John Catanzara quits. The man who gave unions a bad name now wants to be mayor of Chicago.

I’m self-critical.

For a while I shied away from saying in public what I really thought about John Catanzara and his bully boys in the Fraternal Order of Police.

Which was that the FOP should be disbanded.

What I really thought and still think is that they are not in any way a union. They have nothing in common with the union movement, a movement that for all its faults and misleaders has stood on the side of social and economic justice.

That’s certainly not the FOP.

Sure. They represent the cops in bargaining salary and wages. That doesn’t make them a union.

A lawyer could do that job for them. In fact, they probably pay one to do it for them.

However, there has been a ton of research that shows how the due process language of most cop contracts function to protect cops from criminal prosecution when they engage in abusive behavior.

In other words, the FOP exists to protect the cops from their civilian victims, not from their bosses.

As for their bosses, the FOP and its president John Catanzara, function to defy civilian control, a fundamental requirement of a democracy.

As a result, for a short time, I advocated that the state legislature do to the FOP what they once did to the teachers union. I said they should remove by statute the FOP’s right to bargain due process language.

Now I think that is not enough. The legislature should decertify the FOP as the bargaining representative of the police.

The Fraternal Order of Police should be legally disbanded.

Yesterday Catanzara evaded a level of justice by quitting his job as a cop.

He was due to appear before a hearing that was going to fire his butt anyway.

Just because he’s not a cop anymore, he still gets to be head of the FOP and he plans to run for FOP president again.

The hearing before the CPD board was going to address Catanzara’s social media use.

“We’re in America, G-ddamnit. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi fucking Germany, [where they say], ‘Step into the fucking showers. The pills won’t hurt you.’ What the fuck?”

He tweeted that after Mayor Lightfoot issued a Covid vax mandate.

In January 2017, he wrote of Muslims, “Savages they all deserve a bullet.”

Another Catanzara tweet: “Rahm Free City 2019 Make Chicago Great Again DRAIN THE CITY HALL SWAMP #MAGA.”

On Monday, Catanzara said he wished Emanuel was “still here.”

Rank-and-file Chicago police officers elected John Catanzara in early May 2020 — just weeks before George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, later convicted.

More recently Catanzara said the cop who killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo was “heroic” and described the killing of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez, shot in the back by another Chicago cop, as “a 100% good shooting.”

Injustice Watch reviewed the tenures of each of the eight past FOP presidents elected by Chicago police and found a pattern of leadership defined by inflammatory public statements, resistance to accountability, and antagonism to racial justice and police reforms. Police union leaders also tend to stand by police officers who have killed civilians, from Fred Hampton and LaTanya Haggerty to Laquan McDonald and Toledo.

Clearly the problem isn’t just Catanzara. It is the FOP.

Yesterday Catanzara surprised absolutely nobody except some members of the Chicago press by announcing he was running for Chicago mayor against Lori Lightfoot.

Mayor Lightfoot, the first Black lesbian mayor of our city, has been a thorn in the side of the FOP and Catanzara.

Catanzara hates Mayor Lightfoot.

I doubt she is worried.

More worried are probably those with ambitions of being the great white hope, like Paul Vallas.

Vallas had been positioning himself as the white pro-cop, law-and-order candidate and now he and Catanzara must duke it out for the title.