VIOLENT, SADISTIC, RACIST OFFICERS OF THE LAW

NEW YORK---The police officer called late in the afternoon. He spoke
hesitantly, afraid that his identity would be revealed. I assured him that
it would not.

"I came on this job expecting to do the right thing," he said. "I like
people. I was gung ho. I wanted to help people."

But he said that his efforts and those of many thousands of dedicated men
and women in New York's police department are being undermined by officers
who are arrogant, racist and sadistic.

"A lot of these guys are immature and they don't have common sense," the
officer said. "They've been living with mommy and daddy their whole lives.
You give them a gun and a shield and they just get power crazy: Do you
understand? All of a sudden they're Jesus Christ. They can take people's
LIVES." Instead of cracking down on these volatile young cops, the
department frequently goes out of its way to reward them.

"They're like rising stars," he said. "That behavior is absolutely a good
way to move up to detective. But in reality they're just bogus tough guys
with no sense of responsibility. There's a difference between being gung ho
and being a punk and a bully."

The officer said it was difficult to estimate the percentage of officers
who engaged in abusive beXhavior, but he said if he had to 'guess he'd say
about 10 percent.

Some cops, he said, just flat out like to be brutal. "I used to work with a
guy who loved to beat the [expletive] out of people. He's a sergeant now
and he's teaching young cops the same crap he used to do."

The officer said he had been prompted to call by columns I had written
about two disastrous drug raids that occurred in the Bronx on Feb. 27. In
one of the raids, an innocent man was dragged handcuffed and naked from his
apartment and put through several hours of grotesque humiliation before
being released. It turned out the police had raided the wrong apartment. In
the second raid, a woman who was eight months pregnant and her 15-year-old
sister were handcuffed and terrorized by a dozen cops who turned the
apartment upside down in a futile search for marijuana. The pregnant woman,
dressed only in panties and a top, became so frightened that she urinated.
Her plea to be allowed to put on dry clothes was denied and she was forced
to sit handcuffed in her soiled underwear on her soaked bed for more than
two hours.

That ordeal ended when a cop at the scene announced that the wrong
apartment had been hit. Later a police spokesman would insist that the raid
had not been a mistake, although M drixgs were found and no arrests were
made. The officer who called me said he had been on a number of similar
raids. "They call it 'booming.' That's crashing the door down," he said.
"What happens is that the narcotics guys get these CIs [confidential
informants] who are trying to cut themselves sweet deals to get them out of
worse charges. They have to come up with something; so they give this
[expletive] information. They'll say this guy is selling pot or whatever.
But a lot of it's not true.

"The narcotics guys go and get a warrant from a judge. And then they boom
the door and totally trash the apartment, but a lot of times they'll come
up with nothing. One that I went on, there was this older black woman in
the apartment. They threw her down and cuffed her and dragged her outside.
It was freezing out and this woman was crying. I felt so bad for-her. I
said, 'What the [expletive] are they doing?'"

No drugs were found, he said. But the woman's apartment was wrecked. I
asked why cops who object to abusive behavior don't intervene and try to
stop it. "You don't want to be branded a rat," he said. "If you were to
challenge somebody for something that was going on, they would say:
'Listen, if the supervisor isn't saying anything, what the hell are you
interjecting for? What are you, a rat?' "

"You gotta work with a lot of these guys," he said. "You go on a gun job,
the next thing you know you got nobody following you up the stairs."