Ultimately, the only people
watching the watchers are those realistic enough to admit that it's necessary.
J.D. Tuccille is managing
editor of Reason.com.
Years ago, members of my extended
family were gangsters connected with the Genovese crime family. They had the
ability, which they used, to place people in favored positions within the New
York City Police Department. I know this, because my father was offered one of
those slots.
This is a big part of why
I've always had a problem with claims that you can trust the police, in
addition to the civil liberties abuses we report at Reason. Cops can be as
crooked as anybody else—and are more dangerous for it, because of their power
and position. It's the old problem of "Quis custodiet ipsos
custodes?"—"Who watches the watchmen?" The more you give the
watchmen to do, the more tempting it becomes to corrupt them, and for them to
let themselves be corrupted. And the more temptation for corruption, the more
the likelihood that such temptation is the main attraction for people who want
to be watchmen.
That temptation sometimes
really is the main attraction. Remembering some of the old family stories, I
asked my father for details. He told me:
The time was 1954 when I
was graduating from high school and my Uncle Puggy, Watermelon King of the East
Coast, who presided over the Bronx Terminal Market, told my father he was
wasting his money sending me to college. He could get me a beat around the market,
located in the South Bronx before it moved to Hunts Point, where I could get on
the family’s payroll and get an envelope stuffed with cash every week.
Puggy was called "the
Watermelon King" because the New York Daily News once published a picture
of him standing on top of a mountain of watermelons. The photo illustrated an
article pointing out that he extracted his cut from every banana, every tomato,
every kind of fruit and vegetable known to mankind that passed through the
Bronx Terminal Market. And, if you're going to be in that kind of business,
it's helpful to own the people who are supposed to prevent that sort of thing
from happening. Puggy did. He wanted my father to join in the lucrative fun.
My father decided not to go
that route.
The law enforcement
connections continued and expanded. At the end of the 1960s, that crew pulled
off an art heist that was elegant in execution, but went to hell pretty
quickly. As it turned out the buyers they arranged were FBI agents. But the
thieves were tipped off that the buyers were feds. And they were tipped off
about a raid on a house where the paintings had been stored. As my father tells
me, "they probably had a plant in the FBI as well." (If you're
interested, and it's a hell of a tale, you can read the full story of the heist
in Gallery of Fools.)
None of this is news to
anybody who remembers Frank Serpico's revelations about the NYPD. But it's also
something that doesn't go away. My father's brief opportunity for a law
(non)enforcement career passed 60 years ago. The Knapp Commission convened over
four decades ago. But the NYPD still faces allegations of corruption, including
traditional ticket-fixing, outright theft of cash and jewels, and taking bribes
to deliver accident reports to doctors and clinics who then market their
services to the victims.
Honest cops who blow the
whistle still suffer retaliation for their pains.
Not that the NYPD should be
singled out. Baltimore cops have been accused of working as muscle for drug
dealers. Cops elsewhere have been drug dealers, taking advantage of the
opportunity afforded by their badges to shut down competitors in the illegal
but highly profitable trade and keep the opportunities for themselves
And then there are the FBI
agents who got tight with Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger.
Some of this corruption
overlaps with civil liberties violations committed in the course of police
work. Those jewel-stealing cops mentioned above also gained a taste for
gathering evidence in the absence of warrants. It's probably not surprising
that police officers who engage in theft, accept bribes, and carve out illegal
narcotics empires might find the Fourth Amendment an unimpressive barrier to
further depredations.
There may be no way of
doing entirely without professional police forces that are paid and empowered
to enforce the laws to some extent (though I'm very willing to consider
alternatives). Like many things in life, there's probably no perfect fix. But,
so long as we have police forces, we're going to have a problem with police who
abuse their positions and succumb to corruption. We'll also have a problem with
people who become cops just so they can exploit the opportunity to engage in
abuse and get an envelope stuffed with cash every week, offered by the likes of
Uncle Puggy.
Asking police officers to
suppress highly profitable activities where there's money to be had just for
looking the other way is just begging for trouble.
That's enough reason to
give extra thought to every job, tool, power, legal protection, and
consideration given to police officers. And it's reason to turn a skeptical eye
on the people we've hired to keep the peace. Because, in the end, the only
people watching the watchers are those realistic enough to admit that it's
necessary.
