Corruption by any other name

Corruption is widespread in Atlanta's police department according to an article in the New York Times today. The agency making these allegations is the United States Attorney's office. Their probe on the department stemmed from the fatal officer-involved shooting of a 92-year-old Black woman, Kathryn Johnston last year.

Is there anyone out there surprised by this revelation?


Prosecutors say corruption in department is widespread


Johnston was shot and killed by narcotics detectives wearing plain clothes and carrying guns, who broke into her residence. Most likely believing she was going to be a crime victim, Johnston took the gun that relatives had given to her for self-protection in a high-crime neighborhood and fired it once. The bullet penetrated her front door which was in the process of being broken open by the officers.

Then they opened fire on her and apparently each other as well, as several officers were wounded by what turned out to be "friendly fire".

As the investigation began into the incident, there was nothing friendly about what was uncovered about the officers involved. Three were indicted both by the federal and county prosecutor agencies and two entered guilty pleas, admitting that they had committed manslaughter when they killed her and that was only the beginning of their list of crimes. Perjury, false statements, even planting drugs in her home to justify her death were what came after the shots were fired that took her life.

It gets worse. It usually does.

The "no knock" raid on her house that was done was allegedly based on a tip by an informant who purchased drugs there, but the investigation could not even determine if this individual ever existed. There was evidence uncovered that at least one informant was told by these officers to lie for them in order to help them cover up their crimes.

So the killing of an elderly woman who was too afraid to leave her house because she was afraid of being a crime victim was based on a pile of lies, a house of cards that came toppling down when the federal and local agencies came knocking.

She was killed by those who were entrusted to protect and serve her, but instead became what she needed to be protected from.

The department said it took action in the wake of the emerging scandal.

Over 100 cases investigated by the three involved officers, Greg Junnier, Jason R. Smith and Arthur Tesler are currently being reviewed for similar corruption that federal prosecutors now believe has permeated the entire department.


(excerpt)


In court documents, prosecutors said Atlanta police officers regularly lied to obtain search warrants and fabricated documentation of drug purchases, as they had when they raided the home of the woman, Kathryn Johnston, in November, killing her in a hail of bullets.

Narcotics officers have admitted to planting marijuana in Ms. Johnston’s home after her death and submitting as evidence cocaine they falsely claimed had been bought at her house, according to the court filings.

Two of the three officers indicted in the shooting, Gregg Junnier and Jason R. Smith, pleaded guilty on Thursday to state charges including involuntary manslaughter and federal charges of conspiracy to violate Ms. Johnston’s civil rights.

“Former officers Junnier and Smith will also help us continue our very active ongoing investigation into just how wide the culture of misconduct that led to this tragedy extends within the Atlanta Police Department,” said David Nahmias, the United States attorney.



It will be interested to see if these two men who lied to cover up their culpability in a killing will tell the truth about what else they or any other officer did in the department. Their own lack of veracity along with what many people call, the blue wall of silence may inhibit that unless the two men are promised something in return. After all if corruption exists, how many police officers working within its midst ever complain about it? How many report their fellow officers when they see them engaging in misconduct? How many report their officers when they hear them engaging in corruption? Do they report it to a supervisor, or do they look the other way?

Those are questions that many members of the public ask and their answers are much closer to embracing cynicism than optimism. Or as some may call it seeing the glass half-empty rather than half-filled. But as story after story and there are many stories erupt in this country from sea to shining sea, there's always signs that many acts of corruption leading up to the explosive one had taken place and were often ignored by the department or brushed aside.

Chief Richard Pennington in Atlanta said that it was he who got the federal agencies involved in the probe into Johnston's death, but he said in the article that his officers were not trained to lie. Given that clearly there were at least three narcotics officers and possibly more who did and have lied, it's fairly clear that someone taught them how to do it.

And it's silly to say that police officers are never taught to lie. Of course they are. Detectives interrogating people suspected of crimes lie, often by omission to try to get that person to confess. A hostage negotiator may lie to a person holding hostages to get them to turn themselves in. Officers going undercover to pretend to be someone else lie to protect their covers and to obtain information to make busts. However, three situations where they are told never to lie, are when writing police reports, writing warrants and testifying on the witness stand.

