Police boycott won’t affect Tarantino’s popularity

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Part 1 of 2

Throughout its investigation the Commission staff sought to find police officers actually engaged in corrupt activities who could be induced to describe openly and for the record their activities and their knowledge of the patterns of corruption observed during their careers. We were informed by people experienced in police work that no police officer had ever given such information and that none ever would, even if he himself were caught in a corrupt act and were offered immunity in exchange for his testimony. The tradition of the policeman's code of silence was so strong, we were advised, that it was futile to expect such testimony from any police officer. The most that could be expected was anonymous information or, if we were extremely lucky, testimony given under oath on an anonymous basis. All of the experienced people with whom we spoke agreed that if even one police officer could be induced to give inside information based upon personal experience, the testimony would be of inestimably greater value than any other evidence the Commission might uncover.

The search for a corrupt officer who would speak frankly and openly uncovered not one but five. However, the first and potentially most productive of these proved to be too valuable to keep to ourselves. Robert Leuci was a detective who had spent eleven years on the force and who had been assigned to the elite Special Investigation Unit (SIU) of the Narcotics Division. He had met police officers Durk and Serpico in 1970 and led them to believe that he would back up their charges that SIU had not adequately pursued certain narcotics cases. In the fall of 1970 Durk arranged for meetings between Leuci and various assistant district attorneys, the State Commission of Investigation, and the staff of this Commission. In these meetings Leuci's statements were inconclusive and not susceptible to investigation. He subsequently indicated that his purpose in submitting to questioning had been to discover how much information the Commission and other agencies possessed.

In February, 1971, Leuci was again interviewed by the Commission staff, and this time he was convinced to tell all he knew about corruption in SIU and to help the Commission expose it.

Leuci told of a Narcotics Division infested with corruption. Drawing on personal experiences as well as those he observed and discussed with fellow officers, he described enormous payoffs by narcotics violators, illegal wiretaps used to facilitate shakedowns, involvement of supervisory personnel in narcotics graft, and arrangements between police officers and organized crime members which gave the latter protection from arrest and advance knowledge of legitimate investigations involving them.

Leuci worked with Commission agents for about one month and obtained a number of incriminating tape-recorded conversations with police officers. It quickly became apparent that he had incalculable value as an undercover agent. His work, if allowed to continue for as long as it was productive, could result in criminal prosecutions which might well expose a network of narcotics related corruption involving many police officers and stretching outside the Department.

However, an investigation calculated to accomplish this end would, if successful, last for many months, even years, and would require concentrating on obtaining evidence in specific cases rather than on gathering information for the purpose of identifying patterns of corruption. Because the Commission's investigation was due to end in a few months, we decided that Leuci should be turned over to law enforcement authorities with the time and manpower necessary for such an investigation.

In March, 1971, Assistant United States Attorney General Wilson and Whitney North Seymour, Jr., United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, were apprised of Leuci's activities to date and advised that the Commission was willing to forego any use of Leuci or the information he had provided in favor of an investigation directed at criminal prosecutions. The Commission also offered to refrain from revealing or further pursuing certain investigations into narcotics and related corruption which might draw attention to Leuci, and to allow the attorney and the two agents who had been working with Leuci to devote their full time to the proposed investigation. The Commission's offer was accepted.

The following month Commissioner Murphy and First Deputy Commissioner William H. T. Smith were informed of the investigation and arrangements were made to transfer Leuci back into SIU where he could work most effectively. The Commissioner agreed to keep his knowledge of the investigation entirely confidential and to give his full assistance whenever requested to do so.

The investigation was pursued with great success by the original investigative team aided by personnel from Mr. Seymour's office and, as the scope of the investigation broadened, by agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and a few carefully selected police officers. By the spring of 1972 federal authorities were confident that the investigation would result in far-ranging indictments involving organized crime members, police officers, and others in the criminal justice system including even judges.

However, Detective Leuci's participation in the investigation came to an end in June, 1972, when a story printed in The New York Times precipitated a general disclosure of his activities. Six indictments have so far been returned alleging corruption on the part of four police officers, an assistant district attorney, three lawyers, a bail bondsman and a private investigator. Other indictments are anticipated, but some of the most important cases have undoubtedly been aborted by the premature disclosure of the investigation.

The Commission could not, of course, call Leuci as a witness in its public hearings since at that time he was still working as a federal undercover agent. Moreover, findings in other Commissions investigations were withheld during the hearings so as to avoid areas where the focusing of attention might threaten his undercover activities. [xii] With his exposure some of the information disclosed by Leuci and certain of the results of his undercover work can now be discussed and have been included, where relevant, in this report.

***

Corruption in narcotics law enforcement has grown in recent years to the point where high-ranking police officials acknowledge it to be the most serious problem facing the Department. In the course of its investigation, the Commission became familiar with each of the practices detailed by Chief Cawley, as well as many other corrupt patterns, including:

Keeping money and/or narcotics confiscated at the time of an arrest or raid.

Selling narcotics to addict-informants in exchange for stolen goods.

Passing on confiscated drugs to police informants for sale to addicts.

"Flaking," or planting narcotics on an arrested person in order to have evidence of a law violation.

"Padding," or adding to the quantity of narcotics found on an arrested person in order to upgrade an arrest.

Storing narcotics, needles and other drug paraphernalia in police lockers.

Illegally tapping suspects' telephones to obtain incriminating evidence to be used either in making cases against the suspects, or to blackmail them.

Purporting to guarantee freedom from police wiretaps for a monthly service charge.

Accepting money or narcotics from suspected narcotics law violators as payment for the disclosure of official information.

Accepting money for registering as police informants persons who were in fact giving no information and falsely attributing leads and arrests to them, so that their "cooperation" with the police may win them amnesty for prior misconduct.

Financing heroin transactions.

In addition to these typical patterns, the Commission learned of numerous individual instances of narcotics-related corrupt conduct on the part of police officers, such as:

Determining the purity and strength of unfamiliar drugs they had seized by giving small quantities to addict-informants to test on themselves.

Introducing potential customers to narcotics pushers.

Revealing the identity of a government informant to narcotics criminals.

Kidnapping critical witnesses at the time of trial to prevent them from testifying.

Providing armed protection for narcotics dealers.

Offering to obtain "hit men" to kill potential witnesses.

