Battle Against Bad Cops Isn’t Fought Only in L.A.

One day Officer Kerwin Hall climbed into his patrol car and found two $100 bills on the seat. Before long he was taking cash directly from the hands of drug dealers. In return he would steer his police cruiser away from certain streets notorious for drug sales.

But soon enough the law he had sworn to uphold caught up with Kerwin Hall.

Arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison, he traded in police Badge No. 209 for Inmate No. 07441-424. He no longer sports the crisp blue colors of the Ford Heights, Ill., police uniform. Instead, he wears a drab green inmate jumpsuit at the Federal Prison Camp here.

He is doing 11 years for criminal racketeering. He will be 50 years old when he gets out. His eight kids will be grown.

“I faced up to what I did,” he said in a recent prison interview. “But I didn’t think I was going to get this much time.”

Hall has not journeyed alone from the life of a cop to a life of crime. In the seven years that U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has run the Department of Justice, the number of law-enforcement officers doing time in federal prisons has risen to 668--an increase of nearly 600%.

Even before the scandal involving the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division began to unfold, corruption crackdowns were leaving deep scars on police forces large and small. Experts agree that much of what has been revealed in Los Angeles--a department under siege, a group of officers under arrest or investigation, a community anxious for reform--is being played out in cities and towns across America.

Compared with the Rampart scandal, most of these cases involve smaller forces and are less visible to the nation at large. But within the affected communities, the impact is no less devastating.

In Ford Heights, Ill., one of the nation’s poorest communities, for instance, seven of the Police Department’s 10 officers were convicted on racketeering, bribery and other drug- and money-related charges. Among those sent to prison--for 20 years--was Police Chief Jack L. Davis, a man Hall had admired as a youngster, both as a father figure in uniform and for the car he drove back and forth to the police house: a flashy blue Cadillac.

In West New York, N.J., up on the bluffs of the Hudson River, some two dozen officers of a 100-member force were prosecuted on similar racketeering and bribery charges, mainly for protecting illegal interests in gambling, prostitution and go-go bars. Among those now in prison are Chief Alexander V. Oriente, who sobbed openly when he described to a judge his descent into infamy, and his son and namesake, Lt. Alexander L. Oriente. They each were sentenced to 2 1/2 years.

Both departments were turned upside-down by the corruption scandals. Both are still struggling to rebuild their shattered organizations, reform their internal procedures and restore order on the streets. In their own way, they have already embarked on the difficult journey now facing the LAPD.

What is it about police work that turns cops who arrest crooks into cops who become crooks? Why have some forces become so full of corrupt police officers that federal investigators not only are making wholesale arrests, from chiefs on down, but even calling in outside law-enforcement agencies to protect citizens?

Gary Sykes, director of the Southwestern Law Enforcement Institution and the Center for Law Enforcement Ethics in Dallas, said he has helped train more than 2,000 officers in how to resist the lure of selling their badges.

What he has found, he said, is that a surprising number of cities has had to deal with police corruption.

“I’m talking about abuse of authority and patterns of misconduct,” he said. “There isn’t any major city that hasn’t gone through some embarrassing events that call into question the trustworthiness of police departments.”

Ford Heights and West New York mirror the LAPD’s Rampart Division scandal--systemic examples of police arrogance that put officers above public safety.

Today, there are more cops on the streets. But there are also more temptations. And experts say that prosecutors, community groups and the public are not as willing to give police officers a free pass to skirt the law just because they are authority figures with high-pressure jobs.

“It’s nothing distinctive about police. In all big, complex organizations you have this,” said Edwin J. Delattre, a longtime criminal justice expert and dean of the School of Education at Boston University. “These things happen in every walk of life.”

But, he said, police officers who go bad are singularly egregious because “in policing you have the authority to abridge liberty and you are in a distinctive position to do harm.”

Sam Walker of the University of Nebraska, a leading researcher on police corruption, said that more honest officers are blowing the whistle on colleagues on the take. And he said prosecutors are increasingly aiming their sights at the “good ol’ boy” network of policing.

