Stewards of Principle

by Joe Broadmeadow

In 1964, seven Rhode Island police officers lost their jobs for saying out loud what everyone in the building already knew. The answers to a promotional exam had circulated in advance. The seven had no contract, no grievance procedure, no appeal, and no protection. They had the truth and a willingness to pay for it.

So they went to the General Assembly. They convinced the legislature to grant police officers in this state the right to organize and bargain collectively. From that fight came the first local of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, and from that local came a union representing officers in departments across the country.

Every one of those seven men paid for the principle. That is how the tradition works. Somebody stands up, absorbs the cost, and the people who come after inherit the benefit without ever seeing the bill.

The Bill Nobody Sees

Americans enjoy a long list of things we no longer think about. The eight-hour day. The weekend. Overtime pay. A minimum age for factory work. Machine guards, fire exits, and a legal obligation on an employer to send a worker home in the same condition he arrived. Pensions. Health insurance tied to employment. The plain expectation of a hearing before losing a livelihood.

None of those arrived as gifts. Organized workers won them, one contract and one statute at a time, often against ferocious opposition and sometimes at gunpoint. The postwar middle class did not emerge from the natural generosity of capital. It emerged from a rough balance of power between people who owned the enterprise and people who did the work.

Balance is the whole argument. An individual worker negotiating with an institution is not negotiating. He is receiving terms. Collective bargaining does not guarantee a good outcome, and it never promised one. It guarantees a table, a process, and a record.

I spent twenty years in the East Providence Police Department, commanded the Investigative Services Division, worked narcotics, and served on the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force alongside the FBI and DEA. I learned to distrust conclusions unsupported by evidence. Applied here, the evidence points one direction. Where workers organized, wages rose, injuries fell, and arbitrary power shrank. Where they did not, it did not.

There are some who stood taller in the fight right here in Rhode Island, and I want to put a name on two of them.

Ralph Ezovski

I met Ralph Ezovski in the eighth grade.

That detail carries more weight than it appears to. I did not simply come to admire the man Ralph became. I watched him become that man, in real time, across five decades, beginning at an age when none of us knew anything about anything.

Nothing in a thirteen-year-old announces a future union director. The raw material shows anyway if you stand close enough for long enough. Ralph argued. He argued on behalf of somebody else more often than on behalf of himself, and he did not stop when the argument turned costly. At thirteen that reads as stubbornness. At sixty it reads as character. The trait never changed. Only the stakes did.

Ralph gave the East Providence Police Department twenty-one years and retired as a lieutenant in 1997. He then spent twenty-six years as Rhode Island State Director of NAGE-IBPO, representing officers in departments from one end of this small state to the other. He served in the Army during the Vietnam era. He earned a degree from Roger Williams University and a law degree from the New England School of Law, which he pursued while carrying a badge and a caseload of other people’s problems.

Understand what the union job actually costs a person.

It costs promotions. The officer who files the grievance, questions the discipline, or reads the contract aloud in a room full of brass acquires a reputation. Chiefs remember. City solicitors remember. Assignments go elsewhere.

It costs weekends and holidays and sleep. Arbitration hearings, contract negotiations, and 2 a.m. phone calls from a young officer in trouble do not schedule themselves around a family dinner. Ralph’s family absorbed decades of that.

It costs friendships, sometimes. A union representative defends the member he likes and the member he cannot stand, with identical vigor, because the principle attaches to the process and not to the personality. People misread that as approval. It never was.

Ralph carried all of it for twenty-six years. When he died in January 2024 at sixty-seven, the Rhode Island Senate passed a resolution honoring him, and officers from departments across the state wrote about a man who left the profession better than he found it. Not richer. Better.

None of those arrived as gifts. Organized workers won them, one contract and one statute at a time, often against ferocious opposition and sometimes at gunpoint. The postwar middle class did not emerge from the natural generosity of capital. It emerged from a rough balance of power between people who owned the enterprise and people who did the work.

Joe Broadmeadow

John Rossi

John Rossi worked for me when I was a sergeant, and he was a young officer.

A supervisor learns everything he needs to know about an officer in the unglamorous hours. John blended tough and fair, a combination far rarer than either quality alone. He showed restraint in moments where others would have overreacted, and anyone who has worn the uniform understands the discipline required. The job hands you provocation and the authority to answer it. Declining to answer it, over and over, on nights when nobody would have criticized you for doing otherwise, takes a particular kind of strength.

When Ralph retired from the department and went to work for IBPO/NAGE full-time, John took over as union president for the East Providence Police Department. He carried Ralph’s altruism into the role with him. I understood the succession immediately, because Ralph had seen exactly what I saw. The restraint making John steady on a bad call made him formidable across a bargaining table.

John, still very much with us and still capable of an unprintable opinion on request, led IBPO Local 569 through the city’s fiscal collapse.

The city terminated thirteen police officers.

Rossi won those jobs back. He did it by going to his own membership, the officers who kept their positions, the ones with seniority and security and nothing personally at risk, and persuaded them to accept pay cuts so thirteen colleagues could come back to work.

Sit with that a moment because it demolishes the caricature.

The standard indictment of a union holds that senior members protect themselves and let the newest take the fall. Seniority insulates. Layoffs run bottom-up by design. Every self-interested calculation available to that membership pointed toward letting the thirteen go.

They voted to take less money instead. Thirteen families kept their income and their careers. Every other family in the room paid for it out of their own paycheck.

For that work, John got called a union thug in the local press. He retired, ran for the state Senate, and lost. Stewardship offers no severance package.

The Honest Objection

Police unions have earned criticism, and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

Contract provisions in some jurisdictions have delayed investigations, purged disciplinary records, and returned officers to the street who had no business wearing a badge. The reflexive defense of indefensible conduct corrodes public trust and, worse, corrodes the trust of the good officers forced to work alongside the problem. Reform of those specific provisions is overdue, and I have written as much.

The remedy is precision, not demolition. A grievance procedure is a due process procedure. Strip it away and you do not get accountability. You get a chief who fires officers he dislikes and protects officers he needs, with nobody positioned to see the difference. The evidentiary discipline I applied to a criminal case applies to labor relations too. Process protects everyone, including the public, precisely because it protects the person you would rather not protect.

Stewards

Neither Ralph nor John founded anything. That is exactly the point.

They inherited a structure built by seven fired officers in 1964, by textile workers in Fall River, and by miners and machinists and teachers who took beatings for the right to speak with one voice. They maintained it. They handed it forward intact.

A steward, in the union sense, holds a specific office. A steward, in the older sense, holds something in trust for people who have not yet arrived. Ralph and John did both, and the second job never appeared in any contract.

Watch how the thing actually moves. Seven fired officers in 1964 hand it to a generation of union members. One of those members, a kid I knew at thirteen, spends twenty-six years carrying it. When he leaves the local for the larger fight, he leaves it in the hands of a young officer I once supervised. That officer then persuades a room full of cops to cut their own pay for thirteen colleagues.

Investigators call that a chain of custody. Break one link and the whole thing becomes inadmissible.

Every officer in Rhode Island working under a fair agreement today stands on the shoulders of people who paid for it. Most will never know their names.

Now some of you do.