***

In 1968, allegations of irregularities in the Narcotics Division led to an investigation by the Department's Internal Affairs Division. As a result of this investigation, many members of the division, including almost the entire staff of SIU, were gradually transferred out of the Division. However, three years later, this Commission's study of narcotics-related corruption revealed that both sectors of the Narcotics Division were still pervaded by corruption. Within the past year, there has been a nearly one hundred percent turnover in Narcotics Division personnel, but as the present commander of the Division recently told the Commission, the problem of corruption remains....

In June, 1972, a dismissed plainclothesman who had been assigned to the Narcotics Division was convicted in New York County and sentenced to up to four years in prison for his part in an extortion scheme which involved six members of the Narcotics Division. According to testimony at the trial, he and two other police officers contacted a restaurant owner and demanded $6,000, threatening to arrest his daughter-in-law on a narcotics charge unless he paid them. They further threatened to send the woman's two children to a foundling home in the event of her arrest. The restaurant owner paid them what they asked.

Within a few months, the same policeman, along with some other members of the unit, again approached the man and demanded an additional $12,000. The man told them to return in a few days, and in the interim he arranged for police surveillance of the next transaction. The plainclothesman was arrested when he accepted a down payment in marked money....

They told of participation in police shakedowns of narcotics "cribs" and said that it was standard practice for an informant to find a location where drugs were being sold in large quantities, and by attempting to make a buy with a large denomination bill, to induce the seller to reveal the hiding place of his cash supply....On leaving, the informant would arrange to return later to make another buy. On his next visit, as the seller opened the door, the police would crash in behind the informant. If the police felt they could score without risk, they would take whatever money and narcotics were available and let the seller go. If the amount of money was small, they would usually arrest the seller but still keep most of the narcotics, turning in only the amount necessary to charge a felony or misdemeanor as the case might be....

The Commission learned that it was not uncommon for defense attorneys in narcotics cases to pay policemen for such favors as lying under oath and procuring confidential police and judicial records concerning their clients' cases....

Evidence uncovered by the United States Attorney's Office in Manhattan in a current investigation of bribery by heroin dealers confirms the fact that corruption in narcotics law enforcement goes beyond the Police Department and involves prosecutors, attorneys, bondsmen, and allegedly even certain judges....

one Tactical Patrol Force officer who was apparently so confident of the acceptability of bribery that he attempted to arrange for a significant narcotics violator to bribe an assistant district attorney. He later pleaded guilty to bribery and resigned from the force after having served in the Department for eighteen years....

Theoretically, police may not secretly tap a suspect's telephone without a warrant. However, since strict constitutional safeguards and a certain amount of red tape surround the procedure for obtaining a warrant, it was not uncommon for Narcotics Division detectives to monitor and record the conversations of suspects without the required court order.

Since the Police Department has no official record of a wiretap installed without a warrant, no arrest is officially expected. Thus, information obtained by means of illegal taps can be used as easily to extort money and drugs from suspects who have been overheard as to make cases against them. Two Narcotics Division detectives were recently observed by a federal undercover agent as they engineered just such a score. The detectives illegally tapped the telephone conversations of a suspect in order to determine the extent of his dealings in narcotics. They then confronted the suspect with the evidence they had against him and threatened to arrest him unless he paid them $50,000. The suspect acceded to their demand and was given his freedom. The undercover agent, a former member of the Narcotics Division, told the Commission that in his experience the case is not unique....

Most often a police officer seeking to score simply keeps for himself all or part of the money and drugs confiscated during a raid or arrest. One former member of the Narcotics Division recently assigned to other duties told the Commission that in his experience eighty to ninety percent of the members of the Narcotics Division participated in at least this type of score....

The sergeant took a black fur coat from the trunk of the car and hid it in his own, while the patrolman walked away with a stereo tape device and several tape cassettes. Other situations described by Logan indicate that theft by police of furnishings and other personal property from premises where a narcotics raid had taken place were not uncommon.

Logan testified that his PEP Squad sergeant taught him the various techniques of scoring, and that such scoring was standard police procedure among his fellow officers....

"[T]he general feeling was that the man was going to jail, was going to get what was coming to him, so why should you give him back his money and let him bail himself out. In a way we felt that he was a narcotics pusher, we knew he was a narcotics pusher, we kind of felt he didn't deserve no rights since he was selling narcotics."... "[t]he feeling is that it is his word against theirs."...

Logan testified that he began to let suspects go after he had taken their money, so that they would be less likely to complain. This practice was in keeping with the philosophy of scoring taught to Logan by his sergeant: "[W]hen you are scoring a guy, try to leave him happy. If you leave a guy happy, he won't beef, won't make a complaint against you." Logan explained in his testimony that this could be accomplished even after a large amount of money was taken from a suspect by releasing him with enough of his narcotics to get him back into business....

Another detective, assigned to a squad in Queens, had been a full partner in a narcotics wholesale enterprise, and testified at the same hearings that when he decided to join the partnership, he discussed with fellow officers the fact that at least part of his heroin supply would come from holding back large quantities of heroin from important narcotics arrests....

Narcotics retained from prior arrests are also used for "padding," that is, for adding to the quantity of narcotics found on a subsequently arrested person, thus enabling the arresting officer to upgrade the charge to a felony. It is also common to use illegally retained narcotics to "flake" a narcotics suspect, that is, to plant evidence on a person in order to make a narcotics arrest....

Waverly Logan, in his testimony before the Commission, told of an occasion when he flaked a suspect. He had arrested a suspected narcotics seller and planted four bags of narcotics on him. At the precinct house the prisoner told two narcotics detectives how the arrest had been made. One of the detectives then took Logan aside and carefully instructed him on how to write up the complaint in order to make the case stick....

one patrolman testified that padding can also be accomplished by mixing the seized narcotics with adulterants such as quinine and mannitol....

The Commission found that police officers were involved in possession and sale of narcotics in a variety of ways, including financing transactions, recruiting informants and addicts as pushers, and share-selling, where the pusher is given drugs on consignment and retains part of the proceeds as payment. In addition, the Commission found it common for police officers to use narcotics as a medium of exchange for goods and services....

The Commission was able to verify the allegations that merchandise-for-drugs transactions between police officers and addicts were commonplace....

One plainclothesman, in the middle of a narcotics-for-cigarettes transaction ordered a gasoline powered mini-bike. The informant explained that it was still daylight and that he could not conveniently and easily steal a mini-bike in Central Park until sundown. The officer indicated he didn't care about the informant's troubles in obtaining a mini-bike, he just wanted it and, emphatically, that night....

