Out on the street who is making sure the cops are not dirty?

Nobody. Thanks for asking.

It’s a dirty job, but it falls mainly to Internal Affairs, a division of the force whose job is to watch for wrongdoing by other officers and investigate any suspicion of such going on. When police forces fail to properly police themselves internally, and complaints begin to mount, then state police and the state Attorney General’s office will get involved. If, as often is the case, police malfeasance violates civil rights of citizens or other federal law, the FBI and the US Prosecutor or even the Attorney General’s office will also get involved.

In your specific example, at the cost of a Kilo of cocaine, the drug dealer most certainly knows exactly how many bricks he had in that trunk. If they charge him with 12 Keys instead of 14, there is a good chance he would sing to the District Attorney. The DA might give the cop the benefit of the doubt one time, but several such cases in a row, and he knows they have a dirty cop. Most DAs being elected will go after a drug-dealing cop with a vengeance.

Oh, and just about the worst thing that can happen to a cop is to go to jail for dirty dealing. Just think about how his cellmates are going to welcome the guy who was busting them while doing just as bad himself.

Internal Affairs generally has no sense of humor about such things and few cops are willing to risk their careers like that, so they are generally on the level.

Those that aren’t have a hard time hiding their transgressions for long. If nothing else, their fellow officers may not appreciate the bad rep involved in covering for that sort of thing and drop a tip to IA to preserve the honor of the badge.

Wouldn’t it be great if it was a cultural tendency, every time people see cops or other government authority, they pull out their phone cameras and record even if nothing special is going on. Just to make sure they know they’re being watched as closely as they watch us.

@zophu Sadly, that is illegal in many states.

@jerv no way, really? I mean, I know recording random people can be illegal, but recording cops? How can that be illegal?

edit: Yeah, I guess this is a thing I’ve missed. I just assumed it was allowed. that sucks.

@zophu Maybe they don’t want John Q catching them letting a hooker off for a little someth’n, someth’n, or stashing a few grams away for a rainy day or tossing down that throw away because they shot someone holding his cell phone in a dark alley the moment it went off and they seen it light up in his hand, etc.?

@zophu It is, amazingly, illegal to film cops in the process of questioning a suspect or making an arrest here in liberal Massachusetts. I don’t agree with that law, but it’s on the books.

The citizens of the U. S. are supposed to report any police who do not follow proper procedure, but unfortunately, many do not want to do their job, so the police get away with it.

@ETpro I.A. can only act if they know something which usually takes a cop to blow the whistle, but seeing many cops have a tighter bond than the MOB, if one rolls up on a collar to find one of their own skimming the dealer’s money or dope how many times do you think that cop will run to I.A. and rat out the dirty cop? Especially if he/she would not believe the rest of the rank and file will rally around them against the dirty cop especially if that cop was well like or of rank?

Most cops have them cameras on their dashboard. Their are plenty of “bad cops” out there, but I think any good cop wouldn’t even think about doing that if they had a conscious and took their job seriously. When they do get caught they get in a hell of alot of trouble.

Don’t worry, in the US there is no lack of law enforcement agencies to spy on each other and fill our for-profit prisons. In most states, if not all, there is a state police organization fashioned after the FBI whose duty it is, among many others, to investigate city and county police departments which show signs of corruption. They usually answer straight to the State Atty’s office, or in some states, the Lt. Governor. In Florida the agency is called the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement. Georgia has the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Tennesse has the TBI.

The city/county agencies are watched by the state agencies, the state agencies are watched by the FBI, the FBI is watched by other agencies withing the Dept. of Justice, and the National Security Agency is sometimes used to watch any and all. The CIA, who under the Patriot Act can and do now operate domestically, has been known to rat out the FBI and vice versa. Then there is the Secret Service from the Treasury Dept., the law enforcement arm of the Dept. of the Interior, Homeland Security which has become a huge umbrella for old and new police organizations, the US Marshalls, ad infinitum – all of which can be assigned to investigate other agencies if necessary. They are all supposed to be bound by their own charters and by the Constitution to do their jobs properly and not get off the leash, but whether or not they actually do well to contol corruption everywhere or even within their own agencies, well, that is a source of many an argument. I’ve lived in worse places. We’re better of than Mexico and Columbia, but not as clean as Sweden.

