New York, for instance, has had more than a half dozen major scandals concerning its police department within a century. It was the Knapp Commission in 1972 that first brought attention to the NYPD when they released the results of over 2 years of investigations of alleged corruption. The findings were that bribery, especially among narcotics officers, was extremely high. As a result many officers were prosecuted and many more lost their jobs. A massive re-structuring took place afterwards with strict rules and regulations to make sure that the problem would never happen again. Be that as it may, the problem did arise once again. Some of the most recent events to shake New York City and bring attention to the national problem of police corruption was brought up beginning in 1992 when five officers were arrested on drug-trafficking charges. Michael Dowd, the suspected 'ring leader', was the kind of cop who gave new meaning to the word moonlighting. It wasn't just any job that the 10-year veteran of the New York City force was working on the side. Dowd was a drug dealer. From scoring free pizza as a rookie he graduated to pocketing cash seized in drug raids and from there to robbing dealers, sometimes also relieving them of drugs that he would resell. Soon he had formed `a crew" of 15 to 20 officers in his Brooklyn precinct who hit up dealers regularly. Eventually one of them was paying Dowd and another officer $8,000 a week in protection money. Dowd bought four suburban homes and a $35,000 red Corvette. Nobody asked how he managed all that on take-home pay of $400 a week. .
In May 1992 Dowd, four other officers and one former officer were arrested for drug trafficking by police in Long Island's Suffolk County. When the arrests hit the papers, it was forehead slapping time among police brass. Not only had some of their cops become robbers, but the crimes had to be uncovered by a suburban police force.