New York’s Finest (that would be the cops) either have a short memory, aren’t too bright or both.  No, that’s not the newsflash.  The news is that we’re all about to enjoy another episode of my favorite game show, Are NYPD Narcotics Cops Dirty!

As reported in the New York Daily News, the latest and greatest scandal is exploding. From Serpico/Knapp Commission, a federal side trip to DEA Group 33, to the Dirty Thirty, New York City has a long history of police being swayed to the dark side by the allure of money and narcotics.  Every so often, a new groups of cops thinks they’ve come up with a way to game the system.  It’s happened again.

This scandal broke when 34 year old Detective Sean Johnstone seized 28 bags of drugs, but only turned in 17.  Nothing new about this, but Sean was just a bit too arrogant about it.

The corruption came to light when a Brooklyn South undercover detective was caught on his own wire bragging about seizing 28 bags of drugs and turning in only 17. He allegedly gave the other bags to informants.

Bragging is what one does when one is proud of oneself.  Johnstone was proud that he found a way to beat the system.  what Johnstone was apparently unaware of was that this was nothing new, but one of the exact things that brought down the Dirty Thirty a decade before.  I know.  I brought the scandal to the New York County District Attorney’s Official Corruption Bureau, which showed incredible integrity in their investigation of the police.

The nature of these scandals is that once the camel’s nose is under the tent, you see plenty of very ugly stuff.  And this one followed course.

The junkie claims she had sex with Officer Jerry Bowens, 41, a member of the Brooklyn South narcotics unit where 20 cops were benched over charges of taking sex, drugs and cash from addicts and dealers.

You see, as soon as cops cross one giant step over the line of legality, everything else is just a variation on a theme.  Dirty cops are dirty.  The job of cop offers a multitude of ways to break the law, commit crimes and have a grand old time.  First, you steal the excess weight in drugs, because no one will miss it and what type of moron will tell that he had more drugs than claimed?  Then it’s stealing the money from the bad guy.  Then it’s sex with their women or trading those excess drugs for a quickie, or maybe just freedom.  There’s no cost in giving some women a free ride for a quickie.

Worse still is the ability of dirty cops to rationalize why it’s not so terrible for them to do so. After all, they’re only stealing from the bad guys, right?  The money is dirty, so why shouldn’t it go in the cops’ pockets instead of the shredder? 

What does NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly think about this newfound scandal on his watch?  He worries that busts will get tossed because his cops were dirty.

“Defense attorneys could make mincemeat out of a cop on the [witness] stand if the cop was involved in this mess,” said a source close to the investigation. “And it could force old cases to be reopened, examined and thrown out as well even if the arrests were good.”

Maybe he would have been a little more successful if he was more concerned about his own cops being dirty than about losing the busts?  Naw, the truth is that there is nothing Kelly could have done.  The temptation has historically proven too much for cops.  After every scandal, safeguards are put in place which are supposed to prevent it from happening again.  Yet it always happens again.  It’s the nature of the beast.

The only thing missing in this scandal is a catchy name.  But I’m sure some enterprising young journalist will come up with something, so that ten years from now, when the next narcotics cops scandal comes along, we can refer back to this one and sigh.