NYT        January 25, 2001

       Police Predators

        By BOB HERBERT

            There were many clues that the
            Police Department in upstate
        Wallkill, N.Y., had a problem. One
        was the widely reported discovery
        of the police chief, James Coscette,
        having sex with a woman in the
        back seat of a police vehicle.

        That was deftly characterized in an
        official report as "the chief's dalliance."

        And then there was the harassment, intimidation and
        outright coercion of women by Wallkill cops, both on
        and off duty. Predatory behavior was the rule.

        Last spring a 23-year-old woman driving alone was
        stopped and arrested for drunken driving. "In fact,"
        according to court papers filed by State Attorney
        General Eliot Spitzer, "she was not intoxicated." A
        videotape of the stop showed that the woman had
        "passed the field sobriety test."

        Nevertheless, she was taken into custody. The
        following week the arresting officer approached the
        woman and suggested he could get the charges dropped
        if she would go out with him. The woman declined. A
        judge later dismissed the charges.

        In another case, a cop who had arrested a woman on a
        petty larceny charge ordered her into a holding cell and
        told her to take her pants down so he could search for
        contraband. The woman, frightened, complied. Later
        the officer told the woman that he would try to have the
        charges reduced if she would meet with him privately.

        The Wallkill cops even had a special vehicle, known
        as the "stealth car," that was used for following women
        drivers. The front of the car had no markings to indicate
        that it was a police vehicle. Late one night a cop in the
        stealth car followed an 18- year-old woman as she was
        driving home from her job at a movie theater. On a
        particularly dark, almost deserted road, the officer
        began flashing his headlights.

        "Not seeing any police marks on the car, she became
        afraid for her safety and continued driving," the court
        papers said. The woman pulled into the driveway of
        her parents' home and began blowing the horn. By the
        time her mother came out of the house, the driver was
        crying. When the mother attempted to comfort her
        daughter, the cop pulled his gun, cursed, and told her to
        stay back.

        The teenage driver was arrested and taken to jail,
        where she was held for a couple of hours and then
        released on $500 bail.

        Wallkill is an Orange County town of about 25,000,
        and for the past few years its residents have had to put
        up with a variety of torments from the 25-member
        police force. Teenage girls employed at a local food
        store took to hiding in a back room because of the
        repeated pawing and suggestive comments of an
        on-duty, uniformed police officer. When the town's
        voluntary civilian Police Commission conducted an
        investigation of the department (prompted by
        complaints about its crime-fighting ineptitude), the
        members of the commission found themselves and their
        families being harassed by the police.

        The commission's investigation showed what was
        already widely known — the Wallkill cops were out of
        control. "There is no sense of responsible leadership in
        the Police Department," the commission said in a report
        released last summer.

        Eventually the Police Commission recommended that
        the Police Department be dismantled. The Town Board,
        protective of the police, disagreed. It abolished the
        commission.

        Attorney General Spitzer, responding to the continued
        insanity, filed a federal lawsuit against the town of
        Wallkill last week, charging that it had failed to rein in
        its lawless Police Department. The suit asks the court
        to impose a series of reforms on the police and to
        appoint a federal monitor to oversee the department.

        "This was a breakdown at many different levels," Mr.
        Spitzer said. "We want the proper governing structure
        to be put back in place."

        Mr. Spitzer's suit is a civil action. I asked the Orange
        County district attorney, Francis D. Phillips, whether
        criminal charges would be pursued — for false arrest
        and sexual misconduct, among other things.

        Mr. Phillips sounded reluctant to follow that route. He
        said he wouldn't know "for sure" until he meets next
        week with Mr. Spitzer's office.

        We'll see if yet another public official, sworn to uphold
        the law, chooses to avert his eyes to outrageous police
        behavior.
   ------------------------------------------------
        January 25, 2001

        Inquiry Into Reported Police
        Abuse Widens

        By AL BAKER

            GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Jan. 24 — Two Nassau
            County police officers were placed on desk duty
        today as an inquiry widened into a woman's report that
        she was sexually abused by a plainclothes officer in
        August.

        One of those placed on administrative assignment was
        the Eighth Precinct officer under investigation for
        allegedly stopping the woman and forcing her to
        perform oral sex in exchange for her release, said a
        department spokesman, Detective Sgt. Kevin Smith.
        The other, Sergeant Smith said, was a supervisor
        working in the unit that investigates police misconduct.
        The supervisor mishandled the woman's complaint by
        failing to begin an immediate internal investigation,
        Sergeant Smith said. As a result, the case went
        uninvestigated by the police Internal Affairs Unit for
        five months.

        The supervisor took a report from Eighth Precinct
        personnel who called him the day the woman, an exotic
        dancer, came forward with her charges, but he did
        nothing but log it in a book where it stood a slim chance
        of being followed up quickly, Sergeant Smith said.

        Investigators are not yet certain that the episode
        involved an officer, not a police impersonator.
        Sergeant Smith would not identify either of the officers.

        The inaction on the case has stymied the police in their
        recent efforts to collect forensic evidence, interview
        people and piece together what happened that early
        morning in August, police officials said.

        "They should not treat any complaint against a police
        officer in a slipshod manner," said Gary DelaRaba, the
        president of the Nassau County Police Benevolent
        Association. "The officer deserves an immediate
        hearing, an immediate investigation, and so do the
        people."

