The wrong side of the law: The people of Stoke Newington, in the London borough of Hackney - the poorest in England - have lost faith in their police. Allegations of fabricating evidence, gratuitous violence and drug-dealing have blurred the line between law-enforcers and law-breakers

STOKE NEWINGTON's pounds 9m police station is the most imposing building on the High Street. Built three years ago to replace a sombre structure with an equally sombre history, it has light-coloured brick and shatter-proof glass through which Hackney citizens may be observed in discourse with their uniformed protectors. From the wide pavement, the large windows and spacious interior contribute an impression of institutional openness, even friendliness, no more threatening than, say, a Tesco store or Telecom office.

Then you start talking to people. And before long, the illusion of a regulated, user-friendly law enforcement vanishes. There are sullen reminders of 'bent' cops and disgruntled observations that nobody seems in a great hurry to do much about them. The allegations against the police include gratuitous violence, fabricated evidence, perjury, racism, racketeering, conspiracy, fraternising with criminals, trafficking in drugs. According to senior Scotland Yard officers, the damage Stoke Newington has caused to the reputation of the Metropolitan Police is 'the most serious for 20 years'.

In recent years at least one policeman has died (an inquest verdict of suicide has failed to dispel rumours that he may have been murdered). Another was jailed for dishonesty. Three have been suspended. Eight have been transferred. The entire drugs squad was disbanded, then reassembled with new officers.

Stoke Newington's reputation for police skulduggery has spread far beyond the borough of Hackney. It has been aired in Parliament by two Hackney Labour MPs, one of whom (Brian Sedgemore, Hackney South and Shoreditch) tabled a motion condemning 'those nasty, vile and corrupt police officers at Stoke Newington police station who have been engaged in drug trafficking and perverting the course of justice'. The Crown Prosecution Service and the Police Complaints Authority have studied dossier after dossier, promising appropriate action in due course. Barbara Mills, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who has taken a personal interest in the scandal, is said to be ready to prosecute some officers. But nobody really expects an adequate purge of the Stoke Newington police, or a seizure of its members' ill-gotten gains. Past responses to police corruption in Britain offer little prospect of the root-and-branch surgery that may be necessary for restoring public confidence.

A visit to Stoke Newington police station is 'out of the question', the Yard informs me. 'Operation Jackpot', the official Yard probe set up in April 1990 into allegations of corruption at Stoke Newington, 'is nowhere near over . . . (there are) still bits and pieces.' I suggest an informal canteen chat about morale, but this, too, is out of the question.

The ultra-cautious responses are a reminder that Operation Jackpot is not really the Yard's brainchild at all. It was launched not on police initiative, but after a Customs and Excise investigation into VAT fraud. The Customs men discovered that every time they went out on a raid with Stoke Newington police, the suspects had bolted. Diane Abbott, Hackney's other Labour MP (Hackney North and Stoke Newington), told the Commons in October last year: 'Customs and Excise began to believe Stoke Newington police were on the take. When they planned raids without the police, suspects would be there when they arrived.'

The Metropolitan Police has often been investigated. Lord Scarman's inquiry into the 1981 Brixton riots led to the setting up of the Police Complaints Authority. The Scarman report, which recommended radical reform of the system for handling complaints against the police, was considered in the drafting of that year's Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE). At the time, there was a feeling that something was at last being done to curb police excesses. Events at Stoke Newington, however, suggest the optimism was gravely misplaced.

On 12 January 1983, less than two years after the riots in Brixton, a young black Hackney man, Colin Roach, blew his head off with an old shotgun in the lobby of the old Stoke Newington police station. Roach had only minor convictions and was not wanted by the police at the time. There was evidence that he feared 'someone' was out to get him. Among the black community of Stoke Newington, 'someone' was the police. In Bent Coppers, a recently published book on police corruption, James Morton, a former practising solicitor who now edits The New Law Journal, writes: 'Relations were so bad that there was a section which genuinely believed he had been shot by the police. Others believed that whilst the police generically might be capable of doing this, they would not be so foolish - unless this was the most amazing double-bluff - to do it literally on their own doorstep.'

Colin Roach became an emblem for a generation of blacks at odds with the police. In 1985, an independent inquiry into his death on behalf of the dead man's family was told of police harassment, wrongful arrest, uncivil conduct during home raids, misuse of stop and search and other abuses to Stoke Newington's residents. A coroner's jury voted eight-to-two that Mr Roach committed suicide, but Hackney residents staged angry demonstrations and refused to accept the verdict, pointing out that (among other puzzles) no fingerprints had been found on the shotgun; nor had it been forensically linked to the dead man.

