Remember the scene in Heavy Metal when Harry Canyon tries to get the NYPD to investigate a murder & they tell him how much it'll cost him up front?

Walter Russell Mead on the larger implications of NYPD ticket fixing scandal.

New Yorkers are getting an uncomfortable look at the ugly realities behind what we like to think of as the country’s bluest, most European and most enlightened city. A series of trials now underway in the Bronx reveal the harsh truth of embedded corruption and contempt for the public at the heart (if that is the right word) of the New York City police union. . .

Together with a string of other recent cases, the Bronx case suggests that a culture of corruption and entitlement has spread through the ranks of the thin blue line. Worse, it is clear that police union officials are the mainstay of the illegal ticket fixing enterprise, so much so that prosecutors considered indicting the union as a corrupt organization under racketeering laws. The police demonstration in the Bronx was apparently orchestrated by the union, which sent text messages to officers urging that they show up to support colleagues involved in ticket fixing. “It’s a courtesy, not a crime,” was the slogan.

This of course is what everybody thinks of special privileges. That’s what doctors and lawyers think when they cover up professional wrongdoings by their guild brethren. It’s what investment bankers think when they pass on inside information to favored clients — a courtesy not a crime. It’s what politicians think when they do favors in exchange for money and it’s what Don Corleone and Tony Soprano think when they do favors for their friends. The essence of privilege (private law, etymologically speaking) is exactly that: exemption from the laws that govern other people. The police union in New York believes that based on longtime practice it possesses certain unique rights to circumvent the written law.

Meanwhile, the Times was deeply shocked and troubled by what it saw. Policemen booing and cursing prosecutors and officers of the court? Open solidarity with lawbreakers? But it was even worse. Across the street from the courthouse is a “benefits center.” When the crowd lined up to collect welfare payments started chanting “Fix our tickets!” at the protesting cops, the cops responded with derisory chants of “EBT! EBT” (electric benefits transfer, a popular method of making social support payments here in the blue paradise of the northeast). . .

The police rally against law enforcement was one of those rare moments that illuminate the life of a great city in crisis. Between the good government, pro-minority Times reporters, the angry crowd of police rallying to protect their privileges and perks against the background of a city facing financial cutbacks, and the crowd of poor benefit seekers waiting in the street, resentful of the privileged police, we see can see the political and social crisis of New York in a single space. . .

What that Bronx courtyard shows us is a political culture in decline and a development model on the brink. New York’s dependence on Wall Street and the federal government is becoming more acute by the year. Post bubble and post stimulus, neither source of revenue can be expected to grow at an adequate rate, and it is not unlikely that both will be shrinking for years. The pieces of the coalition are venting their rage and hostility, and new supplies of money are nowhere in view.