After years of unchallenged dominance within Tunisia's security debate, there are are growing signs that the power enjoyed by the country's police force and its unions may be waning. 

In recent months, growing public resistance to new security laws and a campaign by the country's powerful lawyers association, along with a perceived decline in the terror threat, may finally be about to check the power of the country's police.

Once regarded as the attack dogs of the former regime, the police were among the first vestiges of the old regime to return to the post-revolutionary landscape. Since then, fueled by increased terror threats facing the nascent democracy and aided by a tranche of newly formed trade unions operating under official sounding names, such as the National Union of Internal Security Forces, whose actions in defense of their members has occasionally bordered on gangsterism, the police's virtual impunity has become almost a fact of life.

In addition to the longstanding and ambiguous legal framework governing the conduct of the trade unions, there are two other pieces of legislation, one passed and the other long promoted, that further bolster the police's power.