“Why do cops go bad?” Walker asked. “It’s because of bad organizations.”

Reno says that policing the police continues to be a top priority for the Justice Department. Her office has advised federal prosecutors around the country to be increasingly vigilant to police misconduct.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder recalled in an interview that, as U.S. attorney in the nation’s capital during the mid-1990s, his office successfully prosecuted the District of Columbia’s so-called “Dirty Dozen” police officers for protecting drug dealers.

He said the case stemmed from poor recruiting and inadequate officer candidate screening by the local Police Department in its rush to hire more officers.

“That was a wake-up call for a lot of people. That had national implications on how you recruit,” he said.

“You’ve got a new generation, new kinds of people heading up police departments and new people who are prosecutors more willing to look at these things,” Holder said.

“And there have been outside pressures to bear too. Citizen groups. Activists. Nobody has been shy in raising concerns in a way that did not happen in the past. When people see police officers acting inappropriately, they won’t accept it like it might have been accepted 30, 40 or 50 years ago.”

Los Angeles’ Rampart scandal has seen two officers imprisoned, with three more under indictment. More than 30 officers either have been relieved of duty, suspended, fired or have quit.

More than 70 are under investigation for such offenses as covering up unjustified shootings, intimidating witnesses, planting evidence and perjury. Prosecutors have overturned more than 75 felony convictions because of alleged police misconduct.

The West New York case broke after one of the officers, Richard G. Rivera, spotted a detective leaving a gambling parlor in 1991. He tipped off federal investigators--not an easy decision for someone working in such a closed society as a police department.

“I never imagined myself betraying another police officer,” he wrote for the Law Enforcement News published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, “until I discovered that it was me, along with law enforcement and the general public, who was actually being betrayed.”

Carlos Ortiz, a federal prosecutor, said honest citizens also stepped forward.

“People are afraid to testify against officers,” Ortiz said. “They’re in the community, and if you testify against the police, you sometimes might feel you are on your own.”

Chief Oriente, upon his arrest, began cooperating with authorities.

He confessed that when he joined the Police Department in the 1950s, rookies like himself commonly accepted $1 for each car tow they sent to a favorite auto-wrecking company.

By the time he stood up to be sentenced in federal court last January, as the top cop for a 100-person department patrolling a city less than a square-mile in size, rookies were pocketing $6 for each tow.

“When I joined the West New York Police Department, I was very young,” a sobbing Oriente told the judge.

“I was placed in a corrupt position, a corrupt environment, which was the normal part of this Police Department. I was foolish and stupid enough to go along with this corruption.”

When the chief’s son, Lt. Oriente, was sentenced, he apologized for his “mistakes” but did not mention his father’s influence.

However, U.S. District Judge Jerome B. Simandle took note of the father-son relationship.

“Mr. Oriente was molded by his father,” the judge said. “He decided to, when the opportunity presented itself, follow a corrupt path and he derived directly from his father, as well as from his own corrupt activities, money that was paid in order to destroy his oath and to avoid the law.

“And that was a tragic choice.”

About 40,000 people live in West New York, long a home to immigrants and today one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Cuban Americans and new arrivals from Central America.

Mayor Albio Sires, a Cuban refugee himself, said that rebuilding the Police Department “started by getting rid of the chief.” Today, there is a police director, and he reports directly to the mayor. Police headquarters is in the basement of City Hall.

The result for this city across the river from Manhattan’s Empire State Building is a lower crime rate that began when many of the gambling halls and strip clubs were run out of town.

“We did every reform. You name it,” the mayor said. “We restored the ranks. We instituted traffic divisions with motorcycles we didn’t have before. The evidence room is new and new guidelines were put in [place] on how to deal with the evidence, because in the past evidence was missing all the time.

“And as people retired, we brought in a lot of young people and we scrutinized these young people very closely and made sure they are the ones we really want.”

