Busted

Before he was promoted to captain and transferred in 2007, Frank Mancini was the commanding officer of the BPD's anti-corruption unit for six years. While in that job, he kept a rubber rat in the office, "for atmosphere," he says. It was an appropriate prop for the secretive squad, whose duty is not to bust cops' chops for uniform infractions or detail scams—that's internal affairs—but to take down the real wrongdoers in their midst. (Mancini has never previously talked about the ACU on the record, and his replacement, Lieutenant Detective Richard Sexton, is not authorized to discuss the unit.)

The ACU works out of an off-site location kept secret from most of the rank and file. Its members—whose numbers vary from year to year—drive unmarked cars with plates that can't be traced back to the BPD. For all intents, in fact, it operates as an entity separate from the BPD as it investigates the roughly 30 to 60 corruption cases that accumulate annually in its files. Because the ACU is working in a small department in a small city, when Mancini ran it he was careful to handpick officers who he thought would be up to the task of handcuffing friends or even relatives on the force. His sales pitch was that his unit's busts did every officer a service. "If we aren't able to watch our own shop and take down our own dirty cops," he says, "the federal government is going to come in and do it for us. It happened in Cincinnati. It happened in Pittsburgh. It happened in New Orleans. It happened in Detroit. It happened in Los Angeles. It happened with the New Jersey State Police. I don't want the feds coming in and watching over the Boston police. We have to take care of our own house, and we have to show everybody we can do it properly."

But solving the smaller problems that can snowball into ugly scandals is more complicated than just appealing to fellow officers' sense of duty. It calls for changing a departmental culture created, in part, by years of poor leadership. While Commissioner Paul Evans was well regarded when he took the job in 1994, he quickly fell into a notoriously cantankerous relationship with Boston Police Patrolmen's Association president Tom Nee. The two men publicly butted heads over virtually every issue, making real reform next to impossible. Evans alienated much of the force when he acquiesced to the federal prosecution of a Brighton cop named Harry Byrne, who was charged with slapping a politically connected Harvard student in the face after, he claimed, the student spat on him. Byrne was found guilty, and served nearly six years in a federal penitentiary.

Evans's successor, Kathleen O'Toole, had to put up with both deep budget cuts and incessant meddling by Mayor Tom Menino, who high-ranking sources say continues to have a hand in the day-to-day operation of the department. She also inherited a mess involving the BPD's latent fingerprint unit (full of grievously ill-trained officers), which was blamed for the wrongful conviction of Stephan Cowans in connection with the 1997 shooting of a Boston cop. After a rocky debut, she drew heat from police commanders for seeming to be more concerned about maintaining good relationships with union officials than addressing the spike in violent crime. As her tenure stretched on, O'Toole took yet more flak for making herself scarce and allowing her command staff—which was itself divided by internecine feuding—to run the department. After just 27 months as top cop, she left for a police job in Ireland.

The impact of that stretch of dysfunction has been pronounced. Last summer, hoping to crack down on detail abuses like those committed by Ortiz, the BPD's chief of patrol officers, Superintendent Dan Linskey, began to visit sites unannounced. He didn't like what he found. In some cases, the cop on duty was not at the site at all. (Linskey called one sergeant, and was told he had left because of a "family emergency." When pressed, the sergeant admitted he had taken his son to a doctor's appointment—but had still put in for the detail and planned to charge the department for it.) Since then, Linskey has lowered the boom on lax district commanders who have allowed this sort of thing to happen. Davis himself notes, "You let the small things go, and the big things will manifest themselves." A source close to Linskey says, "Sometimes we are our own worst enemy."