In one of these a narcotics plainclothesman gave the two Commission informants a written list specifying thirty-one quart bottles by brand name. He told them to make sure to "come through because I need them for my daughter's wedding shower." The patrolman paid for the liquor with a quantity of white powder containing heroin, starch, quinine, and mannitol....

Another similar case which resulted in the conviction of a police officer involved a young woman, the addict mother of several children, who had been arrested on information supplied by her mother and her boyfriend, who hoped she would be treated. The arresting officer, a member of the Narcotics Division, persuaded her to become an informant and continued to supply her with large quantities of narcotics. The arresting officer later introduced her to a "gangster" -- actually another member of the Narcotics Division -- and together, by threatening to harm her children, they forced her into becoming a share-seller pusher.

Eventually her boyfriend complained to the Internal Affairs Division and an arrest was made. At one point during the investigation, the patrolman kidnapped the victim and held her in captivity while trying to frighten her into refraining from testifying against him....

In the case of one police officer who was convicted for selling narcotics, it was clear from the evidence that during the period covered by the charges, from the summer of 1970 to December, 1970, he had been a wholesaler of substantial amounts of cocaine. The conviction was obtained largely through the cooperation of another arrested former policeman, who on several occasions had acted as a distributor for him. The evidence included a secretly-recorded conversation in which the defendant discussed the possible effects of his distributor's arrest on his cocaine operation, the possibility of fixing the colleague's case, and the desirability of killing the informant who was responsible for the arrest....

A former Narcotics Division detective, while a member of the force, financed a narcotics wholesale business that dealt in one-eighth kilo quantities of heroin. He obtained some of the heroin he used for resale from an underworld connection, a wholesaler in narcotics....

a narcotics wholesale ring that was responsible for the monthly distribution of 1.5 million dollars' worth of heroin, revealed that a New York City patrolman provided armed protection as the ring made its deliveries....

Members of the Narcotics Division have helped known narcotic violators win amnesty or leniency from district attorneys' offices by fraudulently registering them as police informants and attributing arrests and leads from other sources to these "informants" on official Department records....

Captain McGowan testified, "that a member of our Narcotics Bureau learned the identity of an East Harlem character who was an informant for the Federal Narcotics Bureau and the allegation was that he passed this information on to the organized crime people in that area, that the informant was subsequently taken upstate and murdered, and the detective was paid $5,000."...

it is unfair of some City residents to assume that the existence anywhere of conspicuous narcotics trading proves that policemen are either directly involved or are being paid to close their eyes to the illegal activity. Very often, it is not police corruption, but the overcrowding of the courts and the penal system, and the difficult standard of proof required to convict an arrested suspect that are to blame for the apparent non-enforcement of narcotics laws....

When a police officer keeps for himself a portion of confiscated narcotics he is not always acting from corrupt motives. The Department's practice in the past of not providing money to pay informants, who usually are addicts themselves, created great pressure on police officers to use seized narcotics to pay for information.

***

The Commission found that payments to the police by contractors and subcontractors were the rule rather than exceptions and constituted a major source of graft to the uniformed police. It must be noted that policemen were not alone in receiving payoffs from contractors. Much larger payoffs were made to inspectors and permit-granting personnel from other agencies....

Corruption is a fact of life in the construction industry. In addition to extensive payoffs contractors make to police and others in regulatory agencies, there is evidence of considerable corruption within the industry itself. Contractors have been known to pay owners' agents to get an inside track on upcoming jobs; subcontractors pay contractors' purchasing agents to receive projects or to get information helpful in competitive bidding; sub-subcontractors pay subcontractors; dump-truck drivers exact a per-load payment for taking out extra loads they don't report to their bosses; and hoist engineers get money from various subcontractors to insure that materials are lifted to high floors without loss or damage. In this climate, it is only natural that contractors also pay the police....

the responsibility for inspecting certain permits and enforcing the ordinances outlined above lies with the police. The police officers charged with this responsibility have always been faced with a particularly tempting opportunity for corruption....

In a small job like the renovation of a brownstone, the general contractor was likely to pay the police between $50 and $150 a month, and the fee ascended sharply for larger jobs. An excavator on a small job paid $50 to $100 a week for the duration of excavation to avoid summonses for dirt spillage, flying dust, double-parked dump trucks, or for running vehicles over the sidewalk without a permit. A concrete company pouring a foundation paid another $50 to $100 a week to avoid summonses for double-parking its trucks or for running them across a sidewalk without a curb cut. (Concrete contractors are especially vulnerable, as it is essential that foundation-pouring be carried on continuously. This means that one or more trucks must be kept standing by while one is actually pouring.) Steel erectors paid a weekly fee to keep steel delivery trucks standing by; masons paid; the crane company paid. In addition, all construction sites were approached by police for contributions at Christmas, and a significant number paid extra for additional police patrols in the hope of obtaining protection from vandalism of building materials and equipment....

A promising method of curtailing construction graft which the Department has yet to use on a broad scale, would be a campaign to arrest contractors who offer bribes to policemen. The recent use in the Bronx of police undercover agents posing as regular policemen has led to the arrests of such would-be bribers.

***

payoffs from bars licensed by the state to sell liquor, along with those from construction firms, were the most common source of illegal outside income to uniformed policemen, and that unlicensed premises, operating completely outside the law, were paying substantial amounts to plainclothesmen and detectives. Like the construction industry, the business of selling liquor by the drink is governed by a complex system of state and local laws, infractions of which can lead to criminal penalties, as well as suspension or loss of license. Thus licensees are highly vulnerable to police shakedowns.....

virtually all bars were found to provide free food and drinks to policemen and also made Christmas and vacation payments to police. In addition, investigators found that many bars doing a substantial volume of business customarily made regular biweekly or monthly payments to the police. During the Commission's investigation such payments were usually initiated by the sector patrol sergeant who, bar owners said, would pay a visit to the premises and point out various violations or suggest that he could always flush the soap down the toilet and write out a summons for "no soap in the men's room."...

In one bar, Commission investigators were mistaken for detectives, and the owner told them, in a tape-recorded conversation, that he had recently paid the precinct captain. As a result of that incident the precinct captain, now a deputy inspector, has been brought up on departmental charges of unlawfully accepting $300 and then attempting to persuade the bar owner not to testify against him....

