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How A Few Harm All

Police abuse may arise from just a few “bad apples,” but if left unpunished, it rots the entire instititution.

By Jamie Kalven

The following is an excerpt from “Kicking the Pigeon,” a 17-part series on police abuses by Jamie Kalven, a journalist who for more than a decade immersed himself in the life of the Stateway Gardens public housing development on the South Side of Chicago. Originally posted on the Web site The View From The Ground, Kalven’s reporting focuses on a… return to article

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    From the early days of Nixon’s “War on Crime” I observed that when crime becomes political, it creates its own constituency. And within that constituency, real criminals find succor and support.

    I saw it first hand in the sixties and seventies, where people who would never consider a crime beyond their choice of smoking materials, found themselves infiltrated as much by really bad people pretending to be like them, who were thieves and rapists, as they were by triple agents, every bit as bad but secretly carrying a badge. As with every war, it is the noncombatants who are the easiest prey for both sides.

    In the Black community, Immigrant communities, or the streets of Baghdad, the results are similar, and verify your point. But while the specific details are instructive to those who have not felt it in their bones, the more general fact that injustice injures all sides by breaking down civil society, cannot be made strongly enough.

    A few bad apples rots the whole barrel indeed, and if you find rot at the bottom, you can trace it’s source all the way to the top as well. More commonly by malice, but incompetence at the very least, is the cause that will continue to rot the barrel, unless it is rooted out to the top.

    United States Posted by FreeDem on Sep 27, 2006 at 12:46 AM
    Page 1 of 1 pages

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  • How A Few Harm All
    Police abuse may arise from just a few "bad apples," but if left unpunished, it rots the entire instititution.
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