Police, stories of corruption in the police department and the aftermath.

Money talks and ethics walk!

For every corrupt cop, official and political personality caught, how many go without notice or ever questioned, most, I would imagine. So, let me repeat the above… money talks and ethics seem to walk.

Its the very dumb and greedy ones that get caught, what about the rest? The corrupt cops caught were stupid enough to sell drugs to other undercover officers and get involved in situations most people would never be a part of - hmmm, so how do you catch the smarter ones or the better protected?

Police setting people up - corrupt officers dealing in drugs, money laundering and other crimes commited by the people we pay to protect and serve us. We seem to think they are supposed to prevent these crimes, but some rotten apples seem to create them. Unfortunately, the innocent get caught in the crossfire of greed and power, ending up with lives ruined for no good reason other than a few bucks got made by the corrupt.

from another police corruption article page here and many other great articles of corrupt cops and the misuse of their authority and badge.

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Boston police corruption case detailed
Prosecutors say Pulido threatened officers’ children

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff

In 2006 - As he huddled in an Atlantic City hotel room last May with a handful of reputed drug dealers, Boston police Officer Roberto Pulido boasted that he knew how to test the loyalty of officers he was recruiting to help protect cocaine shipments being trucked through Boston: threaten their children.
In a conversation secretly recorded by the FBI on May 24 and played by prosecutors during a bail hearing yesterday in federal court, Pulido said he approached three officers about helping him guard drug shipments and told them, “You’re my family, but as family does, family sticks to their own.”

He said he warned them, “If something goes bad and they’re at fault, somebody is going to pay, either with their life or their children’s lives, and as soon as they hear that, they’re like, OK — they back off. The only ones that step forward are the ones that I trust.”

When one officer hesitated, he was left out, Pulido said, because “that was all I needed to hear.” But the two other officers “stepped forward,” he said.

Pulido, 41, of Hyde Park, and two other officers, Carlos Pizarro, 36, and Nelson Carrasquillo, 35, both of Dorchester, were arrested July 20 in Miami on a charge of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms of cocaine. The three are accused of guarding a truckload of cocaine in June for undercover FBI agents posing as drug dealers, who paid them $50,000. All three remain jailed without bail. AUDIO: Boston officer Roberto Pulido discusses threats Transcript of Boston police Officer Roberto Pulido discussing threats

An FBI affidavit also alleges that Pulido was involved in other crimes, including identity theft, steroid trafficking, immigrant smuggling, and hosting illegal afterhours parties in which prostitutes and drug dealers mingled with uniformed officers.

FBI special agent Michael Kreizenbeck testified yesterday that after his arrest Pulido said that he was investigating the purported drug dealers and that his “long range plan was to get to the kingpin and turn him in.”

However, the agent said Pulido hadn’t filed any reports with the Boston Police Department about his alleged investigation. Pulido also kept $20,000 that he and Carrasquillo were allegedly paid for protecting an earlier shipment of 40 kilograms of cocaine in April, according to the government.

A prosecutor argued yesterday that Pulido and Pizarro should remain jailed until the case is resolved because they are dangerous men who led double lives, deceiving both the Police Department and their families by working as officers while leading a criminal life.

“If these men would mortgage their children to commit this crime, then what wouldn’t they do to avoid prosecution in this case?” said Assistant US Attorney John McNeil, arguing that the officers might retaliate against a cooperating witness and his family if released.

McNeil also argued that Pulido could flee to the Dominican Republic, the native country of the woman he had been having an affair with for 11 years, or to Greece, where his alleged steroid supplier now lives after fleeing Boston to avoid a drug indictment.

Defense lawyers, backed by a courtroom filled with supportive relatives and friends of the officers, argued that Pulido and Pizarro were decorated officers and longtime Boston residents who deserve to be free while defending themselves against bogus charges.

Pulido’s lawyer, Rudy Miller, said Pulido had told other officers about his undercover investigation of the purported drug dealers and was “waiting his time to effect an arrest.”

Pulido’s boasts about killing children and committing other crimes were “puffery” and part of Pulido’s effort to infiltrate the drug ring, Miller said.

Calling allegations in the affidavit about afterhours parties, identity theft, and other crimes “absolutely ficticious, fabricated, made-up stories,” Miller accused the government of sucking Pulido into the drug conspiracy and relying on a cooperating witness who is a three-time convicted felon.

Pizarro’s lawyer, Jeffrey Denner, said Pizarro is charged with being involved in one drug shipment and was unaware of Pulido’s boasts about violence against children or other crimes.

