnessed earlier this month — burning police vehicles, looted storefronts and violent clashes between protesters and police officers — will remain etched in New Yorkers’ collective memory. They are symbols of a breakdown in our social contract that none of us want to see repeated,” Pat Lynch of New York City’s Police Benevolent Association declared in a statement on June 17.
Where police unions fit into use of force problems
It is perhaps not surprising, given both police unions’ historic conservatism and their charge of defending members against unjust or arbitrary discipline, that defending and preventing discipline against police who kill or wound unarmed civilians, particularly Black civilians, has become a major preoccupation of police unions since the Black Lives Matter movement’s emergence.
Tellingly, when the International Union of Police Associations endorsed Trump for president in late 2015, they specifically cited as a root cause what they viewed as the Democratic presidential candidate’s slander of Darren Wilson, the white officer who in 2014 shot 18-year-old Black teenager Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Missouri.
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“Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims,” union president Sam Cabral wrote. “Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary.” (A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson for murder, and the US Department of Justice declined to prosecute him for civil rights violations. However, the DOJ also found a pattern of racial bias and brutality in the Ferguson police department.)
In local cases, this attitude has translated to a defense of officers who kill or wound innocent civilians. The Louisville Metro Police Department has been limited to just announcing its “intention” to fire Brett Hankison, a detective who shot his gun 10 times during the raid that killed Breonna Taylor, rather than actually firing him outright. This limitation is largely because of the city’s contract with the police union, which gives Hankison multiple opportunities to appeal. He is first allowed a “pretermination hearing” with counsel, and then, once terminated, an appeal to the police merit board, of which Hankison himself is a member.
In extreme cases, this resistance to discipline has translated into “depolicing,” in which police forces cease making arrests as a protest against civilian leaders and activists whom they perceive as demonizing police.
The NYPD conducted a work slowdown in late 2014 and early 2015 over perceived disrespect from Mayor Bill de Blasio — though crime actually fell during the slowdown according to a subsequent study analyzing the period (but that might just be because the slowdown was limited to low-level offenses). PBA president Pat Lynch called for another slowdown in 2019 when the police commissioner fired officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death five years earlier.
In Baltimore, a police slowdown known as “the pullback” ensued after the district attorney indicted officers for the death of Freddie Gray in 2015; many analysts, like ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, attribute the 62 percent jump in homicides in 2015 at least in part to police just giving up on their jobs.
There is also some limited evidence that police unions themselves make use of force problems worse.
University of Chicago Law School’s Dhammika Dharmapala, Richard McAdams, and John Rappaport looked at a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision that gave collective bargaining rights to sheriffs’ deputies. They use police departments, which were unaffected, as a control group, and find that in the wake of the decision, misconduct violations rose in sheriff’s offices but not in police departments. That suggests that collective bargaining itself caused a rise in misconduct, perhaps by making sheriff’s deputies feel like they could get away with it.
Another study by economists Rob Gillezeau, Jamein Cunningham, and Donna Feir, which has yet to be published but was discussed by one of its authors on NPR’s Planet Money podcast, used the varying times at which different states rolled out collective bargaining rights to police unions starting in the late 1950s to see if introducing police unions made a difference in police killings.
They found it did, Gillezeau told NPR:
We found that after officers gained access to collective bargaining rights that there was a substantial increase in killings of civilians — 0.026 to 0.029 additional civilians are killed in each county in each year, of whom the overwhelming majority are nonwhite. That’s about 60 to 70 per year civilians killed by the police in an era historically where there were a lot fewer police shootings. So that’s a humongous increase.
Another study by Oxford’s Abdul Rad found that police union contract provisions protecting police are correlated with greater police abuse, though the study warns that it’s hard to prove the relationship is causal.
Another way to look at this question is to examine the text of police union contracts. In 2018, Stephen Rushin, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, examined 656 police union contracts and found that “the vast majority of these departments give police officers the ability to appeal disciplinary sanctions through multiple levels of appellate review. At the end of this process, the majority of departments allow officers to appeal disciplinary sanctions to an arbitrator selected, in part, by the local police union or the aggrieved officer.”
Rushin notes, “While each of these appellate procedures may be individually defensible, they combine in many police departments to create a formidable barrier to officer accountability.”
Rushin has found similar problems examining provisions of police contracts not related to the appeals process, including, for instance, rules giving officers a heads-up that they will be interviewed by internal affairs detectives or other investigators in a few days about a case of potential wrongdoing. “Most people, including myself, would say if you provide officers with delays telling them we’ll interview you in two days, that probably is a barrier to accountability,” Rushin told me.
“Notifying that you’re about to talk gives them time to compare stories” and potentially come up with fake alibis or other lies. It’s a subtle matter, however: Notification that enables an officer to obtain legal representation seems like an essential due process provision, but notification long enough to enable cover stories goes too far.
Much of the difficulty in studying police unions is in how to think about these kinds of provisions, Rushin told me. “One thing I’ve learned going through this process is what one person calls due process, another person calls a problematic provision,” he says. “A lot is in the eye of who’s doing the coding.”
Police unions pose unique challenges for the labor left
Beyond the difficulty police unions present as a state and local policy matter, they pose a particularly grave challenge to the labor movement at large.
The American left and labor have been close allies for more than a century, and often the struggle for racial equality and labor rights went hand in hand (see, for instance, A. Philip Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized Black passenger train stewards to fight for both Black equality and economic gains).
“The whole creation of the police force in the late 19th century was largely in response to labor conflict”
Some on the left want to abolish both police and the unions who organize them. Kim Kelly, a labor journalist and vocal activist within Writers Guild of America, East (of which I am also a member), led the charge to push police unions out of the labor movement in a New Republic article. Activism from her and others led WGA-E to call on its parent federation, the AFL-CIO, to disaffiliate from the International Union of Police Associations.
