Word: colbert
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...Colbert didn't know the names of his assailants, and there was no record of his arrest or appearance at the station house, but it didn't take long for Gallagher to figure it out: Ryan and Blondie. Yet even with Colbert's testimony, it took time--and luck--to bust Blondie and his confederates. There was, after all, no paper trail...
What helped was another police beating, 3,000 miles away. Seven days after Colbert's encounter, the nation's attention shifted from Kuwait to Los Angeles, where Rodney King had been beaten senseless by a gang of vengeful cops. As weeks passed and police everywhere pondered the King horror, the Philadelphia department's internal investigation was leading commanders to a logical conclusion; this was no time for a cover-up. So they released photos of Ryan and Blondie, who had been suspended during the probe, to local newspapers. A flood tide followed. Complaints about the cops' behavior inundated the department...
...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, "how you get a bad guy, if he really...
...might cruise through the area and have debris or even rocks thrown at them. When Blondie drove by with his cohort, silence fell on the bleak streets. "Cross those guys, and they'd whack you upside the head," says Cory Brown, who now lives in the house where Arthur Colbert was beaten in 1991. "We had our times, Blondie and me," says Brown. "He busted me for having a gun, and I was lucky to get off with probation." No hard feelings, says Brown. "I didn't have no permit for the gun." More important, says Brown...
...true that all of those arrested were indeed bad guys, and no one is real eager to let them out on technicalities." The other reason for going slow is financial. To date, Philadelphia has paid out almost $5 million in wrongful-arrest settlements stemming from Five Squad's activities (Colbert settled for only $25,000). "There's simply no real appetite for going full blast on this stuff," says the district attorney...