“They were simply put, both cops and robbers,”

In Baltimore, Brazen Officers Took Every Chance to Rob and Cheat

BALTIMORE — Stacks of bills, $100,000 in all, taken from a safe.

Garbage bags full of stolen prescription drugs dumped on the black market.

A motorist robbed of $25,000.

The crimes were not carried out by civilian criminals, but by Baltimore police officers. They are among the dozens of bombshells in one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation. In a trial in Baltimore federal court, witnesses and even the officers themselves have described an elite squad gone rogue, taking every opportunity to rob those they were supposed to be policing or protecting, and barely bothering to cover up their deeds.

The daily disclosures of dangerous, embarrassing and shameless acts come at a particularly bad time for the Baltimore Police Department, which is battling a runaway crime problem in an environment already poisoned by deep mistrust in the police.

The department was in fact under investigation by the federal government for systemic civil rights violations while the officers carried out many of their crimes — which included selling seized guns and drugs back onto the streets, sending innocent people to jail, recruiting civilians to rob drug dealers and using GPS devices to track and rob the innocent.

Six officers have pleaded guilty; four are testifying against the two who are now on trial.

The case fits a pattern of corruption scandals involving anti-crime units that rack up arrests and praise, but do not have enough supervision, said Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former Baltimore police officer who went to the police academy with one of the accused officers. But this one is far worse, he said: “It’s shocking what they’ve done and how long they’ve been doing it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/us/baltimore-police-corruption.html