THE HARM DONE

There is a trail of damage left by the police scandal in Schenectady.
It includes prostitutes who were police informants and were supplied
with drugs by at least two officers, Richard Barnett and Michael
Siler, and deserved better treatment.

It extends to the people of Schenectady, where the initial suspension
of Siler and Barnett in 1999 resulted, for a few months, in other
officers making fewer arrests, where the cases made by indicted
officers may now be in jeopardy, and where Police Department morale
continues to suffer. The people deserved police officers who
themselves acted within the law.

The damage also encompasses officers themselves and their families,
such as the family of Patrolman Nicola Messere, who witnessed his
arrest at home by the FBI on Tuesday morning. Messere is accused, as
were Siler and Barnett, of trading drugs for information.

Siler and Barnett pleaded guilty to that charge. It is not plausible
that they are innocent, and only pleaded guilty because of the
(admittedly excessive) prison time they potentially faced under the
federal indictments. It was apparently on the basis of new evidence
from Siler, after he pleaded, that Messere was arrested.

Siler also has been linked to other, nastier offenses. Witnesses
accuse him of sexually abusing a prostitute he was supplying with
crack cocaine, smoking marijuana with her, and having a sexual
relationship with another prostitute informant he was supplying with
drugs.

No similar allegations of sexual misconduct or drug use have been made
at this point against Messere or the other indicted officer, Lt.
Michael Hamilton. In fact, until this scandal broke, those two
officers were among the most admired on the force, seen as hard-
working and effective, regularly racking up large numbers of arrests.

In 1998, Messere and Hamilton both won the city Police Department's
highest award, as well as the Special Award of Honor from the
International Narcotic Officers Association. If they were getting some
of their information and making some of their arrests on the basis of
the conduct that is alleged, that would obviously taint their records.
But it wouldn't negate all the good things they have done for the city.

Messere, for example, led five other police officers into a burning
building on Stanley Street on Sept. 18, 1991. They got there before
the Fire Department, and rescued two men. Messere's hair was singed
from the heat, police said at the time, and he was treated at Ellis
Hospital for smoke inhalation. If he did trade drugs for information,
as is alleged, it is possible that he did it from good motives, to
make more arrests and make the city safer, and that he saw little
distinction between giving addicted informants money or drugs.

But that kind of rationalization cannot excuse the conduct, which
would have broken department procedures for handling informants as
well as the criminal law. Good ends do not justify bad means, and in
the long run are undermined by them.