Cop Corruption Exposed

It's very common knowledge that the policies of prohibition have failed on many more levels than it succeeded. It brings high corruption to every aspect of society. But the most directly damaging one is corrupt police. There's nothing new about cops planting drugs on innocent people. An article by Allison Kilkenny called "Former Narcotics Detective Admits Drug Planting Common" sums up quite nicely what the drug war is doing to the department that's supposed to SERVE and PROTECT.

"I think that it happens more than people would like to think," says Williamson. He adds that in Camden and in New York, there is a certain degree of pressure to make arrests, and even if a department doesn't have a specific written quota policy, there is always an expectation that a productive police officer makes arrests and hauls in contraband off the streets. "There's a natural temptation for police officers to [plant drugs]."

Stephen Anderson, a former New York Police Department (NYPD) narcotics detective, recently testified that he regularly saw police plant drugs on innocent people as a way for officers to meet arrest quotas.

This practice has reportedly cost the city $1.2 million to settle cases of false arrests. 

Isn't it nice to have UNOFFICIAL official (not a typo) quota to greatly influence the arrest statistics and pretty much hand over loads of taxpayers cash to courts,  prisons, and/or treatment centres. And remember all of this is being paid by YOU.

Well, at least not all the cases are lost but justice still does not prevail. So what if they get money for a wrongful arrest? What about their mental distress of being arrested, permanent record, maybe lost earning/jobs.

"It's almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it," Anderson coolly admitted to a reportedly stunned Brooklyn courtroom. "They're going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway - nothing is going to happen to them."

Forgotten in that detached assessment, obviously, is the horrific experience of being in jail; the financial burden of having to pay up to a $500,000 fine; and, oh, having a criminal record possibly wreck one's chances of future employment - not to mention dealing with the social stigma of being in jail; the travel restraints; the loss of voting rights; difficulty in finding affordable housing; and dealing with barriers to education (the Higher Education act was amended in 1998 to delay or deny federal financial aid to students on the basis of any drug offense,) among other hurdles too numerous to list.

If that's how police think, with complete detachment from reality of the situation, then how do they even get a chance to take an oath...


And the corruption keeps climbing higher:

It's difficult for the ACLU to take on the issue of arrest quotes precisely because they are oftentimes unofficial understandings between supervisors and officers.

It gets better...:

However, officially, these quotas don't exist, and since official quotas "don't exist," then the instances of drug planting are always presented as isolated cases of bad apple officers gone rogue instead of natural byproducts of a high-pressure system of quotas.

Tracking how far rot extends up the ladder of a department is also extremely difficult to determine. Unless someone like Anderson steps forward to spill the beans about corrupt brass, supervisors and investigators almost always deny they knew this kind of behavior was ever going on.

And the lists of suspects goes on and on, in my opinion, all the way to the top of the drug policy makers and big corporations that profit from all this.

"This has been going on for forty years," Downing states simply. "These corruptions are emerging all over the country. It's not systemic to a police department, per se, but it is systemic to the War on Drugs in the context that the federal government is basically corrupting local government with their funds and the helter-skelter way of putting these task forces together and diverting local police from their basic public safety duties to the priorities of the federal government in terms of the War on Drugs."

Sounds like I'm repeating myself but yet again: SERVE and PROTECT???

Even though police departments across the country continue to deny the existence of these quotas, what's become clear through the deluge of corruption cases is that these are not exceptional situations, but rather the expected consequence of a system of skewed priorities beginning 40 years ago that has only served to enrich underground drug pushers and destroy local communities.

Only if more people joined the right side of the debate, we could stop this nonsense of a War on Own People.