“If he made a mistake, it was an isolated mistake that has to be looked at in the context of a very good life,” Denner said.

US Magistrate Judge Joyce London Alexander took under advisement the bail requests from Pulido and Pizarro, and a similar request made by Carrasquillo during a hearing earlier this month.

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In city after city the old maxim that “the cops are the biggest gang in town” is truer than ever.

It is clear from the patterns of police crime — which usually hits impoverished neighborhoods of color — that the inherent racism of the war on crime has paved the way for police gangsters. The 1980s war on drugs and today’s more generalized war on crime have imbued many American’s, regardless of their skin color, with intense fear and frustration. People want results — even if cops have to bend the rules. The crime wars have also intensified racist notions that communities of color are naturally or entirely criminal. This has allowed police to act with relative impunity to brutalize, rob, and frame innocent residents of high crime neighborhoods. In the past police corruption generally consisted of cops taking pay-offs. Today’s criminal police are actively generating crimes of their own.

Rotten Apples

In New York City three years ago, in the Bronx’s 48th precinct, a racially-mixed working class area, the police used to began their night shift at the local bars — not rousting “perps” (perpetrators) and restoring order but getting drunk, taking drugs, and plotting their next eight hours of robbery, graft, and brutality. That was until May 3, 1995, when most of the night shift — 16 officers in all — were arrested and indicted on charges ranging from falsifying evidence to stealing weapons and money from illegally-raided apartments.

According to Internal Affairs investigators the 48th’s night shift was run not by the sergeant in charge but by the notoriously brutal officer Richard Rivera. “He did a lot, got away with a lot, [and] did it in front of his supervisors,” said an internal affairs investigator who worked on the 18-month long investigation. “And in a real, sad sense he was the leadership.”

In early 1994 — stung by criticism from community activists and the recently convened Mollen Commission which investigated police corruption — Internal Affairs, the police unit which investigates police wrong-doing, busted Rivera. Contrary to the officer’s tough street persona, Rivera, after only three hours of interrogation, agreed to turn states evidence and spy on his colleagues. His services revealed a pathological brood of drug addicted sadistic cops who did whatever they wanted to whom ever they wanted.

The most mind-blowing charge of all was that one officer, Michael T. Kalanz, kept $1 million dollars cash in his police locker as part of, what federal investigators said was, a Cali drug cartel money laundering operation. Most of the other indicted officers were charged with “booming doors,” i.e., raiding apartments and robbing the occupants and beating innocent residents with their radios, clubs, and flash lights.

The busts in the 48th precinct are only the latest in a string of police criminality cases. The most recent revelations began surfacing in May 1992 when Michael Dowd and five other members of a police gang from the 75th precinct in Brooklyn were arrested for cocaine trafficking in Suffolk County Long Island. It was only due to the intervention of Suffolk County Police that New York City’s police corruption became a public issue.

Before Dowd’s bust on Long Island there had been 16 complaints alleging that he dealt cocaine and robbed street dealers. None of these complaints were investigated, despite the fact that Dowd drove a new, bright red Corvette and frequently had limousines pick him up at the station house and chauffeur him to Atlantic City for gambling trips.

The arrests of Dowd and his six colleagues led to the creation of the Mollen Commission to investigate allegations of widespread police crime. By the end of the summer of 1992, Dowd and his cronies had been charged with wholesale narcotics trafficking, extorting drug dealers and even robbing drug affiliated grocery stores. Dowd, who snorted cocaine off the dash board of his cruiser, received payments of between $4,000 and $8,000 a week from dealers. In exchange, he tipped off his clients to police raids.

In March 1994 the Mollen Commission, having heard testimony from Dowd and an anonymous, hooded former officer from Manhattan’s Lower East Side 9th Precinct, produced its first indictments. A police gang known as the “Morgue Boys” was uncovered operating in Brownsville’s 73rd precinct. Three young cops were charged with dealing drugs while on duty, extorting dealers, and robbing civilians.

Later investigation by the Mollen Commission showed that the “Morgue Boys” had dropped even the pretense of law enforcement, spending much of their on-duty time in a secluded part of the precinct drinking, snorting cocaine, meeting their girlfriends or prostitutes, and shooting their guns.

Shortly after this first show of force by the Mollen Commission, which many feared would also be its last, three officers in Harlem’s 30th Precinct were videotaped beating neighborhood residents and stealing drugs and cash. The epicenter of the scandal was a gang of cops called “Nannery’s Raiders,” after the leader Kevin Nannery, who used to place fake 911 calls to justify raiding drug dealers apartments.

