Left I on the News

At first glance, this story headlined "Brooklyn man wins nearly $1M lawsuit after NYPD cop tried to frame him on DWI charge" might almost seem like a feel-good story. A cop in a marked SUV ran a stop sign and crashed into another car. What did the cop do? Being one of those "few bad apples" we often hear about, he of course arrested the guy for DUI! Alas, he made one critical mistake — the guy he charged with DUI doesn't drink! Oops. Three years later the guy gets a cool mil in a settlement from the city.

But as Eugene Puryear once said in a quote that I like to repeat, no one ever remembers the full "few bad apples" saying, which is "…spoil the whole bunch". Because it wasn't just one cop who was involved in this false arrest, it was five of them. And it wasn't even just those five, but their bosses in the NYPD too, because none of the five are facing any charges from this incident; all are still on the force. And as for the "Blue Wall of Silence"? The article doesn't explicitly say, but it's safe to assume that the other four officers didn't just "stay silent" about the incident, but actively testified to back up the story of the arresting officer. We've seen that happen time and time again, for example, in the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. Cops are active participants in helping fellow officers evade justice, not passive ones.

It may be true that there really are just "a few bad apples" who would initiate an injustice, whether it be a false arrest like this one, a murder like Laquan McDonald's, or anything in between. But the "bunch" who get "spoiled" by that action, and who routinely and actively participate in its coverup, covers a huge percentage, quite possibly a majority, of their fellow cops, especially in big cities like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Los Angeles and most others.