BATTLE AGAINST BAD COPS ISN'T FOUGHT ONLY IN L.A.

Scandal: National Crackdown Finds Where There's Law, Even In Smallest Of
Forces, There's Potential For Disorder.

DULUTH, Minn.--One day Officer Kerwin Hall climbed into his patrol car and
found two $100 bills on the seat. Before long he was taking cash directly
from the hands of drug dealers. In return he would steer his police cruiser
away from certain streets notorious for drug sales.

But soon enough the law he had sworn to uphold caught up with Kerwin Hall.
Arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison, he traded in police Badge No.
209 for Inmate No. 07441-424. He no longer sports the crisp blue colors of
the Ford Heights, Ill., police uniform. Instead, he wears a drab green
inmate jumpsuit at the Federal Prison Camp here.

He is doing 11 years for criminal racketeering. He will be 50 years old when
he gets out. His eight kids will be grown.

"I faced up to what I did," he said in a recent prison interview. "But I
didn't think I was going to get this much time."

Hall has not journeyed alone from the life of a cop to a life of crime. In
the seven years that U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has run the Department of
Justice, the number of law-enforcement officers doing time in federal
prisons has risen to 668--an increase of nearly 600%. Even before the
scandal involving the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division began
to unfold, corruption crackdowns were leaving deep scars on police forces
large and small. Experts agree that much of what has been revealed in Los
Angeles--a department under siege, a group of officers under arrest or
investigation, a community anxious for reform--is being played out in cities
and towns across America.

Compared with the Rampart scandal, most of these cases involve smaller
forces and are less visible to the nation at large. But within the affected
communities, the impact is no less devastating.

In Ford Heights, Ill., one of the nation's poorest communities, for
instance, seven of the Police Department's 10 officers were convicted on
racketeering, bribery and other drug- and money-related charges. Among those
sent to prison--for 20 years--was Police Chief Jack L. Davis, a man Hall had
admired as a youngster, both as a father figure in uniform and for the car
he drove back and forth to the police house: a flashy blue Cadillac. In West
New York, N.J., up on the bluffs of the Hudson River, some two dozen
officers of a 100-member force were prosecuted on similar racketeering and
bribery charges, mainly for protecting illegal interests in gambling,
prostitution and go-go bars. Among those now in prison are Chief Alexander
V. Oriente, who sobbed openly when he described to a judge his descent into
infamy, and his son and namesake, Lt. Alexander L. Oriente. They each were
sentenced to 2 1/2 years.

Both departments were turned upside-down by the corruption scandals. Both
are still struggling to rebuild their shattered organizations, reform their
internal procedures and restore order on the streets. In their own way, they
have already embarked on the difficult journey now facing the LAPD. What is
it about police work that turns cops who arrest crooks into cops who become
crooks? Why have some forces become so full of corrupt police officers that
federal investigators not only are making wholesale arrests, from chiefs on
down, but even calling in outside law-enforcement agencies to protect
citizens?

Gary Sykes, director of the Southwestern Law Enforcement Institution and the
Center for Law Enforcement Ethics in Dallas, said he has helped train more
than 2,000 officers in how to resist the lure of selling their badges. What
he has found, he said, is that a surprising number of cities has had to deal
with police corruption.

"I'm talking about abuse of authority and patterns of misconduct," he said.
"There isn't any major city that hasn't gone through some embarrassing
events that call into question the trustworthiness of police departments."
Ford Heights and West New York mirror the LAPD's Rampart Division
scandal--systemic examples of police arrogance that put officers above
public safety.

Today, there are more cops on the streets. But there are also more
temptations. And experts say that prosecutors, community groups and the
public are not as willing to give police officers a free pass to skirt the
law just because they are authority figures with high-pressure jobs. "It's
nothing distinctive about police. In all big, complex organizations you have
this," said Edwin J. Delattre, a longtime criminal justice expert and dean
of the School of Education at Boston University. "These things happen in
every walk of life."

But, he said, police officers who go bad are singularly egregious because
"in policing you have the authority to abridge liberty and you are in a
distinctive position to do harm."