The situation seemed to be spiralling out of control. Within three years, residents had formed the Hackney Community Defence Association, which has since taken on the Stoke Newington police with striking success. Within another three, Stoke Newington's alleged corruption had begun to make the metropolitan mind boggle alarmingly. In the past, most police corruption had come under a category, described in police slang as 'bent for the job', in which officers believe they are acting in the public good. But in Stoke Newington, a second category - 'bent for self' - had emerged.

'Bent for self', according to James Morton, is 'simply greed', to pay for ''an expensive girlfriend, a marriage on the rocks, children educated privately, a mortgage which needs repaying, negative equity on a house'. In Stoke Newington, according to testimony filed with the Crown Prosecution Service, criminals became the source of this extra cash. Drug-dealers became targets of a police shakedown, a phenomenon common in some American cities but seldom acknowledged on this side of the Atlantic. One detective was receiving between pounds 1,000 and pounds 2,000 a week from one crack dealer alone, according to testimony given first in court and then to Jackpot investigators.

How did Stoke Newington police get into this mess? They police a district of Hackney which belongs to the poorest borough in England - and one of the most deprived in Europe. It is a major centre for hard drugs: heroin, cocaine and its highly addictive derivative 'crack'. Thirty per cent of Hackney's 200,000 population is made up of non-white ethnic groups (the London average is 14 per cent). More than half the ethnic minorities are of Caribbean origin. There are gentrified pockets, and some suggestions of middle-class,

professional spillover from Islington. But, by and large, 'Old Stokey' (in estate agents' jargon) is a depressing cluster of old and new slums on the London-Cambridge road; a mixed-ethnic dumping ground between the City and comfortable Stamford Hill.

Like other sections of Hackney, Stoke Newington endures severe homelessness, poor housing stock and inadequate municipal back- up services. More than 20 per cent of the employable population is out of work. Among Caribbean youths the unemployment rate is more than 37 per cent. The borough yields other depressing facts: 35,000 crimes last year; one in four of all London's crack seizures (last year, 120 people were charged following the seizure of nearly 400 grams in Hackney raids). Hackney Council, the borough's largest employer, has recently been investigated for corruption. The Yard's fraud squad found housing department staff had been pocketing thousands of pounds by selling keys to council flats officially described as uninhabitable.

Police behaviour has long been a sensitive issue in Hackney: pre-Second World War claims about officers supporting fascist leader Oswald Mosley; a local magistrate's angry 1954 denunciation of a defendant for 'a lot of ranting stuff about British (police) treating coloured people like beasts'; further complaints through the 1960s and 1970s by blacks being searched and abused. In May 1991, a council poster hailed 'a shining example of partnership between the police and a local authority in the fight against crime'. Before the year was out, Stoke Newington police were publicly disgraced.

A stroll through this unhappy place yields many oddities. Turkish-Cypriot cafes and greengrocers occupy much of the High Street. Large numbers of Kurds sometimes march up and down for a homeland far away, occasionally clashing with police. The Aziziye Mosque is next door to the Baptist Church. Life, by day at least, is conducted rhythmically enough, without excessive or frequent friction. But off the High Street are places capable of repelling a visitor: fortified flats in the Nightingale Estate where pirate radio stations broadcast messages to drug-dealers; and streets where residents think twice before emerging at night.

In neighbourhoods of once-grand houses, one hears words and phrases from the paramilitary lexicon: 'No-go', 'front line', 'revenge attack', 'reprisal fears'. Along the once-salubrious Mildmay Road to the south, as elsewhere in this bit of south Hackney, the light of dawn frequently exposes a litter of syringes and condoms in doorways. Sandringham Road is even less welcoming, steeped as it is in notoriety as the 'front line' - so called as the scene of frequent conflict between police and drug-dealers.

At its eastern end is a semi-derelict shopping parade. At one end of the parade is a 'mini-nick', a former shop converted into a police outpost. It has a blue facade, steel shutters and, so far as I can see, no one in attendance. In the middle of the parade, Shreeji newsagents are the only people in business. All the other shops are bricked up. At the end of the row is a locked cafe; a small poster on the door advertises 'Sister Nancy, Live From Jamaica'. These are the former premises of the Jerk Chicken Takeaway. Cannabis, crack and LSD also were taken away with daring regularity, until the police closed the place last year after two raids in a fortnight.

