BY GLOVA SCOTT AND HATTIE McCUTCHEON
PHILADELPHIA - There seems to be no end in sight to the widening police scandal here. City officials are getting nervous. Literally every day some new example of police criminality is being revealed in the daily press.
Five "dirty cops," as the Philadelphia papers call them, from the 39th Police District have pleaded guilty to charges of criminal behavior so far and a sixth is expected to plead guilty soon. More indictments, expanding to the Highway Patrol, are expected.
The cops are accused of planting false evidence, lying, stealing, shaking down alleged drug dealers, making illegal searches, beating people, and framing innocent people.
Lynne Abraham, Philadelphia district attorney, told the New York Times, "This whole thing has made me physically ill. This is the ultimate betrayal of the public trust."
What really has Abraham, a notorious proponent of the death penalty, perturbed is that the scandal "justifies people's suspicions of the police."
As a result of the dirty cop expose', 42 convictions have been overturned and 1,400 arrests are being reviewed.
Illegal arrests
The FBI, U.S. attorney's office, and local officials are
currently investigating numerous reports of illegal arrests,
mostly in the city's Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.
The initial investigation began as a result of a complaint filed by Arthur Colbert, a part-time student in Temple University's criminal-justice program, in 1991.
Police officers John Baird and Thomas Ryan kidnapped Colbert, beat him, and threatened to kill him as they pressed a revolver to his head and cocked the hammer, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
After they were suspended from the force, they paid their informant, Pamela Jenkins, a drug user and prostitute, $100 a week and other rewards if she would say she had bought drugs from Colbert.
The cops "would take care of me, pay my rent for a year, get the warrant lifted off me, pay my fines," Jenkins later testified at a hearing against them.
The case came up for a new hearing in 1994. By then the cop operation started to unravel and Baird and Ryan agreed to cooperate with the investigation, which led to the widening indictments.
Since then many victims of the dirty cops have come
forward.
Victims of police abuse speak out
Betty Patterson, a widow and 54-year-old grandmother, spent three years in prison after being framed up by racist cops and falsely convicted of selling crack cocaine. The cops took drugs to Patterson's home from their secret stash kept at police headquarters. They testified that they were trying to find evidence that could be used against two of her sons in a separate murder case. The case had nothing to do with her.
Patterson's requests for a new trial were vigorously opposed by prosecutors as a "frivolous claim" although they knew the cops who arrested her had been suspended for lying in other cases. "Prosecutors and judges routinely play along with the misconduct, contending these illegal acts are `harmless errors' or police have `good faith' exemptions from existing law," Linn Washington, a reporter for the Philadelphia New Observer, wrote July 26.
Tracey Watson had drugs planted on him in 1989, when he was 18, by Louis Maier, the sixth cop in the city to admit to his crimes. At the time Maier testified that Watson threw a plastic bag with 30 vials of cocaine into a brier bush. Despite his innocence, the youth's public defender advised him to plead guilty rather than fight the case.
George Porchea was also a victim of this police ring and spent three years in prison. During that time his oldest daughter was placed in a foster home in North Carolina. He has to fight to get her back now that he is released.
Initially these 1,400 cases under review involved mainly drug abuses. New evidence in the 39th precinct scandal has spread to at least five murder cases.
Trying to limit the political damage amid the police scandal, Mayor Ed Rendell defended the police. "The overwhelming number of officers are good and decent and want these individuals punished as quickly as possible," he said.
Mayor Rendell has stated the guilty cops should go to prison, but "these guys in my judgment should not necessarily rot in jail."
Bradley Bridge, of the city's public defender office, however, said, "It is more and more clear that the police corruption here was not a few isolated police officers. We are apparently dealing with a systematic, pervasive pattern of corruption."
"I feel I not only have to protect my son from the neighborhood hoodlums," said Nadirah Nock, a resident of the Logan section of the city. "I've got to protect him from the police too."
Encouragement for Abu-Jamal case
The August 28 New York Times notes that the revelations
have given encouragement to the supporters of death-row
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Socialist Workers Party candidate for city council at- large Hattie McCutcheon, who resides in the 39th precinct, pointed out that the Philadelphia dirty cop scandal, like the Mark Furman tapes in Los Angeles, exposes that frame- ups, racism, and lying are all normal operating procedures for the cops.
"Anytime the blinders are torn away, so we can see clearly who the real criminals are in our community, the better," McCutcheon said. "The disrespect and disregard for the lives of working people, especially Blacks and Latinos, the racist treatment meted out to working people by the thugs in blue, the prosecutors, and the judges must be vehemently opposed.
"The Socialist Workers campaign demands justice for all the victims of this police scandal," she added. "We call for the immediate prosecution of the police to the fullest extent of the law, with long prison terms for all those involved."