Behavior of supervising patrol sergeants in the Nineteenth, who were responsible for licensed premises inspections, was consistent with a pattern of biweekly and monthly payoffs to them by bar owners. Duty schedules in the precinct were arranged so that the three sergeants who were alleged to act as bagmen were always assigned to different shifts. They turned out to be a bar-hopping lot. The sheer volume of their visits to bars was out of all proportion to law-enforcement problems posed by licensed premises.

The most glaring example was one sergeant who invariably showed up in one bar or another ten minutes after going on duty and ordered a V.O. on the rocks, then proceeded to go from bar to bar for the rest of his tour....

In some cases, uniformed police officers shook down afterhours clubs. One owner of such an establishment told the Commission the following story, which was later corroborated by another source. Shortly after his bar opened, the local precinct captain paid a visit and asked the owner if he was running an after-hours bar. The owner admitted he was, whereupon the captain produced a neatly typed list of payments the owner was to make to the police for the privilege of operating. Listed were captains, lieutenants, sergeants, and sector car patrolmen, with the amount to be paid to each....

The Commission concluded during its investigation that the interests of both the police and the public would best be served by divesting the Police Department of responsibility for enforcing these laws except in response to specific complaints....Any corruption which may exist in such agencies is a lesser evil than corruption among policemen.

***

One group of stores most vulnerable to police who threaten to issue summonses for violations of the Sabbath Law were delicatessens and bodegas, which are seven-day-a-week Spanish grocery stores. Bodegas were doubly vulnerable, since their proprietors frequently do not speak English fluently, were unfamiliar with the maze of provisions in the Sabbath Law, and were unlikely to know where to go to complain about shakedowns. Every Sunday, the Commission found that many delicatessen and bodega owners paid police from $2 to $10, or the equivalent in merchandise -- usually cigarettes, cold cuts, canned goods, or six-packs of beer. In effect, these payoffs amounted to a license to stay open on Sunday. Proprietors who were unwilling to pay were plagued with numerous summonses for violations of the Sabbath Law and sometimes even for unrelated violations.

***

Although the Commission felt traffic payments were but a minor part of police corruption and chose not to devote any sizable investigative effort to the matter, it received a flood of complaints from citizens indicating that traffic payoffs are a subject of wide interest. And the staggering number of illegally-parked cars passed over by policemen issuing summonses bears silent witness to the prevalence of selective enforcement....

An employee of one major trucking firm, which did not payoff the police, told the Commission that his company paid between $48,000 and $60,000 a year in parking fines. By way of contrast, a Commission informant reported that another company, a large air freight concern, paid the police $15,000 a year -- a staggering amount, but a substantial saving over the amount paid in fines by the other trucking company....

The owner of a chain of six parking garages near Madison Square Garden told a Commission consultant that he had been paying the police $100 per garage per week -- a total of $600 a week -- until the Commission's public hearings began. At that point, he said the police raised the price to $800 a week on the grounds that it had become more dangerous for them to overlook violations....

Two policemen in a radio car stopped a motorist who had just made a U-turn and told him that they would overlook the violation if he "showed his appreciation."...


As for payments to police officers for overlooking moving violations, the Commission feels that motorists are often the instigators of such bribes and should be arrested. If the Department vigorously pursues its policy of arresting those who offer money to police officers, the practice will be much diminished.

-- THE KNAPP COMMISSION REPORT ON POLICE CORRUPTION: COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE ALLEGATIONS OF POLICE CORRUPTION AND THE CITY'S ANTI-CORRUPTION PROCEDURES

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At the first of these incidents another driver, who worked the day shift for the same garage as Burkert, was stopped by police officers while he was towing a wrecked new car in the Fifth Precinct in lower Manhattan. The officers apparently asked the driver for $30....A month later, when Burkert responded to an accident in Long Island City and received permission from the owner of the car for the tow job, he was approached by an officer who wanted to be "taken care of" on the spot....On a third occasion, when Burkert was approached by police as he was preparing to tow a car, he again set up a subsequent meeting and kept the date, accompanied as usual by a microphone and two Commission agents. At the meeting he told the police that he didn't know if his shop was going to be given authorization to make repairs on the automobile, and no money changed hands. The officer apparently resented not being paid off and issued a summons to Burkert the following day. Through another policeman, word was passed to Burkert that the resentful officer wanted $100 from the driver "to be friends."...On still another occasion, Burkert was approached at the site of a tow job by a police officer asking for money....shaking down tow-truck drivers was a prevalent practice in New York...

When police payoffs are made by towing companies, those companies are left free to harass and browbeat motorists who have been involved in accidents, often signing them up at the scene for repair work which will be billed at rates inflated at least enough to cover the payoffs. A second result of such payments is that the immunity from traffic summonses conferred on certain tow-truck drivers allows them to drive around the City in a manner dangerous to other motorists and pedestrians.

***

According to every police officer who cooperated with the Commission, it was common practice for policemen to make payments to each other for services rendered, ranging from the payment of a couple of dollars for typing up arrest reports to the payment of hundreds of dollars for choice assignments....The Commission heard numerous allegations of police officers paying other officers to handle routine work....both Droge and Logan stated that the practice of paying for temporary assignments was a common one. Payments were also made for getting one's choice of days off and of vacation dates. Phillips testified that the roll call man in a busy precinct could make $200 a month in this way...in some precincts, police officers bought permanent assignments from the administrative lieutenant for various amounts, commonly $500....appointment as a detective could be bought for a price which ranged from $500 to $2,000....police officers have bribed certain police surgeons to certify that they were permanently disabled, making it possible for those officers to retire early and receive all or part of their pensions. One doctor, a former police surgeon who has been retired for twenty years, told the Commission that surgeons took such kickbacks when he was in the Department, and that he believed the practice still to be in existence.

***

By far the most widespread form of misconduct the Commission found in the Police Department was the acceptance by police officers of gratuities in the form of free meals, free goods, and cash payments. Almost all policemen either solicited or accepted such favors in one form or another ....

It was not only the policeman on patrol who felt that his lunches should be provided free. Numerous examples were reported to the Commission of officers in the station house sending radio cars to local restaurants to pick up meals for police officers whose duties prevented them from getting out on the street....

The owner of one home-delivery food business which sold $2.00 fried chicken dinners found that his dinners were so popular with the police in his local precinct that they were ordering eighty to ninety dinners a week from him. This was substantially cutting into his profits, so he decided to start charging the police a nominal price of $.50 per dinner. This angered the police, who began issuing summonses to his delivery cars on every trip they made, resulting in $600 in summonses in one week. The owner called the Police Commissioner's office and explained his problem, and soon afterwards, he stopped receiving summonses. However, he had already dropped the $.50 charge per dinner....

