Police Corruption

It's an odd mix this week: A cop with a gambling jones doing petty bribery, a pair of narcs misbehaving, and a Customs officer and a small town cop heading for prison are just the half of it.

A sticky-fingered North Carolina deputy gets busted, so does a Florida sheriff's evidence tech, and a home-invading, drug dealer-robbing Philly cop gets sent away for a long, long time.

One New Jersey prison guard gets indicted and another gets sentenced. There's also another Customs officer lured by lucre, a meth-slinging Indiana cop, and a Colorado cop turned pill provider.

A dirty Philly cop gets smacked hard, a dirty St. Louis cop gets his hands slapped, and two more jail and prison guards get caught.

The drug war corrodes the integrity of law enforcement in multiple ways, as we see this week: Testilying, sexual extortion, thievery, and the usual just plain old corrupt practices.

If you're interested in the border or Mexico's drug war or drug culture or drug economy, or in drug law enforcement, we've got a book you need to read. University of Texas-El Paso sociologist and anthropologist Howard Campbell provides a vivid, rich, and nuanced portrayal of drugs and the drug war in El Paso-Juarez that couldn't be more timely.

More crooked jail guards, and a trooper who must have had a whopper of a habit.

Pretty quiet on the corrupt cops front this week. The Google brings us the daily litany of cops get busted for assaults, sex crimes, drunk driving, and the like, but this week we could only find one cop in trouble for drug-related corruption. Not to worry -- we're quite sure this is an anomaly.

A sheriff shaking down motorists under the guise of asset forfeiture gets a slap on the wrist, and so does a narc who stole the cash from a drug raid. A drug investigation nets two New Jersey cops -- among others -- and another Florida deputy goes down for extorting a pot grower. And sometimes, a cop may not be as corrupt as she first seems.

Cops busted for testilying, a deputy arrested for demanding a bribe from a pot grower, a jail guard arrested for smuggling pot into the prison, and a Michigan town still doesn't know who stole drug buy money from the police department.