NEWS
TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE POLICE
Rochester Police Department officers prepare to engage during the riots of 1964, the same year the Rochester Police Locust Club negotiated its first labor pact with the city. PHOTO COURTESY THE CITY OF ROCHESTER
The evolution of the Locust Club:
From cop fraternity to roadblock to police reform BY GINO FANELLI
A
@GINOFANELLI
round the time that a Rochester police officer pulled out her pepper spray to use on a 9-year-old-girl, Mike Mazzeo, the president of the Rochester Police Locust Club union, pulled out a pen to sign a lawsuit contesting recent appointments by the police chief to the Rochester Police Department’s top brass. Two days later, Mazzeo stood at a podium at the union’s headquarters on Lexington Avenue in blue jeans and a black sweater facing a firing squad of news reporters and stumbled through an explanation of the “psychological trauma” experienced by officers at the scene and blamed the girl’s mother for escalating the incident. “It resulted in her, no injury to her,” Mazzeo said. “If they had to go and push further, and use more force, 22 CITY MARCH 2021
GFANELLI@ROCHESTER-CITYNEWS.COM
there’s a good chance she could’ve been hurt worse.” His response to the incident, which thrust Rochester and its police onto the national news circuit for all the wrong reasons yet again, was widely ridiculed. Keith Olbermann, the itinerant liberal news and sports broadcaster, retweeted a video clip of Mazzeo at the news conference with the remark, “This idiot shouldn’t be sent to the grocery store to get a loaf of bread without a guide and four maps, let alone be a policeman in a large city anywhere in the world.” How did it come to this? How does a union come to offer up a perspective so out of step with public opinion? The answer for the Locust Club has been more than a century in the making. Since the organization transitioned from a social club for cops to the city’s recognized collective
bargaining unit for police some 60 years ago now, the union has had a double-barreled primary charge: protect the rights of officers and defend those accused of misconduct. The work has taken union representatives to court, to arbitration hearings, and to news conferences, where, like Mazzeo as of late, they can
come off as defending the indefensible and twisting logic to its limits. In the process, the Locust Club, like its union counterparts across the country, has emerged to many as an intractable roadblock to reform. Mazzeo said a fair review of the Locust Club’s record over the last decade or so would show that the union has consistently pushed back against public safety initiatives “that have not been in the best interests of all in our community,” including decentralized police services and politicians’ tendency to parse crime statistics in a way that benefits their chances at re-election. “I believe our most important function is to be the watchdog against bad public safety policy by city, county, and state governments,” Mazzeo said. Five months before the girl was