We now have more cops per capita than any other country in the world. We also have more people per capita incarcerated than anywhere else. That includes huge communist “police states” like China and dirtbag backwater dictatorships like Mayanmar..

@Espiritus_Corvus Amen. The for-profit prison system was one of the worst affronts to liberty in all of US history. It must be dismantled. The only thing that keeps it from running totally amok is that it relies on the funds gathered from all us “free” taxpayers to support its profits. THey can’t make a dime if they lock us all up.

… the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Immigration’s enforcement arms: Border Patrol, I.C.E. Then there is the ATF, IRS investigative and enforcement arm, the TSA, even the FDA has people in suits that carry guns who regularly raid food processing facilities and research labs that cheat on study protocols.

@ETpro Read the article by a former member of the Board of Directors at Dillon, Read & Co., a Wall Street investmennt bank and former Asst. Secty of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Bush 1.

The writer describes thoroughly, among many other things in this 20-page article, how Wall Street investment banks back, at enormous profit, the privatized prison system and arrainge contracts through their former colleagues now serving at DOJ and Federal DOC to nail down contracts that they normally couldn’t compete for (due to costs estimates way beyond what the states and Feds pay due to a pricing structure that incorporated exhorbitant profits) and HUD raids (more former, well-placed Dillon Read colleagues) to feed people into the system en masse to create an overwhelming demand from the 1980s up to the present.

@Espiritus_Corvus I am reading it. Very enlightening.

Did you know that the Arizona State Senator responsible for their Papers Please law had a big stake in, and backing from the nation’s largest for profit prison system? And what do you know, that is the system Arizona would use to lock up illegal immigrants till it could hand them over to ICE. Nice tidy little profit for him and his corporate backers if he can pull it off.

No, I didn’t know that. Thanks. It is beyond me how these things seem not of the slightest interest to the taxpayer, to the voter, to each American citizen no matter what our socioeconomic or political status.

I believe this is a classic example where the Right and the Left could establish political affinity, a truce, in the long and terrifying journey toward the realization that, not only are we being manipulated, but that the appellations of Right and Left and the illusion of a two party system is false and fabricated, supported by lies attributed to both sides by a unified, moneyed, politically omnipotent corporatocracy that means to keep us, as common citizens, polarized and impotent to do anything about it.

Not one of us has a chance at realizing our vision of America, no matter how divergent, as long as our democracy is so effectively commandeered by these corporate thugs. A house divided… divide and conquer… It’s so bloody obvious.

@Espiritus_Corvus And yet, the people regularly, willingly abdicate their rights because of ignorance and laziness. They choose to do nothing in the mistaken idea that my vote doesn’t count anyway or one person doesn’t count.

@YARNLADY They choose to do nothing in the mistaken idea that my vote doesn’t count anyway or one person doesn’t count. I think they feel it won’t count the same as it seems not to count in California (:-|

@Hypocrisy_Central You don’t get to vote the US Constitution out of the way. There is a established order of primacy in US law. The US Constitutions’ provisions trump all. Then come treaties duly ratified. THen laws passed by the US Congress. Then State Constitutions, state laws, and finally city and local laws. No law from a lower rung can thwart one that has primacy over it.

You can argue that the District Judge was wrong in his decision, that he incorectly interpreted the Constitution. That will be argued in the appelate court, and almost certainly in the Supreme Court. But it is simply wrong to argue that the judge exceded his authority under the law. He did exactly what the law compels him to do.

If it were not for camera would not Peter MacFarlane be charged with resisting arrest because he just wanted to go to bed and not have the cops hauling him to the ER when he did not need to go?

I can only answer this question in reference to my department. We are given polygraph exams every three months. The questions asked deals strickly with sceniros you have asked.

I have always been a stickler for officer honesty.

I feel I have a clean department and proud of it.