Two patrolmen in particular confronted Commission investigators with a situation difficult to ignore by pulling up nightly to the back entrance of a fairly high-priced downtown restaurant located directly under the windows of the Commission's offices. The officers were served in their car by a uniformed waiter with a tray and a napkin draped over one arm.

Non-uniformed officers generally ordered less modest meals than uniformed patrolmen. Plainclothesmen, detectives, and high-level officers, who worked in civilian clothes instead of the conspicuous blue uniform, patronized a much wider selection of restaurants than the uniformed force, including many clearly in the luxury category. And the meals they ordered were often grandiose compared with the cafeteria-style food favored by uniformed men.

William Phillips, when assigned as a detective in a midtown precinct, regularly patronized, with other detectives, the very best restaurants, where he received gratis what he called "electric-chair meals." He reported that as he sipped the last drop of brandy after an enormous feast all he could think was "pull the switch, I'm ready to go!"....

The owner of one of New York's finest French restaurants reported to the Commission that he was approached by policemen demanding free dinners. When he flatly turned them down, they took retaliatory action: The restaurant was located on a street where parking was illegal before 7:00 P.M., and the police began showing up every night at 6:55 to tow away cars belonging to patrons....

The Commission's interest turned to hotels after a former hotel security officer came in with hotel records indicating that at least one hotel was paying off police in free meals, free rooms, and cash payments at Christmas....

Records from several of the hotels showed that they each fed as many as 300 to 400 meals a month to policemen in their employee dining rooms, mostly to patrolmen in uniform. The value of these meals was usually under $2.00 each. To get free meals in the employee dining rooms, the policemen generally went to the security office, where their uniforms -- or in the case of non-uniformed officers, their shields -- served as identification. They were either asked to sign the meal checks or hotel logs with their names and ranks or were given meal tickets to be turned in in the dining rooms. When the names given in the hotel checks and logs were checked against the precinct rosters, a sizable percentage of them proved to be false (including two uniformed officers identifying themselves as Whitman Knapp and Sydney Cooper, who was then chief of the Department's anti-corruption force).

In these same hotels, higher-ranking officers (sergeants, detectives, inspectors, lieutenants, captains, and one chief inspector) ate in the hotels' better restaurants, ordering the most expensive items on the menu, with the tab rarely coming to less than $20 per person in the larger midtown hotels. And the volume was substantial: over $500 a month at most hotels checked and $1,500 a month at the Statler-Hilton....

Bar owners and policemen also told the Commission that it was common practice for bars to offer free drinks to policemen. As discussed above in Chapter Eight, three patrol sergeants in the Nineteenth Precinct regularly spent their entire tours going from one bar to another. While the behavior of patrolmen was less extreme, there was plenty of drinking on duty and off by them, too, with no evidence of any attempt by superiors to stop it....

Payments to police at Christmas by bars, restaurants, hotels, department stores, and other retail businesses have long been a police tradition....A particularly rigorous campaign was waged against the practice in December of 1971, with the reported result that officers collected their Christmas gratuities in January, after the campaign was over.

Christmas money was usually collected in a fairly organized fashion. Early in December, lists were made up at many precinct houses, division headquarters, and squad rooms, on which were entered the names of all the businesses in their jurisdiction from which the police expected Christmas payments. The list was then divided up among the various officers, each of whom was to go to the businesses on his list and collect....

When asked how long the master list was, Patrolman Phillips said, "it was quite a long list, ten or fifteen yellow pages ... [it contained] every hotel, almost every bar, every cabaret, and other business establishments in the Seventeenth Precinct."...

The Christmas lists presented to hotels in particular were quite detailed, giving amounts to be paid to police officers of all ranks, up to and including the borough commander and Chief Inspector....

A number of merchants gave policemen gifts for services rendered and free merchandise. These included such items as free packages of cigarettes solicited by policemen from tobacco shops and grocery stores, free bags of groceries from retail stores, free service at dry cleaners and laundries, and free goods from factories and wholesalers. In his public testimony before the Commission Patrolman Droge stated that in one precinct in which he had served, police officers had used their tours to make the rounds of a bread factory, a frankfurter plant, and an ice cream plant, among others, stocking up on goods to take home. "I recall one police officer," said Droge, "who felt that if he didn't go home with a bag of groceries, then his tour wasn't complete."...

Proprietors of burglarized stores and factories, if they arrived at the scene before the police did, paid $5 a man to each officer who showed up. However, if the police arrived first, they often helped themselves to merchandise....

In many instances it is unfair to infer that payments of a gratuity necessarily reflected a shakedown by the police officer involved. A bar owner, restaurateur, or other businessman is usually most happy to have a police officer in or near his premises, and in a good many situations, payments -- particularly Christmas gratuities -- were made simply because the police officer became friendly with the local merchants in his patrol area. The fact is that the public by and large does not regard gratuities as a serious matter. While some may be offended by the occasionally arrogant way in which some police officers demand what they consider to be their due, most people are willing to allow a police officer who spends long hours providing protection for an area to stop in for a quick free meal or cup of coffee at an eating establishment which enjoys the benefit of his protection....

there would seem to be no reason why the practice of hotels providing free rooms to police officers could not be officially sanctioned. If an officer is forced to work late hours in any area of the City far from his home and is expected to be on duty or in court early the following morning, it does not seem unreasonable that he be provided with a hotel room, on a space available basis, with the expense being paid for by the City....

Assuming that hotel and restaurants actually do not wish to provide free meals and rooms to police officers, it has been demonstrated that they are not forced to. At the time of the Commission hearings, under the glare of publicity, many of the big hotels announced that they would no longer provide such services.

***

Although the Commission did not find conclusive evidence of police corruption involving loansharks, in the course of its work it came across numerous allegations of police collusion with loansharks and the nature of the business is such that corruption would seem to be an obvious hazard. Some policemen apparently shake down loansharks on a haphazard basis and others have been known to work for loansharks in various capacities, ranging from referring to potential borrowers to roughing up slow payers.

Another patrolman, currently under indictment in the Bronx, was described by Bronx County District Attorney Burton Roberts as "a $100-a-week collector for a loanshark operation."...Another patrolman in the Bronx is currently under indictment for allegedly operating a loanshark ring with two civilian partners....

