Remember the movie "Serpico"?
The cops know who their bad ones are but it is the same brotherhood as street gangs, you don't rat on your bro.

We must get out the rotten eggs!

I just got Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, and, unfortunately, neither of them have it.

Full movie. Just look for it.

I've seen the movie, but it has been a few decades. Damn, I don't really feel that old.

He deserves the

Presidential Medal of Freedom

"I still get hate mail from active and retired police officers. A couple of years ago after the death of David Durk — the police officer who was one of my few allies inside the department in my efforts to expose graft — the Internet message board “NYPD Rant” featured some choice messages directed at me. “Join your mentor, Rat scum!” said one. An ex-con recently related to me that a precinct captain had once said to him, “If it wasn’t for that fuckin’ Serpico, I coulda been a millionaire today.” My informer went on to say, “Frank, you don’t seem to understand, they had a well-oiled money making machine going and you came along and threw a handful of sand in the gears.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-police-are-still-out-of-control-112160



Serpico: I'd fire the NYPD officers who turned their backs on the mayor
In his first TV interview in years, the legendary whistleblower speaks out about today's police controversies
January 15, 2015
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2015/1/15/serpico-i-d-firethenypdofficerswhoturnedtheirbacksonthemayor.html

at real risk of being killed. At the very least they are stalked, threatened, and abused, and their careers are ruined.

and trust about this issue. They described what had happened to an officer in their department. His family was threatened and he was threatened. He interviewed with dozens of other police departments but the word was out and he had to choose a different career. He also had to move out of town.

They have their own OMERTA for sure!

Nothing will change until we change to special prosecutors who come in on police misconduct cases. Local DA's are subject to police Omerta as well. Unless cops are fairly prosecuted and start going to prison for this gang crap they will keep doing it because they are used to being above the law.

While we might like for them to say their colleague was wrong, isn't that the exact opposite of the way our justice system is supposed to work?

If we're asking cops to condemn a professional colleague before an investigation has been completed ( or even started in a lot of cases), then clearly we've already decided that cops are guilty until proven innocent, and there's no point in doing the investigation at all.

So is making any statement on criminal liability before an investigation is concluded. But I think there is some skepticism in many quarters that the responsible authorities take their investigations seriously, or that anything approaching justice will result from them, whatever a court may rule. So in reality, the answer to your question is not so much that some sort of instant judgement be made immediately, but that some sort of fair judgement might be made when all the facts are sorted. The perception, rightly or wrongly, is that this latter will not be the case, and thus frustration mounts.

-- Mal

a narrative that serves the accused. Not sure where you get that they are being asked to condemn prior to inquiry when they are being asked to be honest participants in the inquiry offering truthful testimony not matter what the result of that truth telling might be.
Police use a term for testifying, 'testi-lying'. That's the problem.

as stated by Dorian Johnson in the Michael Brown case, turned out to be a complete fabrication and basically a physical impossibility given the evidence. And that's based on the Eric Holder-led DOJ report, not a police investigation.

But everyone, including most of DU, ran with the "Hands up don't shoot" meme anyway, though ultimately the silence on DU AFTER the DOJ report refuted most of those lies was deafening.

is sometimes complicit. We may need to overhaul the entire system. I'm not sure what can be done to tweak the system in order to make real progress.

You see this in government, in the military, and in any corporate endeavor. The perception, which is deep-rooted, is that admitting error weakens authority. It's something we rarely consider about cover-ups, because we tend to focus on the desire of the individuals involved to save their asses. This is definitely an important factor, but the desire to not weaken the institution is very strong, and strong in proportion to how much authority the organization wishes to maintain. Note, though, that the desire is not so much to keep to a high standard of conduct and thus not weaken authority through abuse, but to refuse to acknowledge that any wrongdoing has taken place. Ideally, one would think that honest reflection and a serious attempt to rectify abuse would strengthen the authority of the organization, but that ideal would be treated with guffaws (or pitying contempt) by most authoritarians.

-- Mal

I guess it has always been this way

Earlier in my HR career, I worked for a company (a Court system that included Probation Officers) that had a toxic "cover-up" culture. After a couple of investigations where I could clearly demonstrate that employees lied or intentional withheld information to frustrate the investigation ("protect their own&quot , I went to the Chief Judge (the Court's top Administrator) and I convinced her to institute a policy/practice of terminating anyone who (it could be determined) lied or, intentionally, withheld material information during an investigation ... even if the offense being investigated did not merit the subject of the investigation being terminated.

The policy/practice was announced via the Court's email system to each employee (who had to click on the email and click an acknowledgement that they read it).

It only took one termination to notice a change the Court's "cover up" culture.

Dirty cops is one half of the problem, that cannot be fixed ... the other half of the problem is the 85% of not-bad cops, that remain silent/cover for them. Once it is clear that those that cover up will pay a severe piece for their covering up, the culture will change ... I've seen it happen, as few are willing to risk their livelihood to cover for someone else's bad acts.