The danger is however, that when officers are allowed to lie in certain circumstances, how many of them and how many times do they cross the line in terms of lying in any of the three areas listed above?

These three officers who likely were taught how to lie in certain circumstances, did just that and then some. Why and how and to what extent, are questions that may or may not be answered during the federal probe.


How many speeches did Pennington give to the public and civic leaders praising his officers actions in addressing crime in the city or the neighborhood where Johnston lived? Did Pennington even know what some of his officers were doing in that neighborhood and probably others like it?

That's well and good to praise crime-fighting efforts, but at the same time Pennington should have been looking closely at how his officers including those in the narcotics divisions were doing this. He should be looking at the behavior of their supervisors, that is if they were even properly supervised at all. Clearly, accountability within the department broke down at some point.



Nahmias, now encharged in the role of the investigating party, had this to say about what was going on in the Atlanta Police Department.


(excerpt)


“The officers charged today were not corrupt in the sense that we have seen before,” he said.

“They are not accused of seeking payoffs or trying to rob drug dealers or trying to protect gang members. Their goal was to arrest drug dealers and seize illegal drugs, and that’s what we want our police officers to do for our community."

“But these officers pursued that goal by corrupting the justice system, because when it was hard to do their job the way the Constitution requires, they let the ends justify their means.”



Corruption of a different stripe or corruption of what some may say the greater good perhaps but does that make it any less corrupt? It's not uncommon for even the outside agencies to make excuses for the conduct of officers in law enforcement agencies that they must maintain close ties with to effectively solve crime, but corruption is corruption. I doubt Johnston and her family care what the reason was as to why these officers broke into her home, took her life and then tried to cover it up. The seething community where this crime took place probably take little consolation in Nahmias' definition of corruption.

But it looks like Atlanta's police department will undergo a similar federal probe as those which took place in such agencies as the Los Angeles Police Department which experienced its own scandal, called Rampart. The end result is that the federal government through its consent decree put checks and balances and safeguards on the department's CRASH units, restraints that those officers still bristle at today on the Los Angeles Police Department's blog.

But don't blame the public. Don't blame the federal agencies that created them. Point the finger of blame at your fellow officers who engaged in corrupt behavior and stained everyone else in that department who works there. Make it clear to others how unacceptable that type of behavior is and that you don't want it in your working environment.

What's left that's good in Atlanta's department and there's probably officers who are, should also send that message to these officers and others like them hiding in plain sight.


District Attorney Paul Howard had this to say about Johnston, a victim who payed the ultimate price because of that corruption.



(excerpt)


“She was without question an innocent civilian who was caught in the worst circumstance imaginable,” Mr. Howard, the district attorney, said at a news conference on Thursday.

“When we learned of her death, all of us imagined our own mothers and our own grandmothers in her place, and the thought made us shudder.”



She was also Black in a predominantly Black neighborhood and it's in neighborhoods like this one and in Rampart(which has a large Latino population) where these corruption scandals most often play out. Another department now being probed in a corruption scandal is Maywood Police Department in Los Angeles County. Maywood is what is called a designated "sanctuary" for undocumented immigrants. A sanctuary where police officers were engaging in excessive force, impregnating 14-year-old police explorers and engaging in corruption. These scandals most often happen in neighborhoods where people live that most people don't care about.


Meanwhile miles away from that epicenter in Atlanta, the city of Riverside, California had to address a similar situation on a smaller scale that occurred within its own house. Two police officers were apparently fired from the department after the investigation of a citizen complaint determined that they had planted evidence and falsified statements according to a Press Enterprise article on the department's internal complaint process last year. Not much in the way of details was provided on what these two officers had done, but if they engaged in evidence planting and lying then they should be fired and not be working in law enforcement agencies. The first line of people who should be saying this are those who work in the department and those who work in law enforcement.

Of course, given the reality of the arbitration system in the state of California that exists for police officers, the question is how long will those firings last? Arbitrators working within this system have already issued rulings that have overturned the firings of a sexual assault detective who had sexual relations with a rape victim on a case he was investigating and a patrol officer who was charged with child molestation and received two hung juries, it wouldn't be surprising, albeit disappointing to see these two officers reinstated as well. And the public would never be the wiser under the current state laws if an officer has been fired and has returned to work or has gone to work some place else.