Policing the Police
The spate of scandals in the New York Police Department is disheartening. Officers have been accused of crimes ranging from gun-smuggling to ticket-fixing. Others have been convicted of planting false evidence—drugs—on suspects to meet arrest quotas that the department insists do not exist.
Clearly something is amiss in the department. But calls for an outside, independent body to monitor the department are overheated and, simply, wrong-headed. True, the department’s own Internal Affairs Bureau clearly has not been doing its job. But the proper response to the department’s institutional flaws should begin with a reform of the institution itself, not with the imposition of an outside entity that very likely would do more harm than good. Read More
