An
interesting article in today's New York Times focuses on an
unusual feature of an unhealthy local government ethics environment.
This feature is payment for votes, something we think of in terms of
old city machines. In this case, it involved school board elections
in Donna, TX, a town of 16,000. The FBI, rather than local
prosecutors...
I've been thinking about what I wrote in yesterday's
blog post with respect to sanctioning police officers who knew about the
disability scam but said nothing. The principal cause for this,
besides each individual's self-interest, was a common uniformed
department's conspiracy of silence, a loyalty to colleagues that
takes precedence over loyalty to the...
According to an
article in the New York Times this week, dozens of New York
City, as well as Nassau and Suffolk County, police officers were
arrested for grand larceny relating to a scheme to fraudulently get
disability pensions through Social Security. It is somewhat like the
Long Island Railroad disability scam I wrote about in...
When the criminal justice system finds that government officials are
involved in a conspiracy to pursue illegal conduct in an
environment of fear and intimidation, they bring racketeering
charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act (RICO). This is what happened with the Atlanta schools cheating
scandal. According to an
article in today's New York Times, six more educators pleaded
guilty to being part of the conspiracy, bringing the total to 17.
According...
In a
blog post last week, I listed the many reasons why city and
county attorneys should not be providing ethics advice. One of those
reasons was that "legal advice and ethics advice require different
skill sets." But I limited this part of my analysis to saying
that "A legal
adviser sticks to the letter of the law, and is always on the
lookout for...