Bulger Corruption Continues

Bulger Corruption Continues

The Editorial refers to "prior corruption problems in the Boston Police
Department." (Editorial, "Blight on the Boston police," Boston Globe, November
14, 2007) In 1995 US Judge Mark Wolf exposed FBI corruption which festered for
many previous years. The gangster leaders, Weeks and Bulger, boasted of their
corruption of state and local police.
Since then there was no wholesale cleansing of any police agency in the
state. The FBI office remains questionable. Neither the staties nor any local
departments were scrutinized. The alleged Internal Affairs divisions do nothing.
Cambridge's Police Review Board is toothless and is run by the police
department. There is no oversight.
Most troubling is the loud silence of elected officials who ignore the
serious threats to public safety. The relaxed moral rectitude and arrogance of a
one-party system keeps the state drifting further and further from the rule of
law.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

Blight on the Boston police
Boston Globe
Editorial
November 14, 2007

BOSTON POLICE Commissioner Edward Davis still subscribes to the "few rotten
apples" theory of police corruption. He used it yesterday to explain the
activities of three officers who pleaded guilty in recent weeks to cocaine
trafficking after getting caught in an FBI sting operation. But cases of
drug-related police corruption in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and
elsewhere suggest that the barrel itself may be moldy.

The three-year investigation of disgraced former officers Roberto Pulido, Nelson
Carrasquillo, and Carlos Pizarro provide the department's internal affairs
investigators with numerous leads. Pulido has been linked to allegations of
steroid sales, identity fraud schemes related to traffic stops, immigrant
smuggling, and protection services for after-hours parties where officers
consorted with known drug dealers and prostitutes. Davis predicts that the
number of additional officers connected to Pulido or his corrupt crew will not
be large. But the department's history doesn't warrant such confidence.

The convicted officers were boastful and contemptuous of their oaths, which
played into the hands of the FBI. It will be harder for Davis to uncover how
many officers are poised on what criminologists call the "invitational edge of
corruption." Drug-related police corruption usually involves just a small number
of hands-on officers. But the larger and potentially more destabilizing problem
stems from officers who know about criminal activity on the part of fellow
officers but fail to report it.

That tarnished sense of loyalty has infected the Boston Police Department
before, notably in 1995 when dozens of officers fled behind a blue wall of
silence rather than testify against colleagues who had nearly beaten a fellow
officer to death after mistaking him for a fleeing suspect.

Some signs are encouraging. Davis says the department displayed its capacity for
self-policing by bringing the Pulido crew to the attention of the FBI in the
first place. And two officers, he says, reported the illicit activities
allegedly taking place at the Hyde Park after-hours club to their superiors.

Other signs point in the wrong direction. Pulido tested positive for cocaine
back in 1999 under the department's mandatory drug testing policy. But overly
lenient accountability measures gave him a chance to return to duty after a
45-day suspension. In New York or Los Angeles, he would have been out on the
street, where he belonged.

An underlying corrosion of standards - weak control of evidence lockers, sloppy
documentation by detectives, poor recruitment practices - has been linked to
prior corruption problems in the Boston Police Department. This case is likely
to be no different. Maybe Pulido and his crew are rotten apples. But the public
still needs to know how the decay got in them in the first place.