Sam Walker of the University of Nebraska, a leading researcher on police
corruption, said that more honest officers are blowing the whistle on
colleagues on the take. And he said prosecutors are increasingly aiming
their sights at the "good ol' boy" network of policing. "Why do cops go
bad?" Walker asked. "It's because of bad organizations." Reno says that
policing the police continues to be a top priority for the Justice
Department. Her office has advised federal prosecutors around the country to
be increasingly vigilant to police misconduct. Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric H.
Holder recalled in an interview that, as U.S. attorney in the nation's
capital during the mid-1990s, his office successfully prosecuted the
District of Columbia's so-called "Dirty Dozen" police officers for
protecting drug dealers.

He said the case stemmed from poor recruiting and inadequate officer
candidate screening by the local Police Department in its rush to hire more
officers. "That was a wake-up call for a lot of people. That had national
implications on how you recruit," he said.

"You've got a new generation, new kinds of people heading up police
departments and new people who are prosecutors more willing to look at these
things," Holder said.

"And there have been outside pressures to bear too. Citizen groups.
Activists. Nobody has been shy in raising concerns in a way that did not
happen in the past. When people see police officers acting inappropriately,
they won't accept it like it might have been accepted 30, 40 or 50 years
ago." Los Angeles' Rampart scandal has seen two officers imprisoned, with
three more under indictment. More than 30 officers either have been relieved
of duty, suspended, fired or have quit.

More than 70 are under investigation for such offenses as covering up
unjustified shootings, intimidating witnesses, planting evidence and
perjury. Prosecutors have overturned more than 75 felony convictions because
of alleged police misconduct.

The West New York case broke after one of the officers, Richard G. Rivera,
spotted a detective leaving a gambling parlor in 1991. He tipped off federal
investigators--not an easy decision for someone working in such a closed
society as a police department.

"I never imagined myself betraying another police officer," he wrote for the
Law Enforcement News published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
in New York City, "until I discovered that it was me, along with law
enforcement and the general public, who was actually being betrayed." Carlos
Ortiz, a federal prosecutor, said honest citizens also stepped forward.
"People are afraid to testify against officers," Ortiz said. "They're in the
community, and if you testify against the police, you sometimes might feel
you are on your own."

Chief Oriente, upon his arrest, began cooperating with authorities. He
confessed that when he joined the Police Department in the 1950s, rookies
like himself commonly accepted $1 for each car tow they sent to a favorite
auto-wrecking company.

By the time he stood up to be sentenced in federal court last January, as
the top cop for a 100-person department patrolling a city less than a
square-mile in size, rookies were pocketing $6 for each tow. "When I joined
the West New York Police Department, I was very young," a sobbing Oriente
told the judge.

"I was placed in a corrupt position, a corrupt environment, which was the
normal part of this Police Department. I was foolish and stupid enough to go
along with this corruption."

When the chief's son, Lt. Oriente, was sentenced, he apologized for his
"mistakes" but did not mention his father's influence. However, U.S.
District Judge Jerome B. Simandle took note of the father-son relationship.

"Mr. Oriente was molded by his father," the judge said. "He decided to, when
the opportunity presented itself, follow a corrupt path and he derived
directly from his father, as well as from his own corrupt activities, money
that was paid in order to destroy his oath and to avoid the law. "And that
was a tragic choice."

About 40,000 people live in West New York, long a home to immigrants and
today one of the nation's largest concentrations of Cuban Americans and new
arrivals from Central America.

Mayor Albio Sires, a Cuban refugee himself, said that rebuilding the Police
Department "started by getting rid of the chief." Today, there is a police
director, and he reports directly to the mayor. Police headquarters is in
the basement of City Hall.

The result for this city across the river from Manhattan's Empire State
Building is a lower crime rate that began when many of the gambling halls
and strip clubs were run out of town.

"We did every reform. You name it," the mayor said. "We restored the ranks.
We instituted traffic divisions with motorcycles we didn't have before. The
evidence room is new and new guidelines were put in [place] on how to deal
with the evidence, because in the past evidence was missing all the time.
"And as people retired, we brought in a lot of young people and we
scrutinized these young people very closely and made sure they are the ones
we really want."