Eventually 29 officers from the “Dirty 30” were charged with crimes including perjury, assault, extortion, and wholesale drug trafficking. In one case an office was accused of shooting a dealer who could not make extortion payments.

Along with Dowd’s gang, the “Morgue Boys” in the 73rd, the madness in the “Dirty 30,” and the misadventures of the 48th’s night shift, numerous other precincts, including the 109th in Queens and the 9th in Greenwich Village, were hit by revelations of police criminality. Yet the New York City’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association spokesperson, Joseph Mancini, insists that: “The New York City Police department is the most closely monitored organization in the world” and that corruption is relatively rare.

However, the Mollen Commission’s 1994 final report found that corruption was widespread, well organized, and permitted by the “willful blindness” of Internal Affairs investigators and high level police officials. The Commission’s report found that virtually all corruption”…involved groups of officers — called `crews’ that protect and assist each other’s criminal activities.” The “crews” averaged 8- 12 officers, with set rules, group names, and worked in flexible networks, planning and coordinating their criminal raids with the help of department intelligence, communications, and special equipment.

Cocaine & Brotherly Love

A similar pattern of police gangs and brutal armed robbery by cops has emerged in Philadelphia’s 39th police district and among an elite highway patrol unit. In the 39th district officers behaved much like their colleagues in New York. Federal prosecutors charge that the officers — some of whom where known to North Philadelphians as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — used their police powers to locate crack houses and drug distribution hubs which could then be raided for cash, cocaine, and weapons. The cocaine was then used to pay informants, setup suspects, bribe witnesses, and buy sexual favors.

So far six officers have been indicted, five have plead guilty and more indictments are expected soon. Over 50 drug convictions have been overturned due to perjured testimony or police-planted evidence. A grand jury is investigating over 100,000 other arrests.

“What’s most disturbing about the Philly corruption,” says Lynn Washington, legal scholar and editor of the Philadelphiapard New Observer, “is that the DA knew what the cops were up to, but tolerated their use of planted evidence because it boosted conviction rates.” Like many other observers, Washington blames much of the current police criminality on the anti-crime and anti-drug frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s.

“No one from the judges on down wants to look soft on crime, so everybody has turned a blind eye to police misconduct…”, says Washington.

The war on drugs and the proliferation of the narcotics trade has also provided police with nationwide opportunities for more lucrative forms of criminality. Today corruption is large scale, proactive, and intimately involved with the narcotics trade. While much police robbery may focus on cocaine and heroine dealers, their terrorism can be quite inclusive. In Philadelphia the police even managed to frame Betty Patterson, a 54-year-old, church-going grandmother, who was recently acquitted.

Same Thing: Different City

Police criminality is not limited to large northeastern metropolitan departments. Throughout the country there is growing evidence of widespread police gangsterism. The following is just a partial survey:
Los Angeles 1990 — seven sheriff’s deputies, members of an elite narcotics squad, are found guilty of stealing $1.4 in confiscated cash.
Cleveland 1991 — 30 police officers are among forty seven individuals indicted for extortion, obstruction of justice, narcotics dealing, and gambling.
Gary, Indiana 1991, the entire vice squad is indicted on charges of extortion, dealing narcotics and robbing drug dealers during phony drug raids, as well as one count of murder.
Detroit 1991 — the former police chief, William Hart, and his deputy chief, Kenneth Weiner, are found guilty of embezzling $2.6 million from a special fund for undercover investigations.
Camden, New Jersey, 1991 — Detective Allen R. Schott is arrested and charged with robbing two banks. In 1995 officers in Jersey City, New Jersey are charged with selling themselves 113 impounded cars at discount prices. Newark’s chief of police is suspended while under investigation.
New Orleans 1994 — ten officers, from what is ranked as the most brutal police department in the country, are indicted for dealing drugs and guns. One officer is charged with arranging the murder of a woman who filed brutality charges against him. The next year, officer Antoinette Frank is found guilty of robbing a restaurant and murdering three people in the process, one of whom is her own off-duty partner.
Greenpoint, New York — 1994, the entire police department (nine officers in all) is disbanded due to corruption, ineptitude, and widespread drug and alcohol abuse by on-duty officers.
San Diego 1995 — an officer is caught on video and convicted for breaking into and robbing a software firm.

These are just a few abridged examples of police criminality. Civil libertarians and police accountability activist’s think these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. “Police corruption and criminality is notoriously hard to prove,” say Jon Crew of the San Francisco American Civil Liberty’s Union. But Crew does point out that, “It is, in fact, quite routine, to see clients who have lost cash and property to the police. Whether things are stolen or just unaccounted for is hard to prove.”

