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Tag: corruption

  • There goes: “You get what you pay for!”

    Well Suffolk County certainly isn’t a good case study for my point that if you pay cops enough, you’ll avoid scandal. Though I’d still like to think that’s true, WTF?

    The former Chief of Police (how much did he make?) pled guilty:

    to federal charges stemming from accusations that he beat a suspect in custody, threatened to kill him and then coerced his fellow officers into covering up the misconduct.

    …

    Two decades ago, as a sergeant, Mr. Burke had a sexual relationship with a prostitute, according to an internal affairs investigation that accused Mr. Burke of accidentally leaving his handgun with the woman, Newsday reported.

    …

    With some 2,700 sworn officers and over 600 civilian members, the department is one of the largest in the region.

    Compared with those in other departments, officers in the Suffolk agency are well paid, making $125,000 in base pay. That is about $50,000 more than their counterparts in New York City, and it does not include overtime pay, which can be substantial, or the extra money officers receive for each year on the job.

    Detectives and sergeants have been known to earn more than $200,000 a year. The police unions on Long Island are so wealthy they have formed a “super PAC” to flood local elections with campaign donations

  • Former LA Sheriff Baca Pleads Guilty

    I don’t know much about LA county. The LA Sheriff’s Department has 18,000 employees and 9,100 sworn officers. And running a huge jail system ain’t easy. But Sheriff Baca and his cronies have been in trouble for a long while. His people tried to strong-arm an FBI agent investigating his department. Not cool. Perhaps we shouldn’t be electing top law enforcement officials. From the NYT:

    The plea agreement with the United States attorney’s office caps a stunning fall for Mr. Baca, who was among the most powerful men in Southern California during the 15 years that he led the sheriff’s department. Seventeen sheriff’s department employees have been convicted as part of the federal investigation into corruption and civil rights violations in the Los Angeles County jails during his tenure. Inmates were routinely sexually humiliated and severely beaten by sheriff’s deputies at the jails, according to the Department of Justice.

    The LA Times has more of the salacious details.

  • The 1 percent

    Out of 12,000 Chicago Cops, 124 are responsible for a third of misconduct lawsuits settled by the city since 2009, costing $34 million. The Tribune(behind a paywall unless you good for the article) reports that 82 percent of the department’s officers were not named in any settlements. (Keep in mind that a good chunk of that 82 percent haven’t interacted on-duty with a member of the public since Richard J. Daley. The proper denominator here would be the number of cops on the street.):

    Of the more than 1,100 cases the city settled since 2009, just 5 percent were for more than $1 million…. [The rest still] cost the city millions of dollars…. A vast majority, 85 percent, were settled for $100,000 or less, which meant the deals did not require City Council approval. And Chicago officers accused of misconduct are rarely disciplined.

    Of course there are many unfounded complaints. Just as there are many BS lawsuits filed for a quick monetary settlement. I know that. But just like a criminal arrest 20 times — God only knows how many crimes he committed without getting caught — a cop with 57 complaints? God only knows how much shit you really did. Not every mope complains.

    While many officers as well as police union officials attribute claims of misconduct to the rough and tumble of working in crime-ridden neighborhoods, complaints against Campbell, Sautkus and their colleagues have often occurred while the group patrolled relatively low-crime areas, focused on quality-of-life issues.

    …

    The three officers have earned hundreds of awards and commendations from the department for their work. They’ve also racked up 16 lawsuit settlements since 2009 among them and two other officers who also live in the neighborhood… The city paid $1.5 million to settle those cases.

    How the hell does one officer get sued (with payout) seven times in seven years and average about 6 complaints a year? Good God. Hundreds of awards. As long as he kept finding the drugs, he gets awards. Doesn’t anybody look for red flags?

