THE SHAMEFUL TRUTH ABOUT POLICE CORRUPTION

Last week's jailing of a senior Merseyside officer demonstrated that not all
bent coppers work in London. In fact, according to confidential documents
seen by The Sunday Telegraph, they are everywhere - despite the police's
public denials. Geoffrey Seed and Alasdair Palmer report

'INFORMATION is money," Elmore Davies said. "And I am privy to a great deal
of information." As a detective chief inspector working on investigations
into drug dealing and smuggling, Davies undoubtedly had information that was
very valuable to criminals - and utterly devastating to his fellow
policemen. Davies was willing to sell whatever he knew. A promise of ?10,000
from a drug baron, Curtis Warren, was enough to secure the knowledge that
there was an undercover agent spying on Warren in his Dutch prison. It also
bought information that would enable Warren's minions to intimidate a
policeman whose evidence would be crucial to a trial Warren wanted aborted.
It included details on how to get to the officer's children. How many more
policemen like Davies are there? The judge who sentenced him evidently
believes the answer is "very few". He said Davies's offences were
"completely out of the normal line of cases of perverting justice and
corruption". The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has publicly
asserted the same. David Blakey, ACPO's president and Chief Constable of
Mercia, stated recently that: "The true level of corruption in the modern
police service is extremely low."

Really? The Sunday Telegraph has obtained the minutes of a highly
confidential meeting organised by the National Criminal Intelligence Service
(NCIS). The topic of the meeting, held on June 23, one month before Blakey's
statement, was "Combatting Corruption in the Police Service". The 10
participants, all past or present members of ACPO, were among the most
senior chief police officers and policy-makers in the country. They included
the director general of NCIS, the deputy chief constables of Merseyside and
West Midlands police, the director general of the National Crime Squad and
two representatives from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary.

They all agreed that "corrupt officers existed throughout the UK" - not just
in the Met, nor even just in the major conurbations. Roger Gaspar, NCIS's
director of intelligence and probably best placed to know, indicated that
police corruption had become "pervasive" and may have reached "the situation
which occurs in some Third World countries".

The "common activities" of corrupt officers included theft of property and
drugs during searches; planting of drugs or stolen property on individuals;
supplying details of operations to criminals; and aborting investigations or
destroying evidence.

"In severe cases," NCIS's director of intelligence added, "this would
include the committing of serious crimes, including armed robbery and drug
dealing, or the licensing and organising of such crimes." The Met has the
reputation of being the only force where corruption is a serious problem
because of Sir Paul Condon's frank admission that he might have "250 corrupt
officers" working for him. If NCIS's director of intelligence is right,
chief constables of provincial forces have a problem of similar magnitude.
The only difference is that they have been far less open about it.

Consider Merseyside police force, where Detective Chief Inspector Elmore
Davies worked. In 1992, it became clear to Sir James Sharples, the Chief
Constable, that some of his officers were selling vital details of police
operations against drug dealers - details such as the identity of undercover
informers, the date and times of proposed arrests, and the location of
police observation posts.

A joint operation by Customs and the regional crime squad obtained the
itemised phone records of a number of notorious drug dealers. Those records
showed that the criminals were ringing numbers inside Merseyside police
drugs and fraud squads. So great was the fear that corrupt officers were
gleaning information about investigations into drug smugglers that one major
operation had to be moved outside the Merseyside police force area
altogether.

But it did not put an end to corruption. In 1995, Customs provided further
evidence that Merseyside officers were still selling drug barons information
that sabotaged operations. In what amounted to an astonishing admission of
the lack of trust he had in his own officers, Sir James secretly gave
permission to Customs officers to tap telephones, not just at the Admiral
Street police station in Toxteth, but also in his own HQ at Canning Place.
It was not just drugs squad personnel who were not informed of the Customs
investigation. Even Sir James's own senior staff were not told. No
operational orders were issued from his office. More than 30 Home
Office-approved telephone surveillance warrants were also issued - many of
them for police officers' domestic phones.

