Noble Cause Corruption: Police Corruption for All the Best Reasons?

Title: Noble Cause Corruption: Police Corruption for All the Best Reasons?
Original Publication Date: 11/1/2023
Transcript URL: share.descript.com/view/YErXOzeB214
Description: In today’s episode of Organized Crime and Punishment, we explore the intricate relationship between law enforcement and crime. We look into the complexities, ethical dilemmas, and consequences that arise when these two worlds collide. Join us as we unravel the hidden aspects of this captivating intersection. This episode features 20 year police captain and true crime author Frank Scalise. frankzafiro.com
#PoliceCorruption #OrganizedCrimePodcast #CriminalUnderworld #CrimeAndJustice #CorruptCops #UnveilingTheTruth
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Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris.
Thanks for joining us again on Organized Crime and Punishment. I'm your host, Steve, and I am joined as usual by our own Mustache Chris. Today, we have a very special guest, our first guest, guest, uh, as it were. Frank Scalise. Frank is a retired Spokane, Washington police officer. Is it Spokane, Spokane, Spokane?
It's definitely, it is definitely Spokane, not Spokane, not Spokant, but Spokane.
[00:01:00] Frank served at every level from patrolman to captain in his 20 year career. Look for Frank to be a fixture on the podcast to provide the law enforcement aspect of crime and punishment. In this first episode of a, of a series where we're going to begin to discuss law enforcement, we will discuss a serious topic in policing that of corruption.
Police corruption is a really complicated topic and a really a fascinating one. And I'm really excited to have Frank here to lead us through this, uh, in some ways, difficult conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Frank. Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about this too. And I think it's, uh, going to lend itself to an interesting discussion, given that, you know, I'm up in the Pacific Northwest.
Uh, you're down in Texas, I think, by way of the Northeast. Yeah. And, and, and Chris is up in Toronto area there in Ontario, um, in Canada. So, I mean, [00:02:00] there, there's that. Cultural divides there, and I think that comes into play when we're talking about this topic. So it'll be interesting to hear the different viewpoints.
And now, Frank, can you, we'll get into a lot of details of your biography, but can you maybe give us a 10, 000 foot view about yourself and your police career and then your post police career? Uh, sure. The, uh, thumbnail sketch is I came on the job in Spokane, Washington in 1993. For people who don't know anything about Spokane, it's in Eastern Washington.
Um, I think it's about 250, 000 people. Now it was closer to 200, uh, even to 10, maybe when I came on, uh, in my career, I was kind of fortunate. Uh, not kind of. I was very fortunate. And then I spent the first half of my career doing the job where the, where the rubber meets the road. I was patrol officer training officer.
I was a detective. I was a corporal. Um, and, and I, so I did the work that that police are there to [00:03:00] do about halfway through my career. I kind of fell backwards into a leadership. Position, uh, as a sergeant and, and had to reassess my career a bit in terms of what I wanted to accomplish and, and, and what leadership meant and, and I embrace that.
So, uh, I spent the 2nd, half of my career in leadership roles and I retired as a captain. The good thing about that was. I did some different things in patrol and in investigations, but I got to see an even greater breadth of the department in my leadership roles. And so. Like, I got to command, for instance, the canine unit.
Um, now, I learned a lot about canines. I mean, I couldn't have jumped in the car and taken a shift for one of the guys if they were sick. Uh, not even close. I didn't know a hundredth of what they knew. But I knew enough, uh, I knew a hundred times more than the public did though. So, I mean, it was a good education.
And, and that happened in every unit that I was fortunate enough to, to command during my career. And, and so this gave me [00:04:00] a little bit of a different view than say, someone who spent their entire career as a detective or as patrol officer. Retire as a captain, as I mentioned, post career, I spent about 4 years teaching a course for the International Association of chiefs of police.
And this is a, it's either nonprofit or not for profit. I forget the difference in which it is. But it has a mission to assist police agencies in a variety of ways. And one of those ways is training. And the course that I was teaching at a national level is called leadership and policing, pretty intensive three week course, where we'd go in for a week and do the first week and then come back a month later, do week two, and then finish with week three a month after that, very heavy into behavioral science.
And, and, and created with a very, uh, with an eye towards application in the policing world. Um, this was pretty cool too, because, you know, I spent my whole career in Spokane and then I went to a few different training [00:05:00] conferences and other things and interacted with other agencies, but I was pretty Spokane centric for that 20 years.
Um, and in fact, the biggest stretch I probably had was working with other municipal. Entities, you know, the mayor's office and the water department and the fire department and things like this. Now, suddenly, I get to travel all over the US and Canada and see all these different agencies and all these different parts of North America and that really opened my eyes and really taught me a valuable lessons that probably conversation.
3, 3 thumbnails of sketching there. Sorry about that. But now, you know. In a department of that size, it's not a huge city, but it's not a small city. I guess you could call it a medium sized city. As a captain, you would have some different roles as a captain. You're not just focused. It's not a big enough department that you're just the captain over patrol, or just the captain over the [00:06:00] canine unit, or that sort of thing.
Would that be accurate to say? Yeah, I mean, every department is different. Um, I think Spokane's up to around 300 sworn officers now. It was closer to 270 during my career. Um, and, and yeah, as the K 9 unit, I commanded that as a lieutenant, the SWAT unit. As a lieutenant, as captain, I had roles like the entire patrol division or the entire investigative, um, or all of support services.
And so you, you become a, uh, you have a much larger purview, uh, rather than a more. Uh, you know, precise 1, uh, narrow, um, and, uh, you know, they, they had the rank of major for a while. And I, I was a major when they had that rank, they ended up getting rid of that rank and restructure. And that became a very outward facing job or as like, as captain of patrol, you're.
Focused on running the patrol division and helping solve the problems associated with that when you're the major of operations, you're, you know, [00:07:00] dealing with city council and you're dealing with, it's a very outward sort of facing position and that's, that's a, that's a gear …