    I can’t help but think of my friend and squadmate who retired as a noble patrol officer after 33(!) years on the mean streets of Baltimore. He once confided in me, half gleefully and half sheepishly, that he hadn’t received a single serious complaint in his entire career. Now mind you, in his 30th year, he wasn’t exactly setting the curve in number of arrests. But he did his job and did it well. His secret? He was a good cop. He didn’t take shit, but he also treated everybody with respect, even those who didn’t deserve it.

  • Snitching for Dollars

    This is what the War on Drugs looks like. Just another day. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

    One of Chicago’s most notorious informants — who provided drug tips to the police while secretly killing and robbing people and doing drug deals — was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his information with the approval of police supervisors who have since reached the highest levels of the department, records show.

    Saul Rodriguez was a top snitch for the Chicago Police Department’s narcotics section between 1996 and 2001. Over that period, he received more than $800,000 from the department for his information.

    …

    During those years, Rodriguez was involved in two killings and other serious crimes like holdups, according to federal prosecutors.

    …

    Rodriguez, the informant, was a partner in crime with Lewellen, his police handler, federal authorities say. Both men went to prison in 2012 in a federal conspiracy case. Sanchez has never been charged and has denied any wrongdoing.

  • NYPD Discipline

    Some stats about the NYPD in the New York Times. Bratton is giving more discretion to local commanders for disciplining cops for minor offenses. That’s good. It’s another move away from the micro-managed overly top-down approach of former Commissioner Ray Kelly. The article then tries to say Bratton is not applying Broken Windows within his own department… but that once again mistakes Broken Windows for Zero Tolerance.

    Seemingly arbitrary and pernicious discipline is a major cause for low officer moral. The idea that you can get punished for wearing the wrong color socks just as easily as excessive force, for instance. (Though seriously, I hate seeing cops with white socks. They make black cotton sports socks. Go buy some. A pick up a few more white t-shirts while you’re at it.)

    Arrests dropped to 388,368 in 2014 from 394,537 in 2013.

    Summonses fell to 359,202, from 424,850.

    Street stops plunged to 46,235, from 191,558.

    Those stats are not hard to find. But these don’t surface as often:

    The number of officers suspended without pay each year hovers around 200. A total of 172 were suspended last year and 117 have been suspended so far this year, through Friday. Those put on desk duty, or “modified”, reached 134 last year and number 98 so far this year.

    Last year, 96 officers were arrested, mirroring an average of about 100 each year, a majority of them on drunk driving and domestic violence charges, the department said. (An arrest automatically leads to a suspension so all of the arrested officers are among those counted as suspended.)

    That means that about 70-75 NYPD officers are suspended without pay at the department’s discretion. For those who believe in some mythic Blue Wall of Silence, how do you account for an NYPD officer being arrested, mostly by other NYPD officers, every 4 days? (About one in every 350 officers is arrested each year, which seems like a lot to me. For non-police, the number is about 1 arrest for every 20 people).

    I leave you with this quote:

    “Chief got kicked; chief kicked inspector; inspector kicked captain; captain kicked lieutenant; lieutenant kicked sergeant; sergeant kicked cop; cop kicked civilian. This is what Bratton has to undo.”

  • Corruption in the Baltimore Police Department

    When I hear people, Commissioner Batts including, talk about the horrible institutional problem of Baltimore police corruption, I know they have never spent any time working on the streets of Baltimore. Batts certainly hasn’t. He’s the chief. He’s separated by five thick layers of chain of command from the rank-and-file. And he didn’t work his way up through that chain of command.

    Here’s what I saw. If you have no first-hand experience, please don’t try and convince me otherwise. It’s the old line about “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

    This comes from Cop in the Hood:

    Temptation is everywhere. Given the prevalence of drug dealing and the fact that drug dealers hold hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in cash, police officers routinely face the opportunity for quick and illegal personal gain. Police could get away with stealing drugs or money, at least for a while. But robbed drug dealers can and will call Internal Affairs. And officers with criminal dealings will usually be ratted out by another criminal. Putting a dirty cop behind bars is as good a get-out-of-jail card as exists.

