Police must probe corruption within the ranks

THE ISSUE A federal grand jury has indicted a former FBI secretary and three Honolulu policemen for alerting a cockfighting operation about raids.

ALLEGATIONS of corruption within the FBI and the Honolulu Police Department providing protection to cockfighting as a venue for gambling and drug trafficking come as no surprise. An inward look at the department is warranted to determine how police culture permitted such protection and whether other corruption persists.

The protection racket was uncovered not by the police, permeated by a code of silence, but by the FBI, where a secretary with security clearance is accused of alerting North Shore drug dealers, through her husband, about sensitive law enforcement information. Commendably, Honolulu Police Chief Boisse Correa says that after the federal investigation is complete, he will order an internal probe that "should mushroom" into implicating other officers.

Three police officers are accused of warning members of the operation about upcoming raids. Another officer faces charges of concealing cockfighting spurs from FBI agents, and a fifth officer is accused of possessing an Israeli machine gun.

Included in a federal grand jury's indictment last week are 17 people accused of involvement in drug trafficking and gambling. Those are inherent ingredients of cockfighting, a misdemeanor that the Legislature has stubbornly refused to make a felony.

The FBI secretary, Charmaine Moniz, was placed on administrative leave without pay when she was served with the first search warrant in December 2004. While one of the police officers resigned, the other four have been on paid vacation for nearly a year at a cost to taxpayers of more than $300,000.

Police corruption is always disturbing but has been a problem for ages. A congressional Government Accountability Office reported in 1998 that drug-related corruption is "characterized by a code of silence, unquestioned loyalty to other officers and cynicism about the criminal justice system. Such characteristics were found not only to promote police corruption, but to impede efforts to control and detect it."

That appears to have been the case with the North Shore operation. According to Charles Goodwin, special agent in charge of the Honolulu FBI office, Moniz, who had access to an FBI computer, turned over the information to her husband, who passed it on to a "key player who brokered information between the drug organization and the Police Department." Two of the HPD officers allegedly received $3,400 in bribes in the first two months of last year.

The payoffs to police officers are little different from those made to legislators, except the latter are called campaign contributions. A committee chairman who bottled up a bill that would have made cockfighting a felony three years ago candidly noted that he had "a lot of cockfighting constituents" in his district.