After the investigation was complete, Sir James quietly disbanded
Merseyside's drug squad, its fraud squad and its serious crime squad. An
unknown number of officers retired early on grounds of ill health, or were
moved to less sensitive positions. There was no public statement of any
kind. Indeed, this is the first time that this extensive corruption
investigation has been made public.

Sir James subsequently set up his own anti-corruption force, tactfully
called the "Professional Standards Unit". It was commended this month by the
Inspectorate as "a brave and far-sighted initiative" - as indeed it is. But
the events that led to its creation show how different the reality of
Merseyside's corruption problem is from the picture of "a few isolated
rotten apples" painted for the public.

Merseyside is by no means alone, or untypical of police forces across
England and Wales. There are at least 110 officers in seven different forces
who are either under investigation or facing charges. And that is just those
who have been stupid enough, or unlucky enough, to raise the suspicions of
their honest colleagues.

It is extremely rare for officers to be caught red-handed, and still rarer
for their corruption to be publicly acknowledged by their chief constables.
As the NCIS meeting noted: "Acts of corruption . . . are not normally seen
or recognised for what they are . . . Most corrupt officers are efficient
and effective investigators . . . Obtaining quality evidence is extremely
difficult."

Obtaining corrupt policemen does not, however, seem to be difficult for drug
dealers. "Finding a cop who'll help out is not a problem," said one drugs
smuggler who works outside London and who has spoken extensively to The
Sunday Telegraph. "Some policemen just want a share of the money you can
earn through drugs. They can collect more than their month's salary for a
few minutes work for one of us."

The criminal claimed to have policemen who would sabotage operations against
him and his friends for as little as ?3,000 - "holiday money", as he calls
it. He also said that there was a contact in the Crown Prosecution Service
who had been used because he could ensure that vital pieces of evidence were
"lost". Curtis Warren is estimated to have amassed a fortune of nearly ?50
million through drug smuggling. He would hardly have noticed the few
thousand pounds needed to corrupt DCI Davies. And though Warren is now
serving a 12-year sentence in Holland, little if any of his money or assets
have been tracked down. Tracing the money is one way of combatting
corruption. The director of intelligence for NCIS suggested others: for
example, greater use of "integrity testing", a procedure in which a corrupt
offer is made to an officer in order to test his reaction. If he takes the
bait, he could face dismissal or even prosecution.

The June NCIS meeting also "considered radical options", such random drug
testing and polygraph tests for officers. The director of intelligence also
suggested using techniques of "profiling" in order to identify corrupt
individuals - although one problem with profiling (which is normally used to
help identify serial killers) is that it may fail to pick out the worst
offenders, for the simple reason that "some of the most overtly honest
officers have actually been extremely corrupt".

The meeting also noted that one of the controls on corruption is "a
vigorous, uncensored media". Recognising the media's role, it decided that
"ACPO should develop a strategy to deal with the adverse publicity" that the
exposure of corruption always gives rise.

The result was the ACPO press release stating that "the true level of
corruption in the modern police service is extremely low". The "strategy"
seems to consist of denying that there is a serious problem with corruption
at all. In this connection, the participants at the NCIS meeting noted that
"the dismissal of officers for breaches of the code of conduct may prove a
more attractive option than their pursuit through the courts", even though,
as the minutes of the meeting dryly noted, "in a large number of cases we
are dealing with serious and organised crime".

It seems still to be true that of all of the police forces in the country,
only the Met is actually prepared to be open about the scale of corruption
and the measures being taken to combat it. A senior Merseyside police
officer told The Sunday Telegraph that he felt his force was in an
impossible position - "damned if we do, and damned if we don't". The more
the police arrested corrupt officers, the more the public would believe that
the whole service was corrupt.

He insists that Merseyside is in the process of changing its stance. "We are
going for a warts-and-all strategy. We accept that we will have a price to
pay. We just ask the public to have faith in us and trust us." But if there
has been a change of heart on Merseyside, it would seem to fly in the teeth
of ACPO's policy. That policy currently seems to consist of deliberately
deceiving the public about the true level of corruption within the British
police - and thereby ensuring that the Met has an unjustified reputation as
the only place in Britain where cops take bribes.

Checked-by: Don Beck