The front line moved, to Shacklewell Lane around the corner, then to Wayland Avenue which backs on to Sandringham Road. In Wayland Avenue, residents cut down trees and bushes to stop dealers hiding. The line is now a mobile thing, returning occasionally to Sandringham Road. The people there respond politely when addressed politely on non- controversial matters. They will talk about housing, the price of butter, the weather. But, unlike a few uninhibited folk on Stoke Newington High Street, they have little to say about drug-dealers, policemen or front lines. Some discourage questions with cold stares or, as once happened, by a thump on the shoulder.

Across the street from the vacant Jerk Chicken Takeaway, I enter a fruit shop and ask for 'Patrick', said to be a former owner of the controversial cafe. 'Who wants him . . . he's not here . . . leave your number,' says a tall West Indian, his arctic eyes chasing me from the premises (Patrick didn't phone). Halfway up the road, a young man walks ahead of me, glancing over his shoulder at intervals. Quite suddenly, he turns and stumbles against me. I am only just aware that his hands are frisking me (for a knife? A gun? Does he think I'm a cop?). Apparently satisfied, he crosses the street. As he does so, I remember that a television crew was attacked and robbed here last year by a crowd which also did thousands of pounds of damage to their equipment.

That evening, I meet Hugh Prince, a 38-year-old Jamaican who claims his experience with the police has left him 'shattered'. Mr Prince, slim and morose, talks to me in the Bradbury Street offices of the Defence Association, which has highlighted his case in a leaflet, Fighting The Lawmen. In it he says he first experienced the police planting drugs on people in the Fritters & Dumplings cafe on Sandringham Road in 1986. 'One of the officers brought a bag of weed (marijuana) downstairs with pounds 50 in and said it was mine. They took me to Stoke Newington police station and I had to return after 28 days . . . When I went back I was told that the officer was no longer there and nothing more came of it.'

In 1989 he was in Sandringham Road when a rented van pulled up and about eight men jumped out, bundled him in and made him remove all his clothes. After being allowed to dress, he was taken to the police station and again forced to strip. One of the officers was Sergeant Gerrard Carroll, known as 'Gerry'.

After searching Mr Prince's clothes in vain for drugs, Sergeant Carroll told him: 'You can go now, but I'm going to get you.' A year later he was seized in a club and taken outside where Sergeant Carroll was waiting. He was arrested and told to get into the police van, but only after his cigarette packet had been taken out of his shirt pocket and 'doctored' with drugs.

Later, in front of the desk sergeant at Stoke Newington police station, the cigarette packet was produced and some cling-film pulled out of it, with a small piece of silver paper inside it. Carroll laughed and said to the sergeant, 'They get pounds 25 for one of these,' and the sergeant smiled.

Mr Prince was charged with possession of crack cocaine with intent to supply. This was later reduced to possession only, for which he was given two months in jail. He is bitter and confused. 'I can't believe that these policemen had any contact with a mixed community before. They don't know how to approach the inner city. My mother was a church-going person. She taught me to respect the law. By planting on people the police lose our respect.'

One comes across his tormentor's name elsewhere. For eight years Stoke Newington's custody officer, Gerry Carroll had featured in several cases known to the HCDA. These concerned beatings, unlawful arrests and the

fabrication of evidence against black men since 1989. According to one victim of Carroll's, he was assaulted in a police van, and a matchbox containing cocaine was planted in his car. When the case came to court in January 1990, the police offered no evidence and he was acquitted.

The man immediately made a formal complaint to the Police Complaints Authority. While the PCA carried out its investigation into alleged assault, false imprisonment and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, Gerry Carroll was transferred from Stoke Newington to Barkingside station.

During the PCA's deliberations, it became known, in January 1992, that eight Stoke Newington officers were to be transferred. A Metropolitan Police statement said at the time, they would continue with 'similar duties' during the inquiry. On the morning this news broke, Sergeant Carroll was found dead in a Barkingside police cell, shot through the head with a police revolver.

A coroner decided that the sergeant had killed himself to escape a constant ringing in his ears, caused by a punch six years earlier. And according to a senior police officer interviewed at the time, the deceased was not, after all, the subject of an inquiry into drug dealing or bribery allegations. 'He was not to be disciplined, nor was he under any suspicion.'

