A recent solicitation from the Fraternal Order of Police seems innocuous enough as a fundraiser for City Council candidate Bobby Henon. The April 28 cocktail reception to support the campaign sounds fun (we weren’t invited however) but there is one thing we did notice, thanks to help from an anonymous tipster: looks like $1k gets you “15 courtesy cards signed by our President [John McNesby].” That’s less than $100 for the little blue piece of paper that gets the owner “courtesies” from cops, which basically means if you have a clean record or aren’t doing 150mph donuts in a school playground at recess, you may get out of a ticket with a warning. However, there has been such flagrant misuse of these cards that many cities have done away with them, and courtesy cards are really just a form of favoritism, an illegal “blue-coat crime” that Ellwyn Stoddard suggests are now accepted as normal. It is a bit off-putting that McNesby would so easily dish away his signature vouching for people who he’s never met but who happened to have a G to spare. Let’s just hope the people who actually got invited to this reception have a better driving record than we do.