In New York City, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York (PBA) tried and failed to block the city’s vaccine mandate for all city workers. New York City police officers have been on the wrong side of public health for most of the pandemic. Like other American police unions, the PBA uses its political clout and large coffers to push regressive policies and fight any move towards an even slightly more humane justice system.

In an effort to prevent another rise in Covid-19 cases, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, introduced a mandate requiring all city employees to have received at least one dose of a vaccine by 29 October. Seventy-one per cent of all city officials are already vaccinated but, according to the PBA, roughly a third of uniformed police officers are not. Even optimistic assessments of the department’s vaccination rates as a whole lag behind the rates of city residents. Despite the fact that Covid-19 is the leading cause of death among US police officers, the PBA launched a lawsuit against the city to halt the mandate. A judge struck down the suit, but the PBA plans to appeal the decision.

The police union loves to play the victim card and paint even its worst officers as heroes – like when it called for a slowdown strike after an officer was fired for his role in the 2014 death of Eric Garner. Yet when faced with a real threat to the lives of their members, and to the public those officers ostensibly serve, the unions’ leaders have chosen to oppose public health recommendations. While the police commissioner has at least urged officers to get vaccinated, the department and its individual officers haven’t exactly had a stellar record of behavior from earlier phases of the pandemic.

In October, unmasked police officers forced a subway rider out of a station after he asked them to put on their masks as mandated by both the city’s transportation authority and the NYPD itself. This was not an isolated incident, according to the New York Times: “[t]he flouting of mask mandates by some police officers in New York City has been the subject of criticism throughout the pandemic. Face coverings have remained required on the city’s public transit and at indoor subway stations since April 2020. But many reports on social media and in local news outlets have drawn attention to instances of officers ignoring those rules.”

This behavior is especially dangerous considering that officers interact face-to-face with the public on a daily basis. According to the Legal Aid Society, the NYPD illegally detained hundreds of people during the George Floyd uprising and the second surge of the pandemic. Protesters were allegedly held for longer periods of time than legally allowed, increasing their risk of contracting Covid-19 and potentially spreading it once released. One protester complained of police stuffing protesters in vans while the officers themselves were not wearing masks. The NYPD insists that these delays were not retaliatory and just another symptom of the pandemic, but the Legal Aid Society noted the similarity to a previous lawsuit over similar alleged events at the 2004 Republican national convention.

In fact, the mere existence of such a large police department is a hindrance to public health. If current trends continue, the city will probably spend more than $10bn on the police department this year, including hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to settle lawsuits for police brutality and misconduct. In comparison, the city’s department of health and mental hygiene has a budget of $1.6bn.

While city residents could have benefited from an increase in healthcare access, the city was busy maintaining the largest police department in the country, spending over $100,000 a year on average for every uniformed officer, according to Business Insider. Insider also notes that a single set of riot gear could provide personal protective equipment for 33 nurses. These numbers recall the dueling images of New York healthcare workers wearing trash bags during the earlier days of the pandemic, in contrast to the heavily armored officers sweeping through neighborhoods arresting people en masse.

The NYPD spent $115m in overtime in the first two weeks of the George Floyd protests alone. And large sums of that money, in the form of membership dues and donations, find their way to police unions. Those unions shell out tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying, much of it to elect candidates seen as pro-police and “tough on crime”. According to Dan Quart, a New York State assembly member, the PBA has “had very significant and I would say disruptive influence in blocking so much important criminal legal reform of our criminal justice system”. Between 2015 and 2018, the union gave $78,500 to the state senate Republican campaign committee. In 2020 the union endorsed Donald Trump for re-election, its first endorsement of a presidential candidate in decades. This last fact alone speaks to the depravity of the union’s perspective and priorities.

The PBA insists that the vaccine mandate will cause “chaos” – that 10,000 officers will be gone from the street, that dozens of patrol precincts will go unstaffed. This outcome seems unlikely. If it does happen, however, it may be a great experiment for the city. During their 2014 slowdown strike in response to anti-police brutality protests, officers decreased their “proactive” crime duties, cutting down patrols and only responding to active calls. The department expected the city to come crawling back in fear. But the opposite happened; a peer-reviewed study in the journal Nature Human Behavior found that residents actually reported a decline in major crime.

The PBA may be setting itself up for another disappointment – and offering yet more evidence that we must defund police for the sake of public health and the public good.

• Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian