COKE UNDER THE BIG TOP

It's Clown Time Again At The Providence Police Department.

More than $20,000 worth of cocaine that police acknowledged last week they
had lost miraculously turned up one day later -- an hour before Mayor
Vincent A. Cianci Jr. held his scheduled press conference on the subject.

Something else turned up, too: a ledger recording that the cocaine, used as
evidence in a trial and no longer needed, had been destroyed.

Just what is the public to make of this?

It would not require an unusually speculative bend of mind to wonder if
something shady was at the bottom of this. Did someone on the force try to
make off with the cocaine? Did he spirit it back when word got out that the
cocaine was missing and an investigation was about to begin? Was the ledger
falsified? Was the cocaine that was so suddenly and dramatically ``found''
even the same cocaine that disappeared?

The mayor assures us that ``there was no hanky-panky here.'' How can he be
so sure?

The public has every right to expect better. Anybody can make a mistake,
but this department's pattern of conduct is completely unacceptable.

Consider the following:

- -- In April, we learned that top city and police officials have been
enjoying the use of a sleek gray BMW sedan, which Providence obtained in
1996 in a deal with a suspected drug dealer. Curiously, police said that
the arrangement was authorized by the state attorney general's office, but
did not know which prosecutor cleared the deal. The attorney general had no
records of the transaction.

- -- Around the same time, the Journal discovered that police had sold 250
cars seized in drug arrests over the past eight years, but had few records
of how much each of the cars fetched in sale, or who bought them.

- -- In May, the Journal learned that the Police Department cannot account
for thousands of dollars in gold seized during a raid of a store in the
city's Olneyville neighborhood 21/2 years ago.

Given this track record, people have a reason to worry that somebody may be
helping himself to the evidence and property seized.

That's a deadly serious matter. It becomes much harder for police officers
to do their difficult job when the public loses faith in a department's
respect for the law.

Mayor Cianci's bland assurances won't fix this. The only thing that will is
an attitude of zero tolerance toward the mishandling of evidence and
property. The city must manage this material with extreme care. Providence
deserves responsible and professional conduct from its police department --
not this three-ring circus.