The experience in Ford Heights was equally devastating.

Chief Jack L. Davis was known around town as a role model for young kids such as Kerwin Hall, growing up next to the old Ford auto assembly plant.

Hall said Davis personally recruited him onto the police force, even though his own father had some misgivings.

“My dad used to warn me that they were going to lock that Jack Davis up someday,” Hall said. “And he warned me that my ass was going with him. He warned me to be careful out there.”

Hall was sworn in as a patrolman in 1989. With just 6,000 residents in Ford Heights, mostly African Americans, he said he knew just about everyone, including many of the drug dealers who in the 1990s began profiting off crack cocaine. The city is near major highways and easily accessible for drug transactions.

“The town is more or less a Mayberry,” he said. “Jack Davis was Andy Griffith and I was Barney Fife.”

If not about power, police corruption is almost always about money. And in Ford Heights, officers chose to facilitate the crack epidemic that swept through town in the 1980s.

Hall said that he was trying to raise a large family on a wage of $7 an hour. Sometimes cash-strapped City Hall could not even meet its payroll.

He said his world “was turned upside-down” when one of his sons was found to have a brain tumor. Around that time the $100 bills started showing up on his car seat.

“Basically,” he said, “my family had to eat. I had infants at home. They needed milk and Pampers and I couldn’t bring it home. So I found myself bringing home gratuities from drug dealers.”

Hall insisted in the prison interview that he never purposely refused to arrest drug dealers. He said he told them that if he caught them red-handed, they were going to jail.

But, he said, he did agree not to drive his police cruiser down certain streets and to warn some dealers if they might be under investigation.

Over four years, he said, he took $2,500--”and it is costing me 11 years and nine months for that little bit.”

Chief Davis, Hall’s mentor, seemed to take a similar view of his misdeeds when he was sentenced to 20 years after being found guilty on 11 counts of racketeering, interfering with commerce by threats of violence and conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine.

He had but one thing to say at his sentencing. “Judge,” he said, “I just want to get this behind me and get back with my family and my kids and to do a little fishing with my grand-kids. That’s all.”

He will be nearly 80 by the time he wets another fishing line.

Prosecutor Jonathan Bunge recalled that “Davis had wads of cash.” He and Hall and the others “were not stupid,” Bunge said, “they just always thought they could get away with it.”

Frank B. Martin Jr., a retired Army officer and former Green Beret, runs the Ford Heights Police Department today. He has six new officers and plans to hire 10 more.

New measures he has implemented include tough and thorough background checks on all recruits, followed by physical, oral and psychological examinations. One of the questions asked on the exams: What would you do if the chief was corrupt?

“When I came here there were no resources,” the new chief said. “The equipment was in bad shape. We had only three patrol cars and on a good day only two of them ran.

“Now we have 11 patrol cars. We have personal radios for every officer, plus extras. We have a new dispatch system. We are getting a new 911 center too.”

Said Mayor Sillierine Bennett: “It’s been a long haul. We started from scratch. . . . The community pretty much had given up, and we were so humiliated with what had been going on for so long.’

Gone are cops such as Hall, who sits in prison in Minnesota, paying the price for that humiliation. His fellow inmates do not know about his past as a cop. He works as a prison plumber.

With plenty of time on his hands, he offered this explanation for the culture of cops and crime:

“There’s just too much wrong out there, too much temptation. There’s too much going down, too many people who aren’t reporting things.

“You’ve got cops who actually make a better living getting money on the outside and it doesn’t just go down to patrolmen. It goes higher. It’s accessible.

“Because as a cop you go anywhere. You talk to anybody. You pull over a drug dealer and roll down your window and say whatever you want to say. You falsify reports.

“And cops are trying to make names for themselves. You’ve got people in jail who shouldn’t be there. You’ve got cops who hide behind their badge every day, cops who profit off the badge.

“I tried to be an honest cop. But it wasn’t easy. A guy gives you a few hundred dollars, why aren’t you going to take it?”

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Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.