Word: colbert
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...both Colbert and the Philadelphia police department, a nightmare was about to begin. Before it was over, it would expose a pattern of corruption that would bring down nine Philadelphia cops, implicate scores of others and eventually lead to the freeing of 160 wrongfully convicted prisoners, all victims of a web of misdeeds masquerading as heroic police work...
...Colbert incident was neither as dramatic nor as horrendous as the recent brutalization of Abner Louima at the hands of New York City police. Cases like that grab national headlines, but they are aberrations. More systemic and infinitely harder to root out is a more common form of corruption: too many cops in too many places who routinely flout the laws they are sworn to uphold, cops who come to view the law itself as a maze of misguided rules that hinder their ability to "get the job done...
This is a look into that world, a sort of parallel universe in which protecting "us" from "them" can cost "us" dearly, as Colbert--college student, aspiring FBI agent and a man free of any criminal history--was about to discover on that Friday night. Unwittingly, Colbert walked into a fiefdom commanded by a rogue cop so intimidating that he had cowed an entire neighborhood, and so clever that he had won 14 perfect job ratings in 14 years...
...Colbert, 24, approached the wagon that night, Blondie and Ryan emerged to greet him. "What are you doing here, nigger?" Colbert recalls one of the cops saying. As Colbert explained his predicament, the officers patted him down and searched his car. "What are you doing?" asked Colbert, who knew the law. "What's your probable cause to search me?" Neither officer responded. "I remember thinking that I was indeed in a bad neighborhood," Colbert says. "The cops have it rough in the real world. They never know if you're a bad guy, so I figured I could take...
When the search turned up nothing, Ryan and Blondie directed Colbert to his date's home on the next block. Within minutes, as Colbert and the woman were driving off, the same cops appeared again. After telling the woman to "get lost," they handcuffed Colbert and told him he resembled a drug dealer named Hakim. Procedure dictated that Colbert be booked at the 39th-district police headquarters, about a mile away. But Colbert wasn't in the land of official procedure; he was in the hands of Blondie. So, instead, he was taken to 1518 Ontario Street, a run-down...