The experience in Ford Heights was equally devastating. Chief Jack L. Davis
was known around town as a role model for young kids such as Kerwin Hall,
growing up next to the old Ford auto assembly plant. Hall said Davis
personally recruited him onto the police force, even though his own father
had some misgivings.

"My dad used to warn me that they were going to lock that Jack Davis up
someday," Hall said. "And he warned me that my ass was going with him. He
warned me to be careful out there."

Hall was sworn in as a patrolman in 1989. With just 6,000 residents in Ford
Heights, mostly African Americans, he said he knew just about everyone,
including many of the drug dealers who in the 1990s began profiting off
crack cocaine. The city is near major highways and easily accessible for
drug transactions.

"The town is more or less a Mayberry," he said. "Jack Davis was Andy
Griffith and I was Barney Fife."

If not about power, police corruption is almost always about money. And in
Ford Heights, officers chose to facilitate the crack epidemic that swept
through town in the 1980s.

Hall said that he was trying to raise a large family on a wage of $7 an
hour. Sometimes cash-strapped City Hall could not even meet its payroll. He
said his world "was turned upside-down" when one of his sons was found to
have a brain tumor. Around that time the $100 bills started showing up on
his car seat.

"Basically," he said, "my family had to eat. I had infants at home. They
needed milk and Pampers and I couldn't bring it home. So I found myself
bringing home gratuities from drug dealers."

Hall insisted in the prison interview that he never purposely refused to
arrest drug dealers. He said he told them that if he caught them red-handed,
they were going to jail.

But, he said, he did agree not to drive his police cruiser down certain
streets and to warn some dealers if they might be under investigation. Over
four years, he said, he took $2,500--"and it is costing me 11 years and nine
months for that little bit."

Chief Davis, Hall's mentor, seemed to take a similar view of his misdeeds
when he was sentenced to 20 years after being found guilty on 11 counts of
racketeering, interfering with commerce by threats of violence and
conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine. He had but one
thing to say at his sentencing. "Judge," he said, "I just want to get this
behind me and get back with my family and my kids and to do a little fishing
with my grand-kids. That's all." He will be nearly 80 by the time he wets
another fishing line. Prosecutor Jonathan Bunge recalled that "Davis had
wads of cash." He and Hall and the others "were not stupid," Bunge said,
"they just always thought they could get away with it."

Frank B. Martin Jr., a retired Army officer and former Green Beret, runs the
Ford Heights Police Department today. He has six new officers and plans to
hire 10 more.

New measures he has implemented include tough and thorough background checks
on all recruits, followed by physical, oral and psychological examinations.
One of the questions asked on the exams: What would you do if the chief was
corrupt?

"When I came here there were no resources," the new chief said. "The
equipment was in bad shape. We had only three patrol cars and on a good day
only two of them ran.

"Now we have 11 patrol cars. We have personal radios for every officer, plus
extras. We have a new dispatch system. We are getting a new 911 center too."
Said Mayor Sillierine Bennett: "It's been a long haul. We started from
scratch. . . . The community pretty much had given up, and we were so
humiliated with what had been going on for so long.' Gone are cops such as
Hall, who sits in prison in Minnesota, paying the price for that
humiliation. His fellow inmates do not know about his past as a cop. He
works as a prison plumber.

With plenty of time on his hands, he offered this explanation for the
culture of cops and crime: "There's just too much wrong out there, too much
temptation. There's too much going down, too many people who aren't
reporting things. "You've got cops who actually make a better living getting
money on the outside and it doesn't just go down to patrolmen. It goes
higher. It's accessible.

"Because as a cop you go anywhere. You talk to anybody. You pull over a drug
dealer and roll down your window and say whatever you want to say. You
falsify reports.

"And cops are trying to make names for themselves. You've got people in jail
who shouldn't be there. You've got cops who hide behind their badge every
day, cops who profit off the badge.

"I tried to be an honest cop. But it wasn't easy. A guy gives you a few
hundred dollars, why aren't you going to take it?"