Word: fuhrman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...partner] is so hung up on the rules and stuff. I get pissed sometimes and go, "You just don't even [expletive] understand. This job is not rules. This is a feeling. [Expletive] the rules; we'll make them up later." --Former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman in a tape-recorded conversation...
...best of times, it is the worst of times for police departments and the citizens they are sworn to protect. News of declines in the rates of violent crime nationwide has been drowned out by the sound of Mark Fuhrman's voice filling a Los Angeles courtroom--swaggering and all too believable as the former cop describes the brutalizing of suspects, fabrication of evidence and abuse of minorities. Although the O.J. Simpson jury will hear only two small snippets of the Fuhrman screed, to the rest of America the tapes provide a profane voice-over to real-life police corruption...
...offensive as Fuhrman's words may be, they are nothing when compared with the scandal in Philadelphia. To date, along with Brown, five other cops have pleaded guilty to such charges as setting up innocent victims, selling drugs and beating and threatening people, primarily poor blacks in the 39th District. As a result, 46 of their criminal convictions have been overturned, with many more still to come. Last week federal investigators expanded their search to include the Highway Patrol, subpoenaing logs of as many as 100,000 arrests over 10 years. "It's nothing new," says Jerry Day, sitting...
...citizens of Los Angeles too did not need Fuhrman to illustrate how vows of absolution are followed by disillusionment. In the wake of the 1991 Rodney King beating, then Mayor Tom Bradley established the Christopher Commission, a blue-ribbon panel entrusted with the job of recommending police reforms. Chief Daryl Gates, who was frequently criticized for closing ranks with his officers rather than being accountable to the public, retired under pressure, and Williams was brought in. Still, 3 1/2 years later, many of the Christopher Commission's recommendations exist only on paper. For instance, the commission identified 44 "problem" officers...
What planet are these white people living on, the ones who profess such shocked surprise at the Mark Fuhrman tapes? Haven't they heard what black people have been telling them all these years: that the ranks of major police departments all across the country are full of Fuhrman-style lying bigots? Not all cops, by any means, not even most of them, but enough to generate a steady stream of racially motivated police misconduct. Most of it never makes the national news--the hundreds of cases in which minority suspects are manhandled, beaten or even killed. But certainly...