    I policed what is arguably the worst shift in the worst district in Baltimore and saw no police corruption. I know there are corrupt police officers. After three years on the street, one Eastern District officer stopped a man who drove his motorized scooter through a red light. The man had $6,300 in his pocket. The officer counted the money and allegedly returned $4,900 of it. The man called police to report the missing money and the officer was arrested and indicted on felony theft charges. One year later, these charges were dropped on condition that the officer resign from the police department and agree not to work in law enforcement again. When a cop is dirty, there is inevitably a drugs connection. Over a few beers after work, the subject of the drug squad came up. An older cop warned me to “stay away from drugs [in your dealings as a cop]. They’ll just get you in trouble in the long run.”

    Incidents do happen, but the police culture is not corrupt. Though overall police integrity is very high, some will never be convinced. But out of personal virtue, internal investigation stings, or monetary calculations, the majority— the vast majority—of police officers are clean. A greater problem is that high- arrest officers push the boundaries of consent searches and turn pockets inside- out. Illegal (and legal) searches are almost always motivated by a desire to find drugs. In the academy, an officer warned the class, “Corruption starts six months to a year after you’re out of the academy. When you’re on the streets and you start shaking down drug dealers because they’re worthless shits.” Similarly a sergeant explained:

    You’ll get out there, thinking you can make a difference. Then you get frustrated: a dealer caught with less than twenty- five pieces will be considered personal use. . . . Or you go to court and they take his word over yours. You’re a cop and you’re saying you saw something! . . . After it happens to you, you don’t care. It’s your job to bring him there [to court]. What happens after that is their problem. You can’t take this job personal! Drugs were here before you were. And they’ll be here long after you’re gone. Don’t think you can change that. I don’t want you leaving here thinking everybody living in this neighborhood is bad, does drugs. Many [cops] start beating people, thinking they deserve it.

    Police officers are often in a position to hold various amounts of drugs and money. Legally seized drugs and money are kept in one’s pockets (carefully separated from personal belongings) before being taken to the station house and submitted in the proper fashion. Officers have to be careful not to make honest mistakes. They could put something in the wrong pocket. Something could fall out of a pocket. The night gets busy and they might forget to submit. Before each shift, police officers search the squad car for anything left behind.

    Many residents, after repeated calls to police about drug dealers, assume that officers are either incorrigibly corrupt or completely apathetic:

    I understand what you [police] deal with. But you got to understand. People see police drive right by the dealers, don’t even get out of the car. Or they [police] got them [dealers] with their legs spread [being searched]. Who’s to say you ain’t taking a little something on the side? You can’t have drugs on this scale without somebody letting it happen.

    Police discount such accusations:

    People get bad ideas from the media or from criminals that we’re corrupt or brutal. But we’re not. Or they refuse to think that their son could be involved with drugs. They want the corner cleared, but if we pick up their son it must be the racist cops picking on him because he’s black. And with the amount of drugs you’ve got in this area, of course they aren’t going to like police because we’re trying to lock them up. Too many people here are pro-criminal.

    Even financially, it pays to be straight. A New York City police officer explained:

    My pension is worth between one and two million dollars. I’d have to be a fool to risk that for $100, even $1,000. I’ll tell you when I’ll be corrupt: the day I walk into a room piled with drugs, five million dollars in cash, and everybody dead. For five million, I’d do it. I’d leave the drugs and take the cash.

    Some officers enter the police department corrupt. Others fall of their own free will. Still others may have an isolated instance of corruption in an otherwise honest career. But there is no natural force pulling officers from a free cup of coffee toward shaking down drug dealers. Police can omit superfluous facts from a police report without later perjuring themselves in court. Working unapproved security overtime does not lead to a life in the Mob. Officers can take a catnap at 4 am and never abuse medical leave. There is no slope. If anything, corruption is more like a Slip ’N Slide. You can usually keep your footing, but it’s the drugs that make everything so damn slippery.

  • “Cop of the Year”?

