(MintPress) – James Griffin has become the personification of what the ostracizing of a police officer doing the right thing looks like. Griffin did what his Patrol Guide required him to do: Report corruption and wrong doings he witnessed within the New York Police Department (NYPD). But those that have come forward to report their fellow officers have been all but banished for violating the unwritten rule among officers that they not report one another.
The New York Times reports that Griffin called the NYPD’s Internal Affairs in 2005 to report a fellow officer whom he thought was attempting to frame him during an investigation into a homicide that was mishandled by his squad. From that day forward, Griffin, who is no longer with the department, was turned into an outcast: He found the word “rat” etched on his locker, no one made eye contact with him and other officers refused to ride along with him, despite requirements that say detectives must be accompanied by a partner during an investigation.
Griffin had violated the Blue Code of Silence – an unwritten pact in police culture that sets a standard of values and rules that encourage police officers not to report their colleagues. By cooperating with the department’s Internal Affairs, Griffin had essentially lost his job. He is currently in a lawsuit with the department over his treatment after reporting the instance.
In 2011, NYPD Sgt. Robert Borrelli submitted a report to Internal Affairs that detailed how crime reports were being improperly downgraded to make for a better looking crime statistics. For blowing the whistle, he was put on disciplinary monitoring and demoted to work in the Bronx court system, a move he told the New York Times was in retaliation to his report.
Borrelli said he was not properly protected by the department for coming forward and that the unwritten code of silence still has more clout among officials than any evidence he could have brought forward. As it turned out, many of the examples Borrelli gave in his report turned out to be improperly classified, proving his hunch all along.
“It’s disheartening. I always felt like I tried to do the right thing, you know what I mean?” Borrelli said. “They basically want to make an example out of you to stop people from coming forward, and that’s what bothers me the most.”
Arguably the biggest black eye dealt to the NYPD’s code of silence happened last year when a former NYPD narcotics officer testified against the practice of other officers planting drugs on people in a bar as a means to meet their monthly arrest quota. Stephen Anderson reported four of his colleagues for the practice of “attaching bodies” to drugs, an admission that ultimately was responsible for his split with the force.
“Seeing it so much, it’s almost like you have no emotion with it,” Anderson said, adding that those four years of life as a narc had numbed him to corruption. “The mentality was that they attach the bodies to it; they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway, nothing is going to happen to them anyway. That kind of came on to me and I accepted it.”
From 1999 to 2000, the National Institute of Ethics put together the largest research initiative into the police code of silence to date. The study surveyed 3,714 officers around the country to get an understanding of the code of silence. Some of the findings include:
– 79 percent said that a law enforcement Code of Silence exists and is fairly common throughout the nation.
– 73 percent of the individuals pressuring officers to keep quiet about the misconduct were leaders.
– Excessive use of force was the most frequent situation over which the Code of Silence occurs; with 217 were excessive use of force circumstances.
The director of the study, Neal Trautman, concluded that the only way for the destructive code of silence culture to subside is for unethical behavior within a force to drastically reduce. He said the unethical practices seen by the departments are too widespread for departments to continually call them isolated incidents.
“The American criminal justice system and in particular law enforcement, has been negligent by not attempting to resolve the negative impact of the code,” Trautman wrote. “The ‘rotten apple’ theory that some administrators propose as the cause of their downfall has frequently been nothing more than a self-serving, superficial facade, intended to draw attention away from their own failures.”