Despite the difficulties in proving police criminality, three San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) narcotics officers were recently indicted by a Grand Jury on charges of perjury, soliciting perjury, wrongful arrest, and stealing from suspects, many of whom were not charged with any crime. The pattern is familiar: doors are kicked in and alleged dealers are relieved of their valuables. The Grand Jury indictments do not seem to be isolated incidents.

In another case that has not gone to court, a white professional whose home was raided for methanphedamnine and mescaline, lost $3,000 dollars worth of video and computer equipment to a SFPD narcotics squad. A 1995 New Years Eve raid on an AIDS benefit in San Francisco’s SOMA district reveals a similar pattern of missing cash, computers, and video equipment. The victims of that raid — mostly white political activists — are suing and the 21 cops who conducted the raid are being investigated. But as criminal defense attorney Rose Braz points out, “most people are too scared and too poor to press charges when the police rip them off. And most juries and judges think the cops are the only thing between them and chaos.”

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and a few more cases of the same - bad cops using power, violence and the authority given them, for gain

Police Corruption
Similar to US alcohol prohibition of the 1920’s, current drug prohibition legislation breeds police corruption and abuse. A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office notes that on-duty police officers involved in drug-related corruption engage in serious criminal activities such as (1) conducting unconstitutional searches and seizures; (2) stealing money and/or drugs from drug dealers; (3) selling stolen drugs; (4) protecting drug operations; (5) providing false testimony; and (6) submitting false crime reports. Approximately half of all police officers convicted as a result of FBI-led corruption cases between 1993 and 1997 were convicted for drug-related offenses and nationwide over 100 cases of drug-related corruption are prosecuted each year. Every one of the federal law enforcement agencies with significant drug enforcement responsibilities has seen an agent implicated.

It isn’t hard to explain the growth of corruption. Relative to other opportunities, legitimate or illegitimate, the financial temptations are enormous. Many police officers are demoralized by the scope of drug trafficking. No matter how diligent an officer may be eradication programs and millions of arrests have done little to stop drugs which are now cheaper, purer, and more available than ever. Given the dangers of their job, the indifference of many citizens and the frequent lack of appreciation are no doubt disheartening. Some police also recognize that their real function is not so much to protect victims from predators but to regulate an illicit market that can’t be suppressed and that much of society prefers to keep underground.

One of America’s worst cases of drug-related police corruption occurred in California after an officer caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from a police department’s evidence locker turned on his fellow officers to get a reduced sentence. Known as the ‘Rampart’ Scandal, over a hundred convictions were overturned as police misconduct, ranging from the planting of evidence to “confessions” obtained through beatings was uncovered. Officers were indicted on corruption charges, including torture, murder, drug dealing, and framing innocent people. The unit’s criminal behavior became known as the ‘Rampart Way,’ a term referring to a predominately poor, immigrant neighborhood in East Los Angeles patrolled - and during that time controlled -by the officers.

Indeed, the misfortune of corruption falls disproportionately on communities of color. In July of 1999 the small town of Tulia, Texas, saw 43 residents arrested in early-morning drug raids. Forty of those arrested were black - making up over ten percent of the town’s African-American population. The few whites arrested were in relationships with blacks. The only evidence against them was the testimony of one white undercover officer, who worked alone, and had no audiotapes, video surveillance or eyewitnesses. Despite this, many of the accused ended up with harsh sentences ranging from 25 years to life. The officer’s credibility was brought into question when the employee of one defendant produced time cards revealing that the man was at work at the time of the alleged drug transaction. More recently, it was discovered that the undercover officer had quit his last law-enforcement job and fled town to avoid theft charges yet, only two of the convictions have been cleared.

Police Corruption in Kings County (Seattle), Washington state

A group of public defender organizations in Kings County (Seattle), Washington is pursuing an innovative litigation strategy with race and drug felony issues in the case Washington v. Varner. The offices are consolidating drug cases into a class action suit claiming that the Seattle Police Department employs racist practices in targeting certain communities for drug related offenses. Using statistical evidence compiled by graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the attorneys argue that the Seattle Police Department’s choices in where to enforce narcotics offenses are racist in intent and consequences. The overwhelming majority of those arrested and prosecuted are African-American and Latino, despite evidence that Caucasians use and sell drugs at equivalent rates. Counsel has filed a request for discovery to gain access to additional Police Department records to substantiate their claim.