Lawyers familiar with Gerry Carroll's activities are not a little surprised to hear this.

One confesses to me that he frequently puzzles over the sergeant's death. 'Why go to work to commit suicide? Where did he get the gun? Why did he have it? Why did his tinnitus become so unbearable on the very morning it became known something scandalous had occurred at Stoke Newington? The whole thing is extremely odd.'

In fact, it seems to fit into a pattern of bizarre police behaviour. The cases of Trevor Monerville and Gary Stretch were early examples, leading to the formation of the Hackney Community Defence Association in 1988.

Monerville, a 19-year-old black man, had gone out on 31 December 1986 to celebrate New Year's Eve with two aunts. At the second club they visited, he waited outside. When his companions returned he had vanished. They did not see him until five days later, naked on a mattress in Brixton prison, his body badly bruised, the soles of his feet cut, vomit and blood in his hair. On 6 January, Monerville was rushed from Brixton prison hospital to King's College Hospital where he underwent neurosurgery for a blood clot on his brain, consistent, said a doctor, 'with a heavy blow to the head'.

The Monerville mystery was never properly cleared up. After the operation, the youth was unable to remember New Year's Eve. Some things are clear, however. After Monerville's disappearance his father John visited Stoke Newington police station three times to inquire about his missing son, even supplying the police with a photograph. He also telephoned the station on six occasions. Yet nobody at the station saw fit to tell him that for a time his son was lying seriously injured in the station's cells.

Later, the police claimed they arrested Trevor Monerville at 10.45 on New Year's Eve, having found him lying semi-conscious in the back seat of a car a half mile from the club. They took him to Stoke Newington station and charged him with criminal damage - breaking a car window.

Between then and 3 January, when he was taken to Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court, he was examined five times by three different doctors and taken twice to Homerton Hospital. The custody record finally surrendered by the police shows that before the second hospital trip, Monerville (still semi-conscious) was fingerprinted by six officers. In court he wore only a torn jumper and shorts and was unrepresented. The magistrate who remanded Monerville in custody on the police's request neither expressed alarm at his physical condition nor asked if anyone had been informed of the arrest. Following the brain operation, Stoke Newington police dropped the criminal damage charge against Monerville - 'on humanitarian grounds'.

Backed by the HCDA, the Monerville family sought damages. But the Police Complaints Authority refused to release items of clothing required as evidence in the civil action. They also were unco-operative about access to the custody record, which would show how the youth had sustained his terrible injuries. Doctors who had treated Monerville were urged not to speak to his lawyers on the grounds that their evidence was confidential to the investigation of the official complaint.

There was worse to come. Between the 'humanitarian' outcome of the case early in 1989 and the end of 1990, Trevor Monerville was arrested three times and charged with obstruction and assault (he claims beaten). Each time he was acquitted. In January 1989, it was the turn of Monerville's grandparents, Edgar and Marie Burke. Within minutes of telephoning Hackney police station (Stoke Newington was being rebuilt at the time) to report a crash,

four officers arrived at her home, pushed their way in and dragged Edgar, disabled, diabetic and 76, from his bed. The old man was bundled into a van. Marie, 70, ran after him with diabetes pills and a glass of water. A woman police constable floored her. Edgar Burke was released without charge. Two days later a charge that Marie Burke had assaulted the WPC was dropped.

When the couple sued, the police offered pounds 17,000 in compensation. They refused to accept it and, in February 1992, had their triumph in court. A jury awarded pounds 50,000 damages against the police. Neither the police officers named in the civil proceedings - PC Mark Moles and WPC Tina Martin - nor any Stoke Newington officers associated with the Burke case were disciplined.

The Gary Stretch case had a different outcome. In 1987, seven off-duty officers, this time from City Road station on the Islington border, attacked the 27-year-old white man at a Hackney pub, severing most of his ear. The seven were eventually sacked, but never stood trial because the Director of Public Prosecutions said there was insufficient evidence against them - a decision that did not exactly discourage rogue elements in Stoke Newington station, two miles away.

In 1991, reports began to appear in the Hackney press suggesting that younger officers were 'out of control'. Senior officers declared this a 'nonsense', claiming the Stretch case 'demonstrates where officers do transgress appropriate action is taken'.