    I was recently asked for comments about a “Cop of the Year.” It doesn’t matter which. I didn’t know the cop, so I didn’t say much. I have no clue what he did (or didn’t) do. But I am suspicious of “cops of the year.” Are my suspicions justified? I’ll presume there are lots of nice “cops of the year” out there. Wonderful cops of the year. But I don’t remember meeting one. Of course a good cop would be modest about such an award and wouldn’t wear it on his sleeve.

    So maybe I’m just barking up the wrong tree. But it sure does seem like a disproportionate number of arrested cops have been a “cop of the year” at some point. (Of course if I’m looking for something like this, and I am, then I’m susceptible to “confirmation bias.”)

    I do worry that the same factors that make a cop “cop of the year” — aggression, a lot of arrests, a focus on results, seeing your job as a crusade against evil, seeing no gray in the world — these are exactly the same factors that get you in trouble in the long run.

    Quite simply, it’s nearly impossible to consistently make 10 times as many arrests as other cops. Seems to me that being a “super cop” is more a red flag than a cause for celebration.

    Also, I never wanted to work with an over-driven I’m-going-to-save-the-world let’s-lock-up-all-the-bad-guys adrenaline-loving supermen. I mean, why is somebody getting into a signal-13s when you’re off duty? And when that happens, why would that person end up on my post saying, “you never saw me.” I never wanted to see him because trouble was always finding him. Maybe he was just a better cop than me. Either way, I stayed clear.

    [I just googled the guy I’m thinking of, because I assumed he didn’t retire as a cop. And he didn’t. Though he does seem to have a better job. So for all I know he mellowed and learned and took a wise career move. Maybe. But to see him described in one article as a “by the book” cop? Ha.]

    Anyway, this all came to mind because another “cop of the year” was just sentenced to 10 years for drug charges. So I googled “‘Cop of the year’ sentenced” and came up with a bunch pretty quickly. Coincidence? I don’t know. But they were all described as having at one been recognized as a “cop of the year”:

    Philip LeRoy, Queens. Drugs. The most recent.

    Noe Juarez in Houston. Cocaine trafficker for Los Zetas.

    Drew Peterson, Illinois. Domestic murder.

    Ron Coleman, Houston, Drugs.

    Jonathan Bleiweiss, Florida. Forced sex with male illegal immigrants.

    Jerome Finnigan of Illinois. Armed robbery (and racist bad taste).

    David Britto, Boynton Beach, Florida. Drugs.

    James Joseph Krey, Florida (again). Domestic-related.

    Michael Grennier, South Plainfield, NJ. Child porn.

    Michael Froggatt. Gold Coast, Australia. Drunk Driving.

    Matthew Anselmo. Omaha Nebraska. Mail fraud & money-laundering.

    Pace yourself, I say. You got years on the force to do good. And you don’t want to get burnt out of banged by the department because you took the job too seriously.

  • David Durk thought I was crazy…

    …at least at first.

    David Durk died last month. And I didn’t even know it. That really would have pissed him off.

    (My excuse for missing the obits was that I was en-route to a conference in Chicago. Here’s one. And another. And a third.)

    Let me take you back a bit. In October, 2009, there was this strange voice mail on my school office phone. Some gruff guy with no phones manners said, quite awkwardly: “Call me I want to talk about your book!”

    Hmmmm… No, thank you.

    But I did save the message because it was so strange.

    A month later a similar message comes over the phone. But now I’m sitting in front of my computer. He did actually spell his name, David Durk, D.U.R.K., so I punched it into google. The David Durk? I called him back the next day.

    He proceeded to talk my ear off for a good 40 minutes. He hadn’t read my book, but he had heard something I said that pissed him off, which seemingly wasn’t very hard top do. He thought I was crazy because I said something like, “the culture of police today isn’t corrupt.” What can I say? I call ’em like I see ’em. I didn’t know what else to tell him (nor did I ever get the chance to say much). But I did offer to send David Durk a copy of Cop in the Hood. And I did.

