Methuen, MA goes completely off the rails, decides to give police captains raises up to almost half a mill each.

Yep. You read that right. They don't call it Taxachusetts for nothing. Methuen, a smallish city near the New Hampshire border, is about to have some of the highest paid police officers in the world. One of their five captains is about to get a 180% pay raise from $150K to $440k...and the other four will be paid in that same range. While police do very dangerous jobs, captains often do less dangerous jobs than the beat cops, and these kind of salaries are drawing outrage from Methuen residents. Their city is awash in debt, and this only exacerbates the situation:

https://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/06/police_captain_pay_numbers_are.html?ref=hvper.com

To make the situation even more ludicrous, compare a couple of other salaries from nearby Boston... The Police COMMISSIONER in Boston makes $174K. The Governor of the State makes $140k. The combined salaries of both of these far more senior officials is thus quite a bit less than Methuen's 5th captain. The situation is so bad that state lawmakers are looking at intervening and setting limits, legislatively. While I am generally in favor of local control, it would appear that the union that set up this state of affairs needs reigning in. The people of Methuen need something sensible to be done before their real estate taxes put them out on the streets.

Public officials, nationally, need to be accountable to the people who pay their salaries, and this situation in northern Massachusetts just goes to show that, in many cases, they simply are not.