History makes a liar of every man. By that I mean that no matter what you say at any one point in time, future events will inevitably render your prior statements meaningless. A little less than a year ago I wrote in these pages about how despite the economic crisis, neither San Francisco nor San Jose was actually contemplating the layoff of police officers. Tragically, that situation has now changed.

A few weeks ago San Jose's City Manager prepared a budget that recommends the elimination of 160 sworn positions if requested cuts of ten percent in overall employee compensation are not agreed to by the SJPOA. (Analogous cuts to other departments' positions - e.g., eliminating 86 fire fighter positions - were also proposed if the ten percent wage/benefit reduction is not accepted by the other affected unions.) After taking into account projected retirements and actual staffing levels, the SJPOA leadership's best guess is that anywhere from 60 to 80 police officers are at risk of losing their jobs. And that figure does not include the added possibility of demotions, since some of the police positions slated to be cut fall above the rank of officer.

In San Francisco, the threat of potential layoffs has been more vague: while no specific number of layoffs from the ranks of sworn officers has actually been proposed, the possibility of layoffs in general has been floated in various quarters, if the SFPOA does not agree to certain economic concessions. Indeed, a coalition of other City unions is purportedly in the process of striking a concessionary deal with the City in order to avoid job losses. While one can breathe easy in San Francisco for the moment, the pressures on the SFPOA to do as the other unions have done will likely be enormous, with the threat of layoffs a possible card that one cannot discount the City from choosing to play in what has suddenly become an enormously high-stakes game.

Which leads me to the point of this article: this is in fact no game. We're talking about the livelihoods of San Francisco's and San Jose's finest, which they and their families depend upon. Some in San Jose have opined that the City Manager's proposed budget, with its blunt axe to officers' jobs, is a bluff - a tactic employed simply to wrest concessions from the union. As this line of thinking goes, the City Council will never be able to stomach laying off police officers in a city which already has one of the lowest officer-to-citizen ratios anywhere in the country.

But if the threat of layoffs is a bluff, it's an enormously irresponsible one. It borders on the perverse to play upon the fears and anxieties of men and women concerned for their livelihoods as part of some high-stakes poker match or game of "chicken" against the union, where the loser blinks first. No one at the SJPOA can afford to presume that the San Jose City Manager's proposed budget is a mere bluff. A greater responsibility is owed to those members who face the risk of losing their jobs.

But that having been said, cutting wages and benefits by up to ten percent would be just as irresponsible as laying off police. This cannot be a race to the bottom in terms of employee compensation. San Jose's advanced education requirement and precipitously low officer-to-citizen ratio need to be accounted for in determining what is and what is not an equitable level of pay and benefits for its already beleaguered police force.

In San Francisco, SFPOA President Gary Delagnes shared with me the agonies experienced by the SFPOA many years ago when the threat of layoffs resulted in heated meetings where newer members and their families, at risk of losing their jobs, squared off against more veteran officers who argued against any concessions. This is a spot in which no union wants to be. And yet in San Jose, it's precisely where we could well find ourselves.

We all - and I do mean all: union leadership and rank and file, veteran officer and junior recruit, City management (i.e., both City Administration and elected officials) and labor leaders alike - bear the task of acting responsibly in addressing the consequences of a budget crisis that has actually resulted in the potential loss of police jobs. I repeat: this is no game - the stakes are far too high for that.

"Roll the Union On . . ."