    A short time passes and he call me again saying, “I just finished reading the last footnote! Great stuff.” That blurb from him has been on the right column of this blog for a while now. I’m rather proud of it. We got along better after he read my book. I like to think he respected my integrity. Or maybe he just had a soft spot for a college-educated cop. I don’t know if I got in more than 50 words, edge-wise. Evidently, I later learned, I was not the first to experience this Durkian balance of conversation.

    But I considered it an honor to listen to David Durk ramble on. I mean, he’s David Durk for Christ’s sake, and my time isn’t that precious. But I never did invite him to speak to my classes or the school, which (before his health issues became more serious) he was keen to do. We never met. I didn’t really want to. We talked a few more times on the phone. These conversations each lasted about an hour. But over the phone, when push came to shove, I could simply hang up.

    What David Durk told me, again and again, was that the world was corrupt, policing was corrupt, and he was forced out to retire on an officer’s pension rather than the lieutenant’s pension he deserved. I couldn’t argue with any of that, because he would never give me the chance.

    By many accounts, David Durk was a difficult personality. He struck me as not at peace with himself or the world. Mind you, had he achieved some zen-like state of nirvana, he never would have accomplished what he did. I mean, David Durk — along with Frank Serpico — changed the friggin’ culture of modern police! I can’t think of any other two individual with so much positive impact on policing in the 20th century.

    Perhaps the most importantly change is that today (going back at least twenty years) an honest person can become an honest cop and lead a crime-free work-life for 20 years. No “pad”; no stealing from places already burglarized; no shaking down drug dealers; no shooting criminals just to teach them a lesson (not that Durk was opposed to a robbery squad that did just that, just FYI). It’s not that none of this ever happens, it’s that there’s no longer institutionalized criminal corruption in rank-and-file policing. We have Durk and Serpico to thank for that.

    But something odd happens when you quit policing. In the following years you assume nothing has changed. I know policing changed a lot from 1990 to 2001. And I suspect it’s changed as much if not more between 2001 and 2012. But not in my mind, which will forever be a bit stuck in a bit of a time-warp from 2001.

    David Durk lived his life thinking policing hadn’t changed much over the years. This was unfortunate. For a man not known for his humility, Durk couldn’t appreciate what he himself had done do make policing less corrupt. He told me things were just as corrupt in 2012 as they were in 1985, or even 1970. “But it ain’t so, David,” I would tell him, “It just isn’t.” For Durk, the world was never clean enough. The man tired me out. But I’m happy he found the time to do so.

    Rest in peace.

  • Prohibition Corrupts Cops

    Funny how a few illegal searches for drugs might cost your job and next thing you know, you, the “good guy,” is in prison. Why did you do it, Sarge? Was it worth it? Did you really think you going to win the drug war? From the Times:

    Mr. Eiseman, who lost his job as a result of his guilty plea, had supervised the Impact Response Team, made up mostly of recent Police Academy graduates like Officer Carsey, in Upper Manhattan. The unit patrols high-crime neighborhoods.

    Mr. Eiseman, 39, and Officer Carsey, prosecutors said, said they had smelled marijuana coming from an illegally parked van. In seeking a search warrant for the driver’s home, both testified that the man had admitted to having contraband in his apartment, where drugs and a gun were later found. But the two had actually learned of the contraband when they found pictures on the man’s phone, prosecutors said. The case against the driver was eventually dismissed.

  • Criminal Officers plead guilty

    From the New York Times:

    Mr. Ortiz and Mr. Trischitta helped transport three M-16 rifles, one shotgun and 16 handguns from New Jersey to New York. Many had been defaced to remove or alter the serial number.

    In another scheme, the officers — along with Mr. Mahoney, Mr. Melnik and others — helped transport what they believed to be stolen goods, including slot machines, counterfeit merchandise and thousands of cartons of cigarettes, across state lines. According to court documents, the goods carried a street value of about $1 million.