In those six years, three things stand out:
* Most complaints go nowhere. Each amounts to a citizen's word against an officer's in a system where the citizen's word is suspect.
* Even when a citizen's complaint is upheld, little happens to the offending officer.
* Unknown to taxpayers, it has been costing them a fortune. In just the last 28 months, city lawyers have quietly paid more than $20 million to resolve at least 225 lawsuits against officers.
Examples abound.
Internal Affairs Division investigators concluded that in 1992 Officer Carl W. Holmes Jr. beat a man who'd recently had a kidney transplant and "stepped on his groin" when he caught the man urinating in an alley. The city paid the man $27,500 in damages.
Holmes' punishment? A five-day suspension.
The department determined that Officer Mark Robinson beat a suspect after the man was handcuffed and forced to the ground. Several residents in West Oak Lane said officers piled on the man - "like football players," one woman said.
The punishment? There was none.
Mayor Rendell and Police Commissioner Richard Neal have chalked up the ongoing department scandal to "a few bad apples." A close look at the force's disciplinary system shows a bigger problem. It casts doubt on whether the department is rooting out bad apples on its own. Even when it tries, it frequently can't.
The process of punishing officers is so convoluted that one department supervisor said: "Even we have trouble figuring it out."
