Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper

cop, drugs are clearly the way to go. The availability, street value, and illegality of drugs form a sweet temptation tocharacter-challenged cops, many of whom wind up shaking down street dealers, converting drugs to their own use, or selling them. Almost all the major police corruption scandals of the last several decades have had their roots in drug enforcement. We’ve seen robbery, extortion, drug dealing, drug stealing, drug use, false arrests, perjury, throw-down guns, and murder. And these are the good guys?
    There isn’t an unscathed police department in the country. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Miami, Oakland, Dallas, Kansas City—all have recently suffered stunning police drug scandals. You won’t find a single major city in the country that has not fired and/or arrested at least one of its own for some drug-related offense in the past few years, including San Diego and Seattle. Smaller cities have not been spared. The cities of Irvington and West New York, New Jersey, and Ford Heights, Illinois, saw cops transporting, peddling, using, protecting drug shipments, and/or extorting dealers. In Ford Heights, it was former police chief Jack Davis. A twenty-five-year veteran, he was convicted of extorting heroin and crack cocaine dealers, allowing them to operate on the streets of his own city as he pocketed their dirty money.
    Tulia, Texas, offers another example of a cop—and a system —gone bad. Tom Coleman, an ex-police officer, was hired by the federally-funded Texas Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Taskforce to conduct undercover narcotics operations in Tulia in 1998. In 1999 Coleman arrested 46 people, 39 of them black. He put dozens of “drug peddlers” behind bars—for 60, 90, 434 years (we’re talking Texas, here). The only problem? Coleman made up the charges. He manufactured evidence. Working alone, he never wore a wire, never taped a conversation, never dusted the plastic bags he “scored” for fingerprints. He testified in court that he wrote his notes of drug transactions on his leg. Who was this Tom Coleman?
    A 1997 background investigation revealed that he’d been disciplined in a previous law enforcement job, that he had “disciplinary” and “possible mental problems,” that he “needed constant supervision, had a bad temper and would tend to run to his mother for help.” According to New York Times reporter Adam Liptak, Coleman had “run up bad debts in another law enforcement job before leaving town abruptly in the middle of a shift. . . . Eight months into the undercover investigation, Coleman’ssupervisors received a warrant calling for his arrest for stealing gasoline. They arrested him, let him out on bond and allowed him to make restitution for the gas and other debts of $7,000. The undercover investigation then continued.”
    In August 2003, Governor Rick Perry pardoned thirty-five of the people Coleman sent to prison, thirty-one of them black.
    Thousands of drug cases have been dismissed throughout the country in just the past few years because of similar police malfeasance. Spurred on by federal financial incentives, departments exert tremendous pressure on narcotics units and individual narcs to make a lot of busts, impound a lot of dope, and seize as much of a drug trafficker’s assets as possible.

    On June 17, 1971, President Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one in the United States.” Just how prevalent is drug use in America? In 1975, according to the Monitoring the Future survey, 87 percent of high school seniors reported that it was “easy” or “fairly easy” to buy marijuana. At the dawn of the new century, and millions of arrests later, the figure is at 90.4 percent. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reported in 1998 that high school students found it a lot easier to score pot than