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How you get him is to disregard the law. "Basically, the first thing you really learn as a cop is how to lie," says Blondie. For many officers, their first taste of shading the truth involves car stops. "Now, say you see some guy driving who you think is wrong," says Blondie ("wrong" in his lexicon invariably means a black youth in a late-model car). "You stop him on no basis that could stand up in court. So you lie if you have to. You say he ran a stop sign or didn't signal or had a broken taillight that you break after you've determined he's bad. That makes the initial stop legal."
Then, Blondie continues, "you search the car, which you generally have no probable cause to do." The cop who finds something--guns or drugs--has two alternatives: "Lie, and testify that the guy gave you permission to search." Or say the contraband wasn't in the trunk at all, but rather in plain view. "Why sweat it?" asks Blondie. "Sure, you've fabricated the probable cause and done an illegal search, but the guy is bad, right? We do what we have to do."
"There's far more of this type of thing than anyone could be comfortable with," says Robert McGuire, who was New York City's police commissioner for six years. "Do cops perjure themselves routinely on warrants and arrests, where the probable cause is made up after the fact so the arrest stands up in court? Sure they do."
But it isn't necessary, says McGuire: "It's possible to follow the rules and get the job done. In most communities, the bad actors are well known to both residents and the police, which means if you can't get the bad guys the first time then you can get them the next time, because there's always a next time." But most officers don't make that calculation.
"Prosecutors and judges know a lot of testimony by cops is false," says Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and criminal defense attorney who has popularized the term testilying. "But they only know it generically, rather than in any particular case. So in a battle of conflicting testimony, cops are given the benefit of the doubt."
For those who watch cops for a living, the opening scene in the movie L.A. Confidential, with a veteran cop counseling a rookie, is disturbingly on point. "As the film puts it," says Dershowitz, "if you're not willing to break the law to do the work you're charged with doing, then you shouldn't be a cop--or at least not a detective."
Blondie was transferred to the 39th District in 1984. at its north end, the 39th is home to Philadelphia's elite. Large, expensive houses with well-manicured lawns are owned by business tycoons and politicians. But closer to downtown is an area of about 1 sq. mi. that is still home to the predatory crime common in America's inner cities. "It's the kind of place where if you saw a big TV satellite dish, you knew something was wrong because just about everyone there was on welfare," says the sergeant known as Schoolboy, who was Blondie's nominal boss in "Five Squad," the detachment of plainclothes officers given the task of ridding the streets of drugs, or at least confining them to Philadelphia's poorest neighborhood.