44 Officers Are Charged After Ohio Sting Operation
In what may be the largest and widest ranging police corruption investigation in the country in recent years, 44 officers from five law-enforcement agencies were charged today with taking money to protect cocaine trafficking operations in Cleveland and northern Ohio, Federal authorities said.
The arrests were the result of a two-and-a-half-year Federal sting operation, which started out as an inquiry into organized crime in Cleveland, officials said. Along the way, investigators discovered a large ring of police officers and sheriff's department corrections officers who readily hired themselves out to be escorts and security guards for people they believed to be cocaine traffickers, but who were really undercover Federal agents.
''It's the largest I'm aware of,'' said Tron Brekke, deputy assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Office of Public and Congressional Affairs in Washington, who until recently supervised the bureau's police corruption investigations. ''There are other cases that may have dragged on for a while and may have had as many officers involved. For a single day arrest, I don't recall anything even close.''
Mr. Brekke said he believed there had never been a police corruption case involving officers from so many different agencies.
The Cleveland case is the latest in a series of police corruption investigations that have struck cities across the country in recent years.
From 1994 to 1997, 508 officers in 47 cities have been convicted in Federal corruption cases, F.B.I. figures show. In many cases, not only has the police department involved been forced to overhaul its operations, but arrests made by the corrupt officers have been tainted and criminal convictions they helped secure have been overturned.
''What we're seeing is this pattern of greed and corrupt conduct, and it's happening all over the country, from the Southwest border to New England to California,'' Mr. Brekke said.
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But in a different way, the corruption that has emerged in recent years is also a sign of the times, experts say, driven by the emergence of the drug trade and the vast sums of money it generates.
''There is a new form of corruption,'' said William Bratton, the former Police Commissioner in New York City. ''It used to be cops took payoffs to look the other way, for what was usually a more benign activity like gambling, prostitution. What we're seeing now is the insidious aspect caused by the drug problem. There is more and more crossing the line to get involved in that business.
Either they provide protection or, as in New York, they would literally steal the drugs and then sell them themselves. Also what we're seeing is cops as criminals engaging in very significant violence to support their criminal goals.'
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http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/22/us/44-officers-are-charged-after-ohio-sting-operation.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
—well, well—when I lived in New Mexico just north of the border thirty years ago, the deputies in law enforcement classes at the local junior college used to supply their girlfriends and classmates out of the sheriff’s dep’t stash of confiscated marijuana-—