Word: cops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Blondie spent 14 weeks at the police academy. "It was mostly firearms training, first aid and war stories," he says. "They taught a bit about things like probable cause--just to say they had taught it--but the message was clear: What you really do as a cop you learn on the street from the veterans, and you could be sure, as they said, that it was nothing like what you learned at the academy...
...stopping people without cause," he says. "Second, you don't take money to let a criminal enterprise continue. And third, you don't frame an innocent person." Blondie says he and his crew never "planted stuff" on an innocent person. If he were that kind of cop, he insists, "then we would have put drugs on Colbert, and I wouldn't be talking to you from behind bars right now. We could have created a his-word-vs.-our-word thing, and we would have got off." But aside from the lines you don't cross, says Blondie...
...disregard the law. "Basically, the first thing you really learn as a cop is how to lie," says Blondie. For many officers, their first taste of shading the truth involves car stops. "Now, say you see some guy driving who you think is wrong," says Blondie ("wrong" in his lexicon invariably means a black youth in a late-model car). "You stop him on no basis that could stand up in court. So you lie if you have to. You say he ran a stop sign or didn't signal or had a broken taillight that you break after...
Then, Blondie continues, "you search the car, which you generally have no probable cause to do." The cop who finds something--guns or drugs--has two alternatives: "Lie, and testify that the guy gave you permission to search." Or say the contraband wasn't in the trunk at all, but rather in plain view. "Why sweat it?" asks Blondie. "Sure, you've fabricated the probable cause and done an illegal search, but the guy is bad, right? We do what we have...
...those who watch cops for a living, the opening scene in the movie L.A. Confidential, with a veteran cop counseling a rookie, is disturbingly on point. "As the film puts it," says Dershowitz, "if you're not willing to break the law to do the work you're charged with doing, then you shouldn't be a cop--or at least not a detective...