Tell me again the one about “a few bad apples.”

Because that fairy tale just never gets old.

A Philadelphia plainclothes narcotics squad had barreled into the immigrants’ bodegas, guns drawn. They had cut the wires on the stores’ video surveillance systems, robbed thousands of dollars from the cash drawers, stolen food and merchandise and then trashed the shops on their way out the door.
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…this is Philadelphia, where, a disgusted veteran officer tells me, “The only way a cop can lose his job in this city is if he shoots another cop during roll call.”

Instead, the offending officers, who’ve been on desk duty since Laker and Ruderman wrote about them in 2009, will likely get back their jobs, their guns and the chilling entitlement that allowed them to turn the bodega owners’ American dream into an American outrage.

If it were only a ‘few bad apples,’ the many good apples would hasten to throw them the hell out of the barrel when they are so clearly identified as bad. When the whole apparatus goes into high gear to protect and serve the ‘bad apples,’ which is really bad? The apples or the apparatus?

I’m from Detroit, and this behavior is disgusting even by those standards.