Above the law

The Washington Post has a front-page story today about some of the fine, upstanding police officers of Montgomery County, Maryland, who are ignoring and refusing to pay speeding tickets that they have received from cameras posted in order to catch, well, speeders.

Before anyone asks the question, the tickets in question are not the 76 tickets out of 224 issued for going more than ten mph over the limit that police supervisors found qualified as "responding to calls or had other valid reasons to exceed the speed limit". Those tickets were excused, and the officers do not have to pay them. Nope, the other 148 tickets were for your basic garden-variety speeding, just like you or I would get.

The sticking point seems to be the police union, which has apparently told its members that since the ticket is issued to the car's owner, in this case the county itself, that the officers are under no obligation to pay the fine. Unbelievably, the paper is reporting that the union has actually filed a grievance stating that the payment of the fines is a "change in labor conditions that the department must negotiate with the union before implementing." Stop laughing, it's right there in the article. In fact, according to the story, the sergeants in charge of investigating the circumstances of the tickets, themselves union members, are refusing to do so, forcing non-union lieutenants to figure out who really deserves the tickets. "Brotherhood" and "fraternity", you know.

If that weren't enough, at least two officers have been recently recorded giving the finger to the cameras as they rocket through the speed zones, in at least one of the instances while going over 80 miles per hour. Three cheers for the "professional" officers who did so. That's a great way to show the unwashed peasants how to have respect for the law, and the people charged with enforcing it.

Sadly, only the department's chief, J. Thomas Manger, seems to understand the hypocrisy of the situation:

"'We are not above the law,' Manger said in an interview. 'It is imperative that the police department hold itself to the same standards that we're holding the public to.'"

County Council Member Phil Andrews also gets it:

"'You can't have one set of laws for police officers and another one for the rest of the world,' Andrews said."

Except in the minds of Montgomery County police officers, it seems. Hopefully the licenses of the guilty officers will soon be suspended for non-payment of the fines, although they will probably just argue that the judicial system doesn't apply to them as well, their being "special people" and all.