Patrolman Phillips and others told the Commission that, when police officers were called upon to handle DOA's, they would sometimes go through the victim's pockets and steal anything of value. Likewise, when called to a house or apartment where someone has died, the police have been known to burglarize the premises if the deceased had been living alone. Similar burglaries have taken place after police officers escorted someone to the hospital, who turned out to be dead on arrival. In such cases, officers would take the dead person's keys and let themselves into his apartment, then take anything of value. Patrolman Phillips told the Commission that old people who die in the City frequently keep large sums of money hidden in their homes, apparently not trusting banks. He went on to say that thefts from DOA's in such circumstances have amounted to several thousand dollars....

Various informants told the Commission that truck hijackings almost always received police protection in one form or another. The Commission was told that various policemen were sometimes alerted ahead of time to a scheduled hijacking....

In the past few years, several instances have come to light of individual police involvement with auto theft rings. One of these dovetails with allegations received by the Commission that police officers sometimes ride shotgun for such outfits. The others involve payments for protection of such rings....

it was common practice for policemen responding to burglarized premises to steal items the previous thieves had left behind....

"Me and my partner went in the back of the building [where] a door was open. We went in. There was about six or seven radio cars out front. A lot of cops was inside. Everybody was stuffing clothes down their pants, in their shirt, up their sleeves. Everybody looking fat because they were stuffing so much clothes in their pants. And my partner was telling me that the owners usually take it out on their income tax...."

Commission agents, while conducting a surveillance of an afterhours bar after midnight, stumbled upon a flagrant example of what appeared to be a compound burglary. The agents noticed an unoccupied police car parked next to a meat packing company where a door was ajar. They soon saw men in police uniforms emerge from the packing company carrying large, paper-wrapped packages which they loaded into the car. In the next few hours, four other police cars (the entire motor patrol force for one-half of the precinct) responded to the site. Police officers from four of the five cars were seen putting packages from the company into their cars....

Before Phillips was caught by the Commission, he had arranged for a man accused of possession of a stolen $250,000 check to make contact with a lawyer who claimed he could bribe any of several judges. The man was represented in these negotiations by a Commission informant wearing a transmitter. The lawyer asked for $10,000 to fix the case, saying he could give an 80% guarantee of acquittal. The lawyer received an initial payment of $4,500 before the informant's transmitter was discovered by Patrolman Phillips and the negotiations broken off. The Commission has no way of knowing the truth of the representations made by the lawyer, who fled the country after being discovered....

The Commission received several allegations that applicants for pistol permits have made payments to the appropriate precinct captain in order to get permits. The fee was usually reported to be $100, requested by the clerical officer to expedite approval of the application for a permit, with the understanding that the money would be passed on to the precinct commander....

Companies doing background checks on job applicants have, in the past, paid police officers for looking through Department records to determine whether the applicants had criminal records, and for supplying copies of these records. In 1971, following an investigation by the Department of Investigation, nine policemen and fourteen corporations were indicted in New York courts for participating in the sale of records of this kind....One detective was found to have performed checks for at least seven companies for over fifteen years, netting more than $15,000 a year for this service....

The Commission heard numerous allegations from Gypsies and others that some policemen, particularly detectives assigned to the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad (PP&C), received payments from Gypsy confidence artists who swindle people who come to them for advice, particularly the elderly. In return for the payoffs, officers did what they could to insure that the swindlers would not be apprehended and arrested....

The most common of the Gypsy confidence games is the Gypsy blessing, usually perpetrated by self-styled Gypsy "spiritual advisors" on lonely elderly women who seek their advice. After several visits, they are usually told that the cause of their problems is a "curse" which someone has placed on their money. These women are told that the curse can be removed only by the Gypsy blessing, and they are advised to bring their money in to be blessed. When the money is brought in, the advisor sews it up in a special bag, which is switched for an identical bag containing paper. The victim is told to put this bag away in a dark place like a bank vault for a specified time -- often two years -- and warned that if she should open the bag before the time is up the money will vanish. The Commission was told that such thefts range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $40,000....

The number of people caught and convicted for participating in any type of criminal activity is always a small fraction of those actually involved. It is difficult to make arrests and even more difficult to satisfy standards of proof necessary for convictions with respect to many crimes which, nevertheless, are quite apparently being committed on a large scale. For the Commission's purposes, tape-recorded conversations in which corrupt police officers discussed their activities with undercover agents were invaluable even though such evidence is, under current law, insufficient to establish guilt without further corroboration. Using criminal convictions to measure the extent of police corruption is particularly worthless because the transactions are necessarily secret and those involved in them are extremely unlikely to complain....

In the past a number of administrative defects precluded effective investigations of police corruption in New York City and indicated a lack of adequate planning by the Department's top management. Specifically, the Department's machinery for detecting and investigating police corruption was fragmented and even when unified was not given official standing, adequate records, or adequate manpower. In addition, the Department often failed to use appropriate and effective techniques of investigation....

To correct this organizational fragmentation, the various units charged with searching out misconduct within the Department and with maintaining internal integrity and efficiency were brought together in an Inspection Services Bureau (ISB). Command of this Bureau was vested in the First Deputy Commissioner....However, until Commissioner Murphy took over the Department, the ISB lacked the authority and resources necessary for its job....

there are indications that there was also some reluctance on the part of top level police personnel to undertake investigations that might have led to exposure of widespread corruption inconsistent with the official line that corruption was limited to a few "rotten apples."...

An example is the untouched file of specific and serious allegations against New York City police officers that was found by Commission investigators in the course of an early investigation into narcotics corruption. The allegations, which concerned seventy-two officers, had been referred to the Department by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) during a fourteen-month period beginning in April, 1968....

Although the Commission found evidence that the existence and contents of this file were known to the supervisors of the Inspectional Services Bureau, nothing -- as far as the Commission was able to ascertain -- was ever done about the allegations until our investigators came upon the file in the late fall of 1970....

the fact remains that the Department was given reason to suspect that some of its members were extortionists, murderers, and heroin entrepreneurs and made no attempt to verify these suspicions or dispute them....

On April 30, 1970, two BNDD inspectors met with the Chief of the Narcotics Division. At this meeting, serious allegations against nine members of the Narcotics Division were revealed and discussed in detail....no departmental action was ever taken on these allegations....

