RECONSIDER Tidbits

Thursday, January 10, 2002

By Alexandra Eyle

Cayuga County Sheriff Peter J. Pinckney is being charged by the state Attorney General's Office in connection with $4,000 worth of missing cash seized indrug arrests and other crimes involving abuse of the public trust.

No doubt the sheriff's friends and supporters, as well as most people in Cayuga County, would like to believe that the sheriff is innocent or, at worst, that he's just "one bad apple in the barrel." What they may not realize though, is that, in some ways, Sheriff Pinckney is a victim himself.

He is a victim of policies that produce incredible temptation for even outstanding, award-winning officers, as well as bad cops. How? By making drugs illegal, we make them highly profitable in the black market  so narcotics officers, who have easy access to the drugs, often become dealers themselves. In addition, police can legally seize property and cash from alleged drug dealers  before they even are found guilty of any crime.

The temptation to sell seized drugs or pocket cash is tempting to police who encounter rich dealers daily. In addition to being tempted, they are frustrated by the fact that every time they arrest a dealer, another takes its place. There is no end to the war they're fighting and, to make matters worse, the bad guys are often richer than the cops. So why not take a little off the top, they often reason.

Similar scandals to Cayuga County's have occurred recently in Buffalo and Rochester. But we're not alone Upstate. A brief look at police officers who have succumbed to the temptations and frustrations of our failed drug war shows that this is a national problem:

• Sheriff's department officers in Prince George's County, Md., stole $45,000 from a drug dealer, then kept their stash secret while lobbying for laws that would allow them to keep it.
• California anti-narcotics agent Richard Wayne Parker was sentenced to life in prison and fined $16 million for operating a multi-state drug-running network.
• In Cleveland, Ohio, police officer Gregory Collin was charged with running a cocaine ring out of a topless bar.
• Last year, a police detective in Jackson, Miss., who many times had been named "Officer of the Month," was convicted of charges of "extorting money from drug dealers to fix their cases."
• In Manhattan, Willie Parsons, a decorated homicide detective who once turned in his own brother for heroin use, was among 13 people arrested by federal prosecutors and charged with working with a Queens-based Colombian drug ring to sell heroin and cocaine in several states. The cops were turned in by one of the drug ring members, who claimed they had stolen $200,000 from her.
• In Coffee County, Ga., Sheriff Carlton Evans, about to be arrested and charged with conspiracy to grow more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana, ran into the woods and shot himself.
• The Los Angeles Police Department is still enduring the effects of their Ramparts Division scandal, which placed the department under the jurisdiction of the feds. Since the scandal broke, more than 20 officers have been fired, suspended, relieved of duty or have quit amid allegations they planted evidence, lied under oath, stole money and, in some cases, shot unarmed suspects. Many face charges, and more than 90 criminal cases were dismissed.

What is most frightening about this last story is that while it may be larger than many in its scope, it is not unique. When it comes to the Drug War, there is no shortage of police corruption stories. Since the inception of the Drug War, the toll of thousands of police felonies has been dreadful: armed robbery, kidnapping, stealing money, stealing drugs, selling drugs, perjury, framing people, even deliberate murders.

As former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara said in a recent article for the ReconsiDer Quarterly, "We've created a monster that is eating away at something far more important to the country than drug use, and that is the integrity of and belief in our criminal justice system. We cannot end cop gangsters by merely plucking a few bad apples from the barrel. We can only end it by ending the Drug War policies that breed it."

Alexandra Eyle is editor of The ReconsiDer Quarterly, a publication of ReconsiDer: Forum on Drug Policy in Syracuse; she may be reached at quarterly@reconsider.org.