No one doubts that Stoke Newington police in particular and the Hackney force in general have faced the most appalling odds in trying to preserve law and order. In 1990, when criticism of the police conduct was approaching a crescendo, 340 officers were injured in the borough. Young officers, barely out of training school, would collapse into the custody suite, bleeding from the face and hyperventilating. Others were stabbed in churchyards, popular nocturnal venues for crack-smokers. One constable's arms were chopped to the bone by a machete. Another was beaten almost senseless with his own truncheon in daytime, as shoppers passed by without offering to help. The area seemed to resemble 'Fort Apache', the precinct in New York's South Bronx where policemen think twice before opening their car doors. In such circumstances, Stoke Newington's finest did not relish criticism. Part of the problem, according to Chief Superintendent Bernard Taffs, who has been at Stoke Newington for less than two years, was 'agitators', among them the Defence Association.

The HCDA's offices in Bradbury Street are on the second floor of a ramshackle building. In one room is a large table, around which local people regularly gather to describe their treatment at police hands. In a small room off it, Graham Smith, the secretary, denies the association is 'anti-police'. He says: 'We have violence and drugs in the borough, so we need the police. If we didn't, then we'd kick them out.'

Mr Smith is earnest, soft-spoken and businesslike, moving from a poster design to a teapot to a laptop computer on his cluttered desk. 'Most of our work involves low-life violence,' he says. 'An officer punches someone in the mouth and then arrests that person for assault in order to justify his own assault. Now everyone has an off-day at work, but often the position of the police is that, having done something wrong, they are in a position to cover it up. So I don't think there's anyone who doesn't say to their sons and daughters: 'Stay away from the police.' The person who is responsible for your protection is also the person responsible for your fear. Racism is central to it. Most of our cases are Jamaicans, whereas most of the police here seem to be from Romford (Essex). I know what Romford is like. It's fascist. It used to be the headquarters of the National Front.'

He invites me to return one evening to 'sit in' on a session of fresh complaints. This turns out to be a disturbing experience.

Six cases have come in over the past three days, 'a higher number than usual', says Mr Smith, who normally deals with two a week. An Asian complainant who had an encounter with the police near his home in the relatively affluent Upper Clapton neighbourhood, shows handcuff weals on his wrists: 'Three months ago, I was looking for my mate who'd been breathalysed but it turned out to be negative. So I said to the cop I was looking for my friend, and he told me to piss off. I said, 'What the fuck's going on?' He grabbed me and said, 'I'll teach you what the fuck.' He threw me into the police van and gave me a kicking, arrested me and took me to the station. I was thrown on the floor and kicked again. Four officers walked on my back as if I was a doormat. Each time I shouted the handcuffs were too tight and were cutting into my wrists, they jerked me to my feet with the cuffs.'

Across the table, a man of West Indian origin raises trembling fingers to touch his bruised face and scalp. A youth worker, he had just returned at the end of October from a charity event ('We raised pounds 1,000 for sickle-cell anaemia'), and was walking home with his tape-recorder in the Homerton neighbourhood, when a police officer accosted him.

'Where did you get the tape from?'

'It's mine.'

'Give it to me.'

'No, I'm not giving it to you.'

'All right, put the tape on the front seat of the (police) van.'

Forced to obey, he was subjected by the officer to detailed questions about the recorder, including the position and function of each button. The policeman called him 'a fool', flashed a torch in hiseyes and poked him in the chest, forcing him backwards. 'Don't you back away from me,' the policeman said.

A police panda van arrived with other officers and a police dog. 'They jumped on me and beat me on the head, the mouth, the temple. I said, 'You can't do this to someone like me. I work in the community.' They punched me and told me to shut up. An officer made the dog bite me. I was in a head-lock. I was choking - couldn't breathe. Another officer had his fingers behind my ears, on the pressure-points. They kicked me and knocked my head on the floor, handcuffed me and punched my ribs. I fainted and they threw me up the van against the driver. The driver turned round and punched me on the face. I was taken to the (Hackney) police station. I was told to turn out my pockets and I was lippy to them. They stood on my knees and elbows and went through my pockets, then threw me in the cell and locked me up all night. Before going to court the next morning, the desk sergeant told me to wipe the blood off my face, but I refused. So he said to me, 'What about the other matter?' And I said, 'What other matter?' And he said, 'Drugs. I'm going to charge you with possession.' '

Graham Smith: 'Did anyone see or hear the beating on the street?'

