The trial of eight members of the scandalous Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force is, to a large extent, a repeat of the Dirty 30 Scandal in New York City a generation ago. It’s a fairly obvious, and easy, gig for cops to use their authority, and the trust they’re afforded, to become the criminals.

The Baltimore Police Department is currently in court over one of the biggest scandals in the history of American law enforcement. The corruption case is replete with intrigue as police reveal secrets that sound like something out of an urban-fiction novel or a lost season of The Wire. It has revealed how one of America’s largest cities just happened to be filled with crooked cops, but no one seems to be talking about it outside of Baltimore.

This is what comes of being unaware of where The Wire came from. Or perhaps using pop references under the assumption that your audience knows no history.

You want robbery? How about the story of the corrupt squad stopping a drug dealer during a traffic stop and robbing him of $6,500, then going to the man’s home without a warrant and taking another $100,000 out of a safe? Sgt. Wayne Jenkins would ask suspected drug dealers, “If you could put together a crew of guys and rob the biggest drug dealer in town, who would it be?”

Stealing from dealers is a sweet gig. What are they going to do about it? But an additional revelation involves an issue of a very different nature.

And then there’s the revelation that the supervisor of the unit instructed officers to carry a toy gun just in case they found themselves “in a jam” and needed to plant one. When one of the officers, Marcus Tayor, was arrested, officials couldn’t figure out why he had a toy gun in his glove compartment.

More than half a century ago, the weapon of choice on the street was primarily knives. They would suffice to threaten, or to do harm, and yet wouldn’t draw the severity of punishment should someone get caught with one. Times change, and knives turned to guns. After all, never bring a knife to a gunfight.

And for the same reason, never bring a toy gun.* You pull one out and if the other person has a real gun, you lose. As guns became somewhat ubiquitous on the street, readily available, they became the weapon of choice. It wasn’t that they were carried for offensive use; drug dealers were often the target of robbery and other drug dealers trying to horn in on their turf. They were carried for defense. And by non-criminals who found themselves threatened as well. Better to be able to defend oneself than follow the law by not carrying and end up dead.

Sure, there were the occasional robbers who flashed a toy gun to scare their victims into compliance, but this was increasingly rare. The possibility that the victim was armed meant this was very risky, and there just wasn’t a huge reason not to carry a gun, since flashing a toy gun still meant it was an armed robbery with the same punishment, even if it wasn’t possession of a weapon.

But you know what toy guns are great for? Throwaways. Who could blame a cop for killing a guy carrying a “realistic” toy gun? How could he know it wasn’t real? How could he know he wasn’t about to die?

It’s a lie. No one carrying a toy gun pulls it on a cop. The reason isn’t all that complicated. His gun is a toy, meaning it can’t shoot or harm anyone. It’s fairly well known that cops carry real guns that can shoot, can harm people. Pull the toy and you get killed. Nobody does this.

On the other hand, toy guns are a lot less expensive than real guns as throwaways. They come with red caps on the ends, a relatively new safety precaution to prevent someone from being shot by mistake. Pry the red caps off and you’re left with a sufficiently good facsimile of a handgun to kill over. Bear in mind, any toy guy will do, based on the Wii Theory.

And cops do kill people who have toy guns.*

But the BB gun testimony is particularly disturbing in light of 12-year-old Tamir Rice’s death in 2014, the 13-year-old in Baltimore who was shot twice by cops in 2016 after he allegedly sprinted from them with a replica gun in his hand, and the 86 people fatally shot by police in 2015 and 2016 who were spotted carrying toy guns.

The question raised, in light of the testimony in Baltimore is whether it should be assumed that a cop killing a person claimed to possess a toy gun was legitimate, a righteous shoot, or a throwaway. In the absence of witnesses or video of the shooting, we’re left with only the officer’s version of what happened. The “perp” is dead. So if the cop says he pulled a gun that turned out to be a toy, or reached toward his waist and a toy gun was found, who’s to disagree?

This isn’t a novel problem in law. We’ve been through this with “dropsy” cases, where an excuse finds sufficient acceptance to be the go-to get-away-with-it explanation for whatever it is you need to do. It happened in New York City’s stop & frisk days, when millions of black kids were tossed, and one gun was discovered for every hundred thousand constitutional violations.**

So now it’s toy guns, the readily available excuse for the kill? As the Baltimore trial reflects, blind faith in police integrity can no longer explain the use of toy guns by bad dudes. The presumption, rebuttable though it should be, is that any kill of a person who is alleged to possess a toy gun is a bad shoot, as in murder, by a cop, and the gun is a throwaway.

The problem isn’t toy guns. The problem is bad cops. The problem isn’t that they exist only in Baltimore, and that all the bad cops are on trial. When a cop kills based on a toy gun, presume the worst.

*Whether it’s more appropriate to describe them as “toy” or “replica” is a pedantic argument. A replica may suggest a working gun that was manufactured to appear the same as an old model gun, whereas a toy is a toy. For purposes here, assume “replica” means non-working gun that looks like a real gun.

**This number may not be exactly correct, but it’s close enough for lawyer math.