In the files of the Internal Affairs Division, Commission agents found a request from BNDD for assistance from the Department in an operation which might have led to the exposure of certain police officers believed to be involved in the sale of narcotics. The request had been forwarded by Deputy Inspector John Norey, commander of the Intelligence Division, to First Deputy Commissioner Walsh, who in turn sent it to Supervising Assistant Chief Inspector John McGovern, then the commander of IAD and Walsh's right hand man in corruption investigations. The request was never acted upon. Instead, it was filed with an attached coversheet with two notations written on it in the hand of Chief McGovern. One note reads "I want to get our men out of that." The other, apparently referring to instructions from the First Deputy Commissioner, says, "Norey 11/19/69 -- IDC doesn't want to help the feds lock up local police. Let them arrest federal people."....

Responsibility for investigating corruption has always -- in theory at least -- rested with commanders. But as former First Deputy Commissioner John Walsh testified, reports submitted at six-month intervals from field commanders about corruption in their units always indicated the absence of corruption....

Whatever its obvious hazards, vesting primary responsibility for all but the most serious corruption investigations in the commands concerned appears to be the most rational way for the Police Department to deal with the problem on more than an emergency basis.

***

Investigation of misconduct is the first step in a sequence of possible actions against allegedly corrupt police officers. Within the Department the next step is the disciplinary process. The disciplinary options available to the Commission in corruption cases as well as others are limited. Moreover, even these options have not always been utilized fully or effectively. The formal disciplinary apparatus was and is overburdened and understaffed, and the range of penalties available to deal with officers convicted in Departmental Hearings is inadequate....

Early in his tenure Commissioner Murphy clouded the general excellence of his promotions by elevating to high rank a few officers whose integrity was widely questioned throughout the Department. These promotions raised doubts in the minds of many officers about the sincerity of his intentions to root out corruption....

Joseph McGovern, a former Supervising Assistant Chief Inspector and Chief of Inspectional Services, testified before this Commission that he could not think of a single precinct commander who had been shifted for failure to maintain the integrity of his command. Indeed there is little evidence to suggest that such derelictions by subordinates ever seriously impeded a commander's rise to higher rank....

Commissioner Murphy has revised departmental disciplinary procedures so that precinct commanders can immediately and directly discipline the men under them with penalties of up to loss of five days vacation time for a number of violations of departmental rules....With this important exception, the Murphy administration has been able to make few visible changes in the Department's disciplinary structure and procedures. On the whole, the structure and procedures are prescribed by the City's Administrative Code or the State's Civil Service Law and therefore can be changed only through the time-consuming and sometimes difficult process of legislative amendment. Consequently, the way the Department now handles major charges of misconduct against its members -- including most charges of corruption -- is the same way it has handled them for years....

The volume of cases reaching the Department Advocate and the Trials Deputy is seriously straining their capacity....over the year he himself probably averages three or four trials per working day....The Department Advocate is only a little better off than the Trials Deputy. He has a staff of six uniformed and two civilian lawyers. These nine men processed 1937 cases during 1971....It is easy to see that if eight men have an annual caseload of 1900, whenever one man spends more than a day disposing of a case another man has to dispose of two or three cases a day -- and that includes both preparation time and trial time....Lack of adequate time for preparation in the not very recent past was so common that Detective Frank Serpico, the chief witness in the departmental trials of a number of Bronx plainclothesmen, was put on the stand without having been given any opportunity to refresh his recollection and asked to testify concerning four-year-old events. However, the advocate's caseload has been reduced by the new procedure which grants commanders authority to handle command discipline cases. Before this new procedure was instituted, the Department Advocate's caseload was approaching 200 a month....

Since there were 909 cases pending at the beginning of calendar 1971 and 880 pending at the end of it, there was no great progress in clearing up the backlog. The Department Advocate estimates that the average time consumed between charges and disposition is six months or more. These delays pose a problem in terms of the thirty-day rule which governs departmental hearings. Under this rule, an officer suspected of or charged with misconduct is permitted to put in his retirement papers and retire thirty days later, at which time he becomes immune to departmental disciplinary proceedings and eligible to receive his pension if he has served long enough to qualify for one. This results in a thirty-day race, with a suspected officer seeking to retire before the disciplinary proceedings against him can be completed. Although only a handful of policemen escaped discipline by this route, the ones who did escape often were the most serious offenders. For example, there were ten thirty-day cases in 1970. Trials were held in seven of them, resulting in five dismissals from the force and two acquittals. In the first of the remaining three, the defendant executed a complex technical maneuver that probably will never be repeated. In the second, the defendant was in a psychiatric hospital. However, in the third case, a bribe-receiving case against a lieutenant that may well have been that year's most important case, the lieutenant's lawyer was able to prolong the trial, which began twenty-five days before the deadline, past that deadline's expiration, enabling the lieutenant to retire with his full pension....

There are no statistics reflecting the number of situations where a police officer resigned before charges were brought but after he realized he was in danger of being charged. Under these circumstances, the Department might well never attempt to bring charges since it is virtually impossible to complete disciplinary proceedings within thirty days unless the investigation and preparation of the case has already been completed....

Perhaps the most troublesome issue in the disciplining of policemen found guilty in departmental hearings is the inappropriateness of the available penalties. The Administrative Code provides no gradations of penalty between outright dismissal from the force and a fine of up to and including thirty days' pay or vacation followed by a year's probation. [i] The Commission has recommended that the disciplinary alternatives available to the Police Commissioner be broadened to include greater periods than thirty days. However, even the available penalties were often utilized in the past to treat corrupt officers in a lenient manner....

The Police Commissioner's decisions on penalties in disciplinary hearings are subject to judicial review, and in fact have been reversed in several recent, well-publicized corruption cases. The reasons for reversal usually centered on the requirement for pension forfeiture upon dismissal for cause from the force. This was one of the considerations that motivated the Commission's recommendation, discussed in the Summary, for the separation of pension considerations from departmental disciplinary hearings. The Department should not be obliged to keep corrupt police officers in its ranks merely because some courts feel that loss of pension is too harsh a penalty for some offenses....

It should be noted that a fine of thirty days' pay or less of active-duty officers is usually not all taken out of the next paycheck, but is taken out one or two days at a time from each subsequent paycheck.

