Good Cops, Bad Cops. Mostly Bad Cops
Longform’s guide to murder, corruption, extortion, and incompetence - committed by police officers around the country.
The Lazarus File
A murder case in Los Angeles, cold since the late ’80s, heats up thanks to breakthroughs in forensic science and leads detectives to one of their own.
Matthew McGough Atlantic Jun 2011 35min
The Crack in the Shield
The rise and fall of the Seven-Seven—stationed in the war zone of 1980’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn—and how an idealistic young recruit became part of cash-snatching, drug-reselling, renegade clique of cops.
Michael Daly New York Dec 1986 30min
L.A. Confidential
Rogue cops in the LAPD Rampart division’s anti-gang CRASH unit (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) were involved in everything from drug smuggling and bank robberies to, allegedly, the murder of Notorious BIG.
Murder in the Meth Lab
A cop kills a fellow officer during a drug bust and claims it was an accident. Others suspect that it wasn’t.
Sean Flynn GQ Aug 2008 35min
Deluge
How the New Orleans Police Department failed during Hurricane Katrina.
Dan Baum New Yorker Jan 2006 45min
The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct
In 2008, a Brooklyn cop grew gravely concerned about how the public was being served. So he began carrying a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.
Graham Rayman Village Voice May 2010 25min
The Chickens and the Bulls
It can’t be all bad! Here’s the story of a group that posed as cops and built “most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history” before the law enforcement took them down.
William McGowan Slate Jul 2012 30min
Dec 1986 – Jul 2012 Permalink