Should any of us be surprised that five NYPD officers have been arrested for illegally schlepping stolen guns into the city from New Jersey? East Coast, big-city police enjoy a unique and toxic combination of power, privilege, and protection from prosecution that ‘little people’ like us can only dream of.
This breeds a culture of corruption, in which NYPD detectives allegedly planted drugs on innocent defendants in order to meet their monthly arrest quotas. And fixed parking tickets for friends and family members.
Don’t expect much outrage from New Yorkers, however: the vast majority of them have accepted this level of corruption since the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, and they’ve submitted to being defenseless subjects since the passage of the Sullivan Law in 1911. This is not a coincidence: gun control and political corruption have gone hand-in-hand in the Big Apple for exactly 100 years. State Senator Timothy Sullivan, the bill’s main sponsor, was a himself notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall power-broker.
In the wake of yet another NYPD scandal, expect Hizzonor Michael Bloomberg to respond with a flurry of mea-non-culpas and counter-factual counterattacks. He’ll have a hard time blaming this scandal on the ‘loose’ gun laws of other states, however: all of these stolen guns came from New Jersey, where the gun laws are even tougher than New York’s.
Instead of randomly stopping and frisking young Latino and African-American men on the streets in the name of stopping gun violence, maybe the 34,000 uniformed members of the NYPD should start stopping and frisking each other? How many illegal ‘throw-down’ guns, bags of planted drugs, and fixed parking tickets would they find?
Just wondering.
What really makes me sick is that the CBS article you link tries to give the Bloomberg administration the credit for this sting, comparing it to his shenanigans in Arizona. From what I can gather, CBS seems to think that Bloomberg’s gun-control-mongering is pretty much indistinguishable from the enforcement of laws actually on the books.
This is a time where wearing blue really, really hurts.
There has been a lot of this going on, including a supposed investigation by the DOJ because apparently this has been an issue that has been on the rise:
http://lawenforcementcorruption.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=50
In my old Bronx neighborhood, guys either became cops or crooks. You could tell which kid was going to be which by how much they wanted a pension.
I always had the feeling that cops wore uniforms so people could tell them apart from the crooks who didn’t have a union.
Me the ATF thought they were mexican cartel members
And he’s harassing my state………
Michael Bloomberg says:
“This happened because we are not paying the police a high enough salary so that our valiant blue coats must then resort to such behavior to pay their bills and survive. The solution, good people of NYC, is that we must tighten our belts and pay higher taxes”.
Leave it to RINO Mike to make lemonade out of lemons.
This kind of corruption starts at the top. I contend that Bloomberg’s flaunting federal firearms laws with his illegal faux-stings at out of state gunshows created an atmosphere and an opportuntity for cops to move illegal guns into New York City. On one level that is hyperbole but on a deeper level one has to wonder what happened to all the guns that Bloomberg’s minions purchased at gunshows. I suspect some number ended up in the hands of the City’s gangbangers. I think it is safe to say that the straw purchasers are not of the highest moral character and I have no doubt that some to took the one for the Mayor and one for me approach.