***

Judge Fraiman characterized the Police Department as an autonomous and powerful agency which " ... does pretty well what it wishes to do and is not answerable to the Department of Investigation....This was clearly evidenced in the Police Department's failure to comply with Mayor Lindsay's May, 1969, directive instructing all City agencies immediately to notify the Department of Investigation of any allegation of misconduct or corruption involving a public employee. The Police Department did not comply until after the establishment of this Commission, when the Mayor issued an Executive Order in August, 1970, reaffirming this procedure.

-- THE KNAPP COMMISSION REPORT ON POLICE CORRUPTION: COMMISSION TO INVESTIGATE ALLEGATIONS OF POLICE CORRUPTION AND THE CITY'S ANTI-CORRUPTION PROCEDURES

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Michael Moore Defends Quentin Tarantino Against Police Boycott
"I think millions of us not only stand with Tarantino, we're going to make sure we go see his next movie," documentarian writes.
by Daniel Kreps
November 7, 2015


Michael Moore has come to the defense of Quentin Tarantino following the director's remarks about police brutality at an October rally EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/AFP

As more police unions across the country join the boycott against Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film The Hateful Eight, fellow filmmaker Michael Moore has pledged his support for the director. Tarantino drew the ire of law enforcement after sharing his views about police brutality at a Rise Up October rally in New York on October 20th, and the documentarian has now defended Tarantino on Instagram, writing, "They're just frightened and in shock that a well-known and respected white guy would dare to speak out."

"Quentin Tarantino, a brave and good American, standing with families who've lost loved ones to police violence," Moore wrote in the caption of a photo of Tarantino at the rally. "Now certain police, the same ones who defend the cops who've killed unarmed innocent black citizens, are out to get Tarantino. They've called for a boycott of his movies. I think just the opposite. I think millions of us not only stand with Tarantino, we're going to make sure we go see his next movie! Who's with me? Stay strong Quentin."

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Moore criticized Tarantino's Hollywood brethren for not standing up with the director amid mounting boycotts from police unions. "Has any white person in this town, in the industry, stood up for Quentin Tarantino?" Moore said. "The white guy stuck his neck out there and they're trying to chop it off."

However, Real Time host Bill Maher similarly came to Tarantino's aid during the director's appearance on the show Friday night, saying that the police unions were twisting Tarantino's quote out of context.



While Tarantino has received a lack of support in Hollywood, the ACLU of Southern California applauded the director for his stance on the deaths of unarmed black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. "He has given voice to the frustrations of millions of Americans who stand for justice," the ACLU said in a statement. "And we raise our voice with his, speaking up as we have for decades to make it very clear that we condemn not the police, but police brutality and challenge the conspiracy of silence around police abuse."

Speaking to MSNBC, Tarantino said he was surprised by the outcry following his appearance at the rally, adding that he was just exercising his First Amendment rights. In an op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter, Chuck Canterbury, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest law enforcement labor union, responded to Tarantino's claims that police unions are unfairly reacting to his freedom of speech.

"We revere the right to freedom of speech. After all, police have sworn to uphold all laws, and to protect the rights of those who act within the law, whether we agree or not," Canterbury wrote. "Conversely, we also have a Constitutional right to disagree. That's where we find ourselves with Tarantino. His comments reflect more than just a glimpse into the mind of a very strange man, they reflect a growing misunderstanding of the administration of public safety policy in this country. He spoke publicly and with great publicity; we have reacted. He's promoting a movie; our only weapon in response is to endeavor to reduce that movie's revenue."

Canterbury added that, despite the police unions' efforts, The Hateful Eight will "probably do better than it deserves" at the box office because of all the publicity Tarantino has "ginned up" from this ordeal. The Fraternal Order of Police previously promised a "surprise" for the filmmaker.

Quentin Tarantino, a brave and good American, standing with families who've lost loved ones to police violence. Now certain police, the same ones who defend the cops who've killed unarmed innocent black citizens, are out to get Tarantino. They've called for a boycott of his movies. Really? I think just the opposite. I think millions of us not only stand with Tarantino, we're going to make sure we go see his next movie! Who's with me? Stay strong Quentin. They're just frightened and in shock that a well-known and respected white guy would dare to speak out.
A photo posted by Michael Moore (@michaelfmoore) on Nov 5, 2015 at 10:32am PST

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Quentin Tarantino Has 'Surprise' Coming, Says Fraternal Order of Police
Nation's largest cop union plans action against 'Hateful Eight' director over remarks about police brutality
By Jon Blistein
November 5, 2015


The nation's largest police union say they are planning a "surprise" for Quentin Tarantino, in response to his comments about police brutality Kena Betancur/Getty Images

"We'll be opportunistic," Pasco said, adding: "Tarantino has made a good living out of violence and surprise. Our offices make a living trying to stop violence, but surprise is not out of the question."

The Hateful Eight director has been embroiled in a back-and-forth with police departments and unions after condemning police brutality and the frequent killings of unarmed civilians — often black men — at the RiseUp October protest in New York's Washington Square Park.

While departments in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New Jersey have called for boycotts of The Hateful Eight, Pasco said the Washington D.C.-based Fraternal Order of Police — which represents over 330,000 officers — is planning a different kind of action.

"Something is in the works, but the element of surprise is the most important element," he said. "Something could happen anytime between now and [the premiere]. And a lot of it is going to be driven by Tarantino, who is nothing if not predictable."

Though Pasco offered no specifics, he said the the FoP will "try to hurt [Tarantino] in the only way that seems to matter to him, and that's economically."

Pasco went on to deny he was threatening Tarantino, at least physically. "Police officers protect people," he said. "They don't go out to hurt people." (While neither police departments nor unions keep statistics for the number of civilians killed by officers, The Counted, a database organized by The Guardian, places the current number for 2015 at over 960 people.)

Police organizations took particular umbrage with Tarantino's remarks about the lack of action being taken to deter killings and brutality, and his statement, "When I see murders, I do not stand by … I have to call a murder a murder, and I have to call the murderers the murderers."

Amidst the backlash, the director has clarified his remarks on several occasions, telling MSNBC most recently, "I'm not a cop hater," as he's been labeled.

Regarding his initial comments, Tarantino said: "We were at a rally that was dealing with unarmed people – mostly black and brown – who have been shot and killed or beaten or strangled by the police, and I was obviously referring to the people in those types of situations. I was referring to Eric Garner, I was referring to Sam DuBose, I was referring to Antonio Guzman Lopez, I was referring to Tamir Rice ... In those cases in particular that we're talking about, I actually do believe that they were murdered."