Police Union Privileges
25th January 2018
Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, discusses Blue Privilege.
Earlier I wrote about how police unions around the country give to every officer dozens of “get out of jail” cards to give to friends, family, politicians, lawyers, judges and other connected people. The cards let police on the street know that the subject is to be given “professional courtesy” and they can be used to get out of speeding tickets and other infractions. Today, drawing on the Police Union Contracting Project, I discuss how union contracts and Law Officer “Bill of Rights” give police legal privileges that regular people don’t get.
The proliferation of public employee unions is one of the pillars of our modern dystopian society. You’d think that, as public sector union pension largesse bankrupt local government after local government, they’d wake up and say, ‘Hm, that was a bad idea’, but no. It is a truth universally acknowledge but uniformly ignored that an organized special interest group can almost always triumph politically against the general mass of the public.