The issue here is that police unions don't just represent good police officers, they represent every police officer. Every issue with police unions, like "they

The issue here is that police unions don't just represent good police officers, they represent every police officer. Every issue with police unions, like "they make it difficult to fire bad cops", has an analagous issue in every powerful union. Autoworker unions often negotiated terms where companies couldn't fire autoworkers without "just cause" (read: the same kind of absolutely airtight case it would take to fire a police officer; the sort of thing that in practice never happens). Unions have benefits for their employess of course, like making it impossible to fire them among other things, but then you have to work in the type of environment you get when everybody is impossible to fire.