This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 15, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In addition to being the guys with badges and guns, police officers receive many benefits of the

doubt, special privileges, and considerations that are rarely afforded to the rest of the public.

And many states are hoping to push for yet another benefit of Bill of Rights just for cops.

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

He discusses the so-called police officer's Bill of Rights.

Well, police misconduct can start small,

and sometimes it stays small, but it can escalate to very frightening

sorts of happenings including violence to suspects in custody or to others corruption, the theft of large amounts of money

from criminals and non criminals because police find themselves in so many situations

with loose money.

So there is this question of how do you disincentivize police misconduct and when you have it happen anyway, what do you

do to respond to it?

And the answer that police unions like, and they have pressed for it successfully in between 15 and 20 states,

is something called the law enforcement officers Bill of Rights.

And this differs of a little from state to state, but the basic idea is it slaps a whole bunch of procedural

requirements on a city that wants to discipline or fire a policeman over misconduct.

And some of these kind of resemble teacher tenure rules.

Some of them are especially interesting because they have to do with questioning and interrogation.

For example, you can only question the officer in the presence of his lawyer and after he's had a chance

to examine all of the evidence against him, including the names of anyone who informed

...