When Frank Serpico, the most famous police whistleblower of his generation, reflected on years of law-enforcement corruption in the New York Police Department, he assigned substantial blame to a commissioner who failed to hold rank-and-file cops accountable. That's the classic template for police abuse: misbehaving cops are spared punishment by colleagues and bosses who cover for them.

There are, of course, police officers who are fired for egregious misbehavior by commanding officers who decide that a given abuse makes them unfit for a badge and gun. Yet all over the U.S., police unions help many of those cops to get their jobs back, often via secretive appeals geared to protect labor rights rather than public safety. Cops deemed unqualified by their own bosses are put back on the streets. Their colleagues get the message that police all but impervious to termination.

That isn't to say that every officer who is fired deserves it, or that every reinstated cop represents a miscarriage of justice. In theory, due process before a neutral arbiter could even protect blue whistleblowers from wrongful termination. But in practice, too many cops who needlessly kill people, use excessive force, or otherwise abuse their authority are getting reprieves from termination.

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Let's begin in Oakland, California, where the San Jose Mercury News reports that "of the last 15 arbitration cases in which officers have appealed punishments, those punishments have been revoked in seven cases and reduced in five others."

Hector Jimenez is one Oakland policeman who was fired and reinstated. In 2007, he shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old man. Just seven months later, he killed another unarmed man, shooting him three times in the back as he ran away. Oakland paid a $650,000 settlement to the dead man's family in a lawsuit and fired Jimenez, who appealed through his police union. Despite killing two unarmed men and costing taxpayers all that money, he was reinstated and given back pay.

Another Oakland police officer, Robert Roche, was present at the 2011 Occupy protest where Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, a protester, was shot in the head with a lead-filled beanbag, fracturing his skull and causing brain damage. After Olsen collapsed onto the asphalt, a group of fellow protesters quickly gathered around to help the wounded man. That's when Roche tossed a flash grenade in their midst.

Olsen later spoke out about the incident in the video clip below (ignore the part where he calls the officer a "serial killer," a proposition for which I can find no evidence, and focus on the images of the incident itself, which is rendered appropriately):

Roche was fired after being identified as the perpetrator, but appealed with the help of his union and was reinstated. Federal Judge Thelton Henderson later ordered an investigation of the Oakland Police Department's disciplinary appeals process, declaring that "imposition of discipline is meaningless if it is not final."

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"In Philadelphia, an inquiry was recently completed on 26 cases where police officers were fired from charges ranging from domestic violence, to retail theft, to excessive force, to on duty intoxication," Adam Ozimek writes in a Forbes article on reforms to policing. "Shockingly, the Police Advisory Committee undertaking the investigation found that so far 19 of these fired officers have been reinstated. Why does this occur? The committee blamed the arbitration process."

One case is cited as a highlight. In September 2012, Lieutenant Jonathan Josey was caught on a cell-phone video doing this:

He was fired, appealed as permitted by his labor agreement, got reinstated, and retained his rank.

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Alex Zimmerman of the Pittsburgh City Paper has details about police arbitration in his town:

In June 2008, after downing six drinks as part of his wife's birthday celebration on the South Side, Paul Abel was accused of accidentally shooting a 20-year-old man he was trying to pistol-whip. In December 2009, Eugene Hlavac was accused of slapping his ex-girlfriend (and his son's mother) so hard that he dislocated her jaw. And in November 2010, Garrett Brown was accused of running two delivery-truck drivers off the road in a fit of rage—an allegation similar to those made against Brown in at least one other late-night traffic encounter.

Each of these men, who were all Pittsburgh Police officers at the time of the incidents, shares a common experience: They all were fired, charged criminally, cleared of those charges ... and then got their jobs back through arbitration. And they're not alone. Nine officers were fired by the city between 2009 and 2013, but five of those terminations were overturned by an arbitrator, according to Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Mike Huss. (In all, says Huss, the city filed 269 disciplinary-action reports in that period, 33 of which involved suspensions.) In the cases where terminations were appealed by the police union through arbitration, officers got their jobs back close to 70 percent of the time, according to figures provided by Huss.

A police official sums things up: "Why would you employ a police officer that pistol-whipped and accidentally shot someone on his night off? The common person says, ‘This is crazy.' And they're right: It is crazy. It's just never gotten enough attention."

What does the other side say? Here's the perspective of Bryan Campbell, "a veteran lawyer for the Pittsburgh's chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police," commenting on the cop who accidentally shot a man he was trying to drunkenly pistol-whip:

Abel has been widely held up as an example of an officer who shouldn't have gotten his job back, but Campbell says the picture is more complicated. Though Abel was off duty when he shot someone on the street, Campbell explains, he was sucker-punched and was only trying to arrest the culprit. It just didn't turn out to be the guy he shot. "All he was trying to do is arrest somebody who was guilty of an assault," Campbell says, although he adds, "Should he have taken his gun out in those circumstances? Probably not."

He shot a totally innocent person while drunk ... but there was a different guy somewhat nearby that was guilty of assault, which is supposed to make it all less egregious. I wonder how a police officer would treat that explanation if a non-cop tried it.