THREE MORE DETECTIVES ARE SUSPENDED

THREE more Merseyside detectives were suspended this week after early
morning raids on their homes by special anti-corruption squads.

Police refuse to give their ranks but it is believed that one might be a
senior officer. More raids are planned, following months of surveillance,
phone tapping and the examination of bank accounts. In the past three
weeks, a senior officer has been arrested and charged with corruption and
another officer has been suspended.

These latest moves follow last week's Telegraph revelations that corruption
within Merseyside police is so deep-rooted that in 1995, the Chief
Constable, Sir James Sharples, had Customs investigators tap telephones
inside two police stations - including police headquarters - because he
could not trust many members of his own force.

Phone records showed drug dealers and criminals ringing numbers inside the
drugs and fraud squads. More than 30 additional Home Office wire-tap
warrants were issued to cover domestic phones allegedly being used by
criminals and their corrupt police contacts within the Merseyside force.

Drug dealers have paid thousands of pounds in "holiday money" to Liverpool
police officers for the tip-offs about impending police and Customs raids,
to have rivals arrested or to tamper with prosecution evidence. As the
sheer scale of corruption within Merseyside became clear, Sir James
secretly created a Professional Standards Unit to either prosecute or fire
suspect officers.

Two weeks ago, the unit got its biggest scalp yet when Elmore Davies,
one-time deputy head of Merseyside's drugs squad, was sentenced to five
years for taking a UKP10,000 bribe from a major drugs dealer to wreck an
attempted murder case.

The Telegraph also revealed that a conference of high-ranking police
officers and policy-makers in June concluded that police corruption in
Britain was now so serious and widespread, it was "pervasive" and may have
reached ". . . level two: the situation in some Third Worlds countries".

The National Criminal Intelligence Service, working with MI5 and the
Association of Chief Police Officers, was tasked to co-ordinate
intelligence on corrupt officers, who were now operating in every force in
the country, according to the minutes of the conference.

But a month later, ACPO - who were required to develop a strategy to deal
with adverse publicity from corruption cases - issued a formal statement
claiming "the true level of corruption in the modern police service is
extremely low".

Checked-by: Pat Dolan