If It's Just A Few "Bad Apples," Then How Do You Explain THIS?
September 5, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24
Louis Scarcella was a New York police detective for nearly 30 years, reportedly the “go to” guy for hard to prove murder cases. In 2013, an investigation by the New York Times found that Scarcella had used “the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions” and repeatedly produced “confessions” from defendants who insisted they had not made them. Scarcella’s “investigations” played a role in sending countless people to jail, many serving long sentences. More than 70 of Scarcella’s cases have been under investigation, and so far more than 10 convictions based on his frame-ups have been thrown out.
How does the rest of the NYPD—the so-called “good apples”—feel about Scarcella? According to the New York Times, they consider him an “esteemed colleague,” and this month he’ll be honored by the NYPD’s retired detectives association, and his career celebrated.
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