Complainant: ''I wasn't far from my sister's house. I was screaming her name. I've been told someone in the (nearby) flats heard me calling her name. I remember a car stopping . . . to see what was going on, and the police told him to go away.'

Mr Smith: 'We can stick up posters: 'Did you witness someone beaten up by the police at this place on that night?' We can distribute leaflets to see if anyone else heard you screaming.' He refers to a previous incident near the spot where 13 witnesses saw police beating a man up and breaking his leg. 'Not one will come forward. They're too frightened.'

Remanded on bail, this man now awaits his day in court on assault and drugs charges. His tape-recorder has been returned to him.

Another speaker, also of West Indian origin, is small and slightly built. He describes an argument with 'a guy who grabbed my car keys' in a busy street in mid-October. 'A policeman came round the corner and told me I'm under arrest. I said, 'What are you talking about?' He called for reinforcements, and within seconds, 20 policemen were on the scene. One of them punched me in the mouth and knocked three teeth out. Another grabbed my neck and squeezed it against some railings. I was very close to death. A lot of women in the crowd started screaming. (The police) put two sets of cuffs on me and threw me into a police car. 'Go back to Jamaica]' they said. I said, 'What's that got to do with my car keys?' I was in Stoke Newington station for six hours. Nobody knew where I was. They refused me food and water. There was a black man in the cell who said, 'Black people are really suffering in this country.' That really touched me.'

There is silence in the room. The other complainants also seem moved by this. Mr Smith breaks the silence: 'There are a lot of things going on. It could be they're (the police) angry because the DPP wants to take action.'

Hackney hums with speculation over the action the DPP might take, as well as persistent reports that Operation Jackpot may even be expanded dramatically. The subject preoccupies a wide range of groups: not only Stoke Newington police and their alleged victims, but also social workers, probation officers, lawyers. Several lawyers have formed a group, meeting frequently to exchange information on the behaviour of individual policemen, tapping into the HCDA's data bank, co-ordinating their responses to perhaps as many as 40 police officers whose conduct is questionable.

Debbie Tripley, a solicitor specialising in Stoke Newington legal aid cases, is a member of this 'Group of Sixteen'. She is, she says, 'always on the alert. In some cases, one comes across police officers who lie on oath quite frequently - for various reasons - possibly to try to cover up a fatal flaw in their statement. But in other types of case, it's shocking to find quite a wide range of officers going out to commit criminal acts.'

She is disturbed by 'a climate of fear', and mentions one of her cases in which a man went into the police station to inquire about a friend arrested 'for immigration reasons'. The police then 'got aggressive, pulled him in and charged him with violent assault. He was completely traumatised. Every time he raises it with me he cries. He's a very religious man. He doesn't understand why the police would lie in the magistrates' court where he was convicted. He appealed and was acquitted. The trouble is we don't know how many (similar) cases there are.' Ms Tripley believes that both Hackney and Stoke Newington stations are 'dumping grounds for bad coppers'.

A community worker in contact with both police and criminals says that when he first came across allegations that certain policemen were actually dealing in drugs, he was appalled, then confused. 'I said to my wife, 'Who do we tell? What do we do?' ' He brought his discovery to the notice of Operation Jackpot officers, who are led by Detective Superintendent Ian Russell of Scotland Yard's Complaints Investigation Bureau. The superintendent's files are currently with the DPP, but it is understood he is continuing his inquiries. There have been suggestions (thought to have leaked from the Crown Prosecution Office) that the vast majority of officers investigated are likely to be cleared. Certainly, the man who passed on the drug-dealing allegations to Operation Jackpot - and was subsequently interviewed by Mr Russell's officers - is not confident that justice will be done. 'Call me cynical perhaps, but I have a hunch the police will get off the hook.'

If he is right, there will be little Stoke Newington police can do to restore public faith in their integrity. Too many details of alleged corruption are already known, and too many column inches have been devoted to them, for the charges to be blurred in a damage-limitation exercise.

Readers of the London magazine Time Out are now thoroughly briefed, following an exhaustive series of articles on the Stoke Newington scandal. It has revealed that dozens could have been wrongly convicted since 1989 after being planted with drugs by Stoke Newington police, and that some officers, already involved in drugs, may have been running protection rackets, extorting money from unlicensed drinking and gambling premises.

In a drugs hearing at Snaresbrook Crown Court in November that year, Judge Francis