Bad Cops

Hard-eyed and tightlipped, New York City's Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy last week presided over an unusual ceremony. Kennedy, an up-from-the-beat disciplinarian who runs New York's 23,600-man force with an iron hand (TIME, July 7), promoted eight cops ranging from rookie patrolman to lieutenant. Curiously, all eight were raised for the same reason: they had put the finger on other cops during a month of sordid police scandals that rocked the world's largest city.

Kennedy got his sharpest jolt fortnight ago when Brooklyn police solved the rape-murder of a 60-year-old grandmother. Grimly they announced that one of her two attackers was Patrolman Francis J. Rogers, 26, three years a policeman, whose father and brother are also on the force.

Among some 20 other jolts:

P: Three plainclothesmen on the Brooklyn Morals Squad were hauled up for the shakedown of a bookie; their arrest touched off a grand jury investigation of the entire squad.

P: Three patrolmen were arrested after a rookie saw them walk away from a Manhattan shoe store where one door lock had been removed and a second tampered with.

P: A 30-year-old patrolman was arrested on a charge involving homosexuality.

P: Two off-duty cops were arrested for extortion, accused of shaking down a sailor they saw taking a girl into a hotel.

P: Three ranking officers were demoted and a 28-year veteran bounced day before he would have been pensioned, because headquarters men smashed a numbers ring under their noses in Harlem.

Stung by such a squad of cops gone bad, Top Cop Kennedy hauled 140 of the department's brass on his carpet, warned them to root out the bad ones or be rooted out themselves. Warned he: "There will be changes in the police department. The only things that won't change are ideals and principles."

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