Some veteran labor lawyers and academic labor activists are also opening up to the idea of sharply limiting police union power, recognizing this as an unusual case.
A group of faculty at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations school — Ifeoma Ajunwa, Virginia Doellgast, Shannon Gleeson, Kate Griffith, and Verónica Martínez-Matsuda — argued in a public statement that the labor movement “must also acknowledge that contemporary police unions have contributed to racism.” Benjamin Sachs, the Kestenbaum professor of labor and industry at Harvard Law School and a leading voice in labor law debates, published a blog post suggesting openness to limiting what issues police unions can legally bargain over, perhaps excluding from bargaining matters like discipline for police who beat or kill civilians.
“The consequence of police abusing [collective bargaining] power is that people end up dead,” Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law and a member of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, told me. “That is happening at a significant rate and that’s just a completely different context from the rest of the public sector” or unionism generally.
So far, these efforts have come to little. The AFL-CIO itself has firmly resisted calls to disaffiliate, and no limitations on police unions were included in House Democrats’ call to reform policing.
Moreover, there are many in the labor movement who think calls for purging or outlawing police unions go much too far and risks endangering other public sector workers, like teachers, whose collective bargaining rights have been threatened in recent decades.
“If you look back at prior incidents in American labor history where labor groups kicked out other labor groups over fundamental disagreements about strategy, about priorities, it generally didn’t turn out well for the cause of labor,” Catherine Fisk, a law professor at UC Berkeley and a prominent voice on labor law, told me.
Ideas for fixing the police union problem
There are two extremes on the police union debate. On one end of the spectrum, there’s the attitude of local police union leaders like Pat Lynch and Bob Kroll, who state they are open to reform while in practice they fight almost every measure, even mild ones, meant to rein in police misconduct.
On the other is abolishing police and police unions, as advocated from the left by labor radicals like Kelly, or simply abolishing the unions, as advocated by many right-wing opponents of public sector unions generally. If police still existed in this world, they would of course be allowed to form organizations that advocated for their interests. But police departments would not be obliged to negotiate with those organizations on pay and discipline, as they are in most unionized jurisdictions today.
Most police union experts I spoke with, though, fell in the middle: They believe that police unions can be usefully reformed without being abolished.
There are a number of possible models for this kind of reform. The organization Campaign Zero, co-founded by activists DeRay Mckesson and Samuel Sinyangwe, has been a leader in pushing for police union contract transparency; much of the research above relies on contracts they’ve surfaced publicly.
They recommend a bevy of contract changes, most of which involve removing provisions included in many union contracts or state laws known as Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights (LEOBRs), which provide similar protections to police officers as contracts do but are implemented as state legislation instead. Problematic provisions in contracts and LEOBRs include mandates that delay interrogations of officers (as Rushin highlighted), the ability to appeal to an arbitrator partially chosen by the police union, and bans on investigating misconduct that happened more than 100 days in the past.
Rushin has proposed allowing the public to observe collective bargaining between the police and state governments. That way, the public can exert pressure on city leaders not to yield to police union demands about discipline. A 2017 Reuters investigation found that in a number of cities, such as San Antonio, city leaders have given police unions concessions as an explicit trade-off for not offering high pay or limiting pay cuts. “If that trade-off is publicly visible, that our failure to compensate is causing cities to give significant concessions on discipline,” Rushin notes, then public pressure might force the city to increase police salaries rather than reducing accountability.
L. Song Richardson, the dean of UC Irvine School of Law and an eminent criminal law expert, and Berkeley’s Catherine Fisk have proposed a system of “minority unionism” for police departments. The idea is to use the increasing racial diversity of many police departments to push for useful reforms by enabling the creation of groups like, say, a Black Lives Matter organization within a police department that also has the right to bargain around disciplinary issues with the department.
Multiracial coalitions opposed to the current police union leadership could also form and gain power; Richardson and Fisk note that PBA president Pat Lynch faced energetic reelection challenges in the wake of his inflammatory statements about Eric Garner’s killing, suggesting a real minority within the NYPD was dissatisfied with his leadership. Black police officers, in polling data, seem to have vastly different political beliefs and are much more sympathetic to claims of racial discrimination than white officers. Pew Research Center found that while 92 percent of white officers say the US has “made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites”; only 29 percent of Black officers agree.
Beyond minority unionism, Fisk has another idea to better align cities’ incentives in bargaining: using Congress to partially overrule Monell v. Department of Social Services, a relatively obscure 1978 Supreme Court decision that among other holdings found that local governments cannot be forced to pay up in civil suits due to the actions of their employees.
Suppose that a FedEx deliveryperson pushed you onto the sidewalk, causing a head injury when you fell. The deliveryperson would be liable in a civil suit, and so would FedEx. But it’s different with government. Qualified immunity generally protects police officers and other public employees from lawsuits; meanwhile, a principle called “vicarious liability” protects police departments and city governments from such lawsuits. Fisk argues that Congress should reverse Monell and allow governments to be held liable for police officers’ misconduct.
The most dramatic reform, short of outright abolishing collective bargaining rights for police unions, is one that Harvard’s Sachs suggested sympathy toward and the Boston Globe has editorialized in favor of: limiting police unions to simply bargaining on wages and hours, not on discipline. This change is already the law in Massachusetts. (Fisk argues this would go too far. “There’s two sides to the contract; why are we focused only on what unions are asking for rather than focusing on what cities are asking for?” she says.)
Reforming police unions is hardly the only important task in efforts to reform the police generally. But there is an emerging consensus that something significant has to change in these organizations. If not, they will remain unaccountable lobbies that frustrate even mild efforts to reform police departments and save the lives of unarmed civilians.
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