Police Corruption

The "This Week's Corrupt Cops" feature may have been on hiatus while your editor was down South America way, but it's been pretty much business as usual. We're back now, and here's this week's edition with the usual cast of crooked cops and greedy guards.

Three Salvadoran politicians were brutally murdered by Guatemalan anti-drug police outside Guatemala City 10 days ago. Now, the police killers have themselves been killed in a brazen assassination while being held inside a nasty Guatemalan prison. Many questions are being raised, but dead men tell no tales.

What a cornucopia of corruption the drug war generates. Week in and week out, law enforcement officers fall prey to the temptation to share in prohibition-generated illicit drug profits. This week is no different.

This week, we have a prison guard busted for smuggling drugs OUT of a jail, along with more typical drug-smuggling guard cases, a teenage military policeman in trouble, a retirement age former cop busted, and another Nashville police officer found guilty of drug corruption charges.

Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderon, has unleashed a vigorous attack on that country's powerful and violent drug cartels. Washington is happy, but Mexico analysts wonder if it's just another bit of poltical theater.

Prison and jail guards gone bad! Evidence gone missing! Narcs gone to prison! Busy, busy, busy.

It's been relatively quiet on the corrupt cop front this week, but we've still got a Newark police officer who made a bad choice of boyfriends, and the requisite pair of crooked jail guards.

DEA agents seize hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drug busts, but a Justice Department audit finds the agency is pretty lax in its handling of all that cash.

Hiding marijuana inside cannoli, taking cocaine from a murder scene, and peddling cocaine are all on the radar this week. So is an investigation into drug smuggling at a US Air Force base in England.

Continuing fall-out from the Henry County, Virginia, sheriff's office bust in October, another Tennessee cop running interference for drug dealers, a long-time fugitive INS officer caught, and, of course, a couple more jail guards bringing goodies to the prisoners.