Two police officers were arrested at a Harlem station house last night and law enforcement officials said that about 10 more would be arrested today on charges that they protected or shook down drug dealers. The officials said the arrests represented the largest single sweep of police officers since the Mollen Commission began its corruption investigation.
The arrests are part of a string of corruption cases that senior police officials say is only beginning, and is likely to touch as many as 10 of the city's 75 precincts.
The officers arrested last night and those who will be arrested , officials said, work the overnight shift in the 30th Precinct, long suspected of being one of the two or three most corrupt precincts in the city by Federal and city law-enforcement authorities. Three officers in the 30th Precinct, in northwest Harlem, were arrested last month on assault and robbery charges.
Police Commissioner William J. Bratton oversaw last night's arrests of the first two officers, who were not identified. He went to the precinct at 11:20 P.M., 10 minutes before the overnight shift reported for duty and half an hour before the two men were led out in handcuffs to waiting cars. "Bratton came to pick up their shields," said John Miller, the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information.
Led Through a Chorus of Jeers
The men were taken away to a barrage of unanswered questions from waiting reporters and a chorus of jeers from about 40 residents, who had gathered at the station as news of the impending arrests spread through the neighborhood. To one of the arrested officers, who kept his chin tucked against his chest, a resident shouted: "Put your head up! Be a man!" and another called out, "Aha, they got you!"
Mr. Bratton and other department officials refused to discuss last night's arrests or those expected today. Mr. Miller said that an announcement would be made today.
Law enforcement authorities, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, would give only the sketchiest of details, fearing they might complicate or delay the arrests. But one of the officials said that several of the officers would be charged in connection with protecting drug traffickers. Other officers allegedly shook down drug dealers for cash.
Federal and City Stings
Federal and city law-enforcement officials spent much of the day planning the arrests, debating whether the officers should be taken into custody in handcuffs out of the precinct to deter other lawbreaking officers.
The arrests spring from two separate stings conducted by the offices of the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, and the United States Attorney, Mary Jo White, in conjunction with the Mollen Commission, a panel appointed by former Mayor David N. Dinkins in 1992 to investigate police corruption.
Some of the arrests expected today come out of a sting conducted by Mr. Morgenthau's office, in which officers were apparently videotaped in a car, doing the bidding of drug dealers.
Other arrests came out of an initial investigation begun by the Mollen Commission last year. Evidence was turned over to Ms. White's office.
Three officers from the 30th Precinct were arrested on March 18 on charges of assault and robbery, after a sting by the Police Department and Mr. Morgenthau's office in which an apartment was set up as a drug den and officers were videotaped last year breaking in, beating up an undercover agent, stealing cash and searching for drugs.
Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat and a leading spokesman on drug issues in the House of Representatives, said in an interview yesterday that the fact that so many officers working at night in his district were implicated in drug offenses "just proves that as a nation we have not given the priority that drug abuse deserves."
"Drugs not only corrupt our police but they find their way into government and poison good government wherever they fester," he added.
In a memo sent to all police commanders and officers last week, Commissioner Bratton said that the "department has zero tolerance for corrupt officers and we will continue to do all we can to hunt them down and put them in jail."
Mr. Bratton is toughening the department's anti- corruption efforts by conducting its own stings, strengthening training and remodeling its Internal Affairs Bureau, which the Mollen Commission criticized and accused of failing to investigate corrupt officers.
The Mollen Commission is planning to complete its study on police corruption next month. In its interim report released in December, the panel concluded, "While the systemic and institutionalized bribery schemes that plagued the department a generation ago no longer exist, the prevalent forms of police corruption today exhibit an even more invidious and violent character: police officers assisting and profiting from drug traffickers, committing larceny, burglary, and robbery, conducting warrantless searches and seizures, committing perjury and falsifying statements, and brutally assaulting citizens."
The panel found that a vast majority of police officers were honest, but that there were pockets of corrupt officers in poor and minority neighborhoods like Harlem and Brownsville, Brooklyn.
The embarrassing public shows of police officers arresting police officers originated with the arrest of a corrupt New York City officer, Michael Dowd, by the Suffolk County police in May 1992 for narcotics dealing. Supervisors and fellow officers had suspected that Mr. Dowd had used cocaine while stealing and selling drugs, but the department's internal investigation agency failed to investigate.
That scandal led Mr. Dinkins to appoint the Mollen Commission, which developed evidence already gathered by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office to link several officers in the 73d Precinct in Brownsville to a ring that shook down dealers and traded in stolen guns. Three of those officers were arrested last month on various drug charges.
Mollen Commission investigators found that in both the 73d and 30th precincts renegade officers created fake police calls and used code words over their police radios to communicate with each other. And in both precincts, the investigators found, the corrupt officers stole drugs from drug dealers and turned around and sold their booty to other dealers.
The latest arrests are the first to have come from an investigation begun by the Mollen Commission. Several more cases are expected, although officials with the panel refused to comment on them.