        The Eighth Precinct officer is a former New York
        Police Department officer who joined the Nassau force
        six years ago, the Nassau police said. The supervisor
        no longer works in the Internal Affairs Unit, and is now
        on desk duty in the detective division, the police said. It
        remained unclear today whether the former supervisor's
        decision not to investigate the woman's complaint was
        intentional or a mistake.

        "I can't say whether he did it intentionally or not. That
        is part of the focus of the investigation," Sergeant Smith
        said. He also said that a form should have been filled
        out at the Eighth Precinct and forwarded to the Internal
        Affairs Unit and to the officer's patrol supervisors. But
        none ever was, he said.

        It was also unclear whether others in the Internal
        Affairs Unit participated in the decision not to
        investigate.

        The woman, whom the police did not identify, said the
        officer who stopped her on the suspicion of drunken
        driving had a badge and was driving in an unmarked
        police car. He may have been part of a plainclothes
        crime-deterrent detail in the precinct. Only a handful of
        such unmarked cars would have been in use on the date
        in question, the police said.

        Officers who interviewed the woman showed her a
        photo of a former officer in another precinct who was
        arrested in October on charges that he raped a woman
        while on duty, the police said. But they never showed
        her pictures of the officers driving unmarked cars on
        the August morning she said she was accosted.

        Deputy Inspector Peter A. Matuza said all precinct
        records from that day were being searched.

--------------------------------------------------------------

        January 24, 2001

        Brooklyn Officers Accused as   Brazen Robbers

        By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

            Two police officers were part of a brazen Brooklyn
            robbery gang for several years, federal authorities
        said yesterday, holding up drug dealers, plotting armed
        robberies of businesses and even using a patrol car and
        police raid jackets for a robbery scheme.

        The two officers, both assigned to the 77th Precinct in
        Bedford-Stuyvesant, became so reckless, according to
        court papers unsealed yesterday, that they are accused
        of a crime sure to send shock waves through the force:
        conspiring to murder a fellow officer.

        The target of the conspiracy, a veteran detective, had
        testified in an unrelated case in 1997, contradicting the
        officers' statements and leaving them open to federal
        perjury charges, the court papers said.

        In the months after the detective's testimony, the pair,
        using a mobile computer in their police car, tracked
        down the detective's home address and drove by with
        an accomplice in tow to plan his murder, the court
        papers said. They never followed through, but the pair's
        testimony eventually caught up to them last June,
        officials said, when the Police Department accused
        them of lying to federal prosecutors and fired them.

        The accusations revealed in court papers yesterday
        echoed a notorious corruption scandal in the same
        police precinct 14 years ago, when a dozen officers
        known as the Buddy Boys were charged with robbing
        drug dealers and other crimes. This case, however, did
        not appear to be part of a wider pattern, federal
        prosecutors and police officials said yesterday.

        But the level of brazen criminal behavior detailed in
        court papers was as serious as has surfaced in the
        department in several years. It raised questions about
        how the two officers were able to operate undetected,
        robbing drug dealers in three boroughs, as the court
        papers say they did, and in the case of one officer,
        leaving work early one day in 1997 to take part in a
        $500,000 jewelry store robbery in Garden City on
        Long Island.

        The firing of the officers last summer for lying about a
        gun arrest was unrelated to the crimes with which they
        have been charged, police officials said. Their shadow
        lives of crime came to light when one of the former
        officers, Anthony Trotman, 35, was charged with the
        Long Island jewelry store robbery in a federal
        indictment on Jan. 11.

        Mr. Trotman, who had been on the force for 11 years,
        then began cooperating with federal authorities. The
        information he provided led to a criminal complaint
        unsealed yesterday against the second former officer,
        Jamil Jordan, 28. Mr. Jordan is charged with
        conspiring to commit robberies, credit card fraud and
        conspiring to murder the detective.

        Yesterday, neither the lawyer for Mr. Jordan, Frank
        Handelman, nor the lawyer representing Mr. Trotman,
        Valerie Amsterdam, returned calls seeking comment.

        Mr. Jordan was arraigned before Magistrate Judge
        Marilyn D. Go in federal court in Brooklyn yesterday
        afternoon. Magistrate Go held Mr. Jordan without bail.

        In the same courthouse, the trial of one of the other men
        prosecutors say was part of the robbery crew, James
        Woodard, was getting under way. Jack Smith, an
        assistant United States attorney, told jurors in Mr.
        Woodard's trial that they would hear testimony from
        Mr. Trotman, who as a police officer had robbed drug
        dealers and, on Aug. 1, 1997, helped carry out the
        36-second armed robbery at H. L. Gross jewelers in
        Garden City. The crime, which netted $500,000 in
        jewelry, was the second trip to the store by the crew.
        Four months earlier, without Mr. Trotman, four of the
        men used the same smash-and- grab tactics to hammer
        through the shop's glass display cases and grab as many
        watches and other pieces of jewelry as they could
        carry, officials said.

        Officials said the crew conducted surveillance of their
        robbery targets; usually chose days when the weather
        was bad for their robberies, to slow the police
        response; and used a Lexus as a getaway car.