Earlier this month, a New York Police Department narcotics officer (often shortened to narc), blew a troublesome police scandal wide-open when he testified against corruption inside the department. Although I have always believed that there is a significant amount of corruption within police agencies as well as our government, this is the first case that I can remember where an actual officer essentially
testified against injustice.
According to StoptheDrugWar.com, Stephen Anderson, the former narc who testified as a cooperating witness in the trial of another officer after he was arrested for planting cocaine on four men in a bar in Queens, New York, described how rules were routinely broken or ignored so that narcs could make their monthly arrest quotas.
By testifying, Anderson shone a new and unflattering light on the department, which has been under investigation for decades for several indignities and allegations. This scandal was originally cast as police not turning in all their drug evidence so they could give it to their snitches as rewards for services rendered.
After being questioned on what his thought process was in terms of saving his career at the cost of those four people who had seemingly no involvement in the transaction, Anderson stated, “The practice was called “attaching bodies” to the drugs. It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators.”
“Seeing it so much, it’s almost like you have no emotion with it.” Anderson said, adding that those four years of life as a narc had numbed him to corruption. “The mentality was that they attach the bodies to it; they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway, nothing is going to happen to them anyway. That kind of came on to me and I accepted it.”
While Anderson has done a great deed in our eyes, to the NYPD and other police departments around the nation, he has broken a “sacred” police officer code.
Police officers follow a set of guidelines known as Blue Code of Silence; occasionally referred to the “blue wall” or the “curtain”. The Blue Code of Silence is an unwritten guideline that officers in the United States follow by in which they abide not to report on another officer’s misconduct. All in all, this is corruption in simplest forms, which lead me to reflect on even a bigger picture.
If police officers really follow this set of rules in regulations where they would intentionally look the other way in times when justice should prevail, who’s to say that the O.J. Simpson or Troy Davis cases were wrongly trialed because of such actions? If we cannot count on our police to positively promote honesty, integrity and justice, who can we count on?
