Police "culture of corruption" in Atlanta

Radley Balko has the details on a plea bargain agreed by a pair of Atlanta police officers in their trial for the killing of Kathryn Johnston:

We now know that Kathryn Johnston fired only a single bullet, through the door as police were trying to break in. They responded with a storm of bullets, which apparently both wounded Johnston and the officers themselves. When they realized their fatal error, they planted cocaine and marijuana in the woman's home. They then pressured an uninvolved informant to testify to having made controlled buys at Johnston's home to cover their tracks.

The New York Times is now reporting that the officers have told federal investigators that their behavior was not out of the ordinary. That corruption, planting evidence, and giving false testimony are routine at APD. That's not surprising. The only way these officers could think they'd get away with all of this is if they were operating within a system that routinely allows for—or even encourages—such behavior. APD's focus on arrest numbers and professional rewards for the big bust apparently incentivized such short cuts.

It's also important to remember that it's possible we wouldn't know any of this were it not for the uncooperative informant who admirably refused to help the cops cover their asses. Had he gone along with the plan, much of the public may well still think Kathryn Johnston was a geriatric dope pusher, and that her death was unfortunate, but a justifiable use of force by the raiding police. The failure here is not just with these three police officers. It's with their supervisors who failed to provide adequate oversight. It's with the prosecutors who failed to ask the right questions. And it's with the judges who, according to an investigation by the Atlanta Journal, routinely signed off on these types of warrants with no scrutiny at all.

The key part of the "War on Drugs" is the need for police officers to violate the spirit of the law in order to develop cases to the letter of the law. Entrapment, far from being a rare and shameful tactic, becomes daily practice. Once you're committed to breaking some laws to enforce other laws, you're greasing the skids for a plummet down the moral hill to where police officers (and their supervisors and the courts) end up with a brutal rule of the jungle, where cops are only the largest gang on the streets.