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Originally Posted by loquitur
thanks, Host. That's the incident I was thinking of. The cop in that case didn't have to lie and dind't have to interrogate the kid before his parents came. The kid was a lowlife and was going to get nailed anyway. But it's good that the cop got nailed. They <i><b>should</i></b> live in fear that abuses of power will be found and exposed. Cops have a lot of power and not a lot of money or prestige, so the temptations for self-gratification by misusing the power are pretty strong. It's the old quandary about who watches the watchmen.
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I testified before a secret grand jury (they're all secret in NY) in Robert Johnson's Bronx courthouse, ten years ago. I was a technical witness asked to assess property damage in a criminal case. The ADA who requested my testimony and questioned me before the grand jury, told me that there were 400 ADA's working under DA Johnson.
My little upstate county, population, 300,000 had just 16 ADA's, yet it experiences the crime described in just one of it's town police depts., at it's local state police barracks, and at the adjacent barracks.
The Bronx had a criminal case load, ten years ago, that justified a staff of 400 ADA's. 25 times the size of the prosecutorial staff in my county. We know that the NYPD commissioner, Kerik was probably corrupt, and one of his asst commissioners, as well:
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http://www.villagevoice.com/news/075...t,78709,2.html
.......We already know all about Bernie Kerik's highest-form-of-flattery mimicry—his infamous seizure of a Ground Zero apartment, set aside for first responders, for a juggling act of escapades with two, as Rudy would put it, "very special friends." And then there's the saga of Ed Norris, who rose to deputy commissioner for operations at the NYPD in his mid-30s under Giuliani and became Baltimore's police commissioner in 2000.
Norris, who was still at NYPD headquarters when the Judi Nathan adventure began in 1999, pled guilty to federal charges in 2004 that he had used a supplemental police fund in Baltimore as if it were his own ATM, "financing romantic encounters with several different women." The original indictment referred to eight women entertained by the police chief on the public tab, but that was later reduced to six. Prosecutors also claimed that the married Norris used the apartment of his chief of staff for workday liaisons that were called "naps," sometimes occurring several times a day. Within months of taking over as police commissioner, he billed an October 2000 stay with "female number one" at the Best Western Seaport in New York to the fund, according to the indictment. The estimated $20,000 in playtime billings included luxury hotels and gifts from Victoria's Secret, and his final plea included admitting to looting the funds and not paying taxes on the income.
A folk hero in certain quarters of Baltimore, Norris returned to the city after doing six months in federal prison and became the top-rated radio talk-show host there, declaring in one newspaper interview that all some people know about him is his supposed penchant for "gifts for girls all over the United States." A shaved-head look-alike for Kerik, Norris is a regular on the HBO series The Wire, playing a homicide detective often furious with Baltimore's powers that be. He was such a successful police commissioner that Republican governor Robert Ehrlich Jr. made him the head of the Maryland State Police in 2003, just months before his indictment.
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I doubt that Kerik and Norris, and now Crespo are even a significant portion of the official corruption, even in the Bronx.
Note that our "system" of political appointments, our president and the Maryland governor turned over the central domestic enforcement and intelligence agencies in their respective dominions, to criminals Kerik and Norris, however briefly.
It is telling that an allegedly "liberal" press does not "package" the individual reports of corruption into a stereotypical problem. Just as the small store owner who could not afford a problem with the local cop on the beat if he wanted to avoid burglary, shoplifiting, and vandalism, no press agency wants to attract animosity from law enforcement, by reporting aggressively or highlighting "the problem" for public discussion, so...we are where we are.
We have a growing, under reported official crime "problem", with near universal public denial that it is more than an occasional act of wrongdoing by a "rogue" cop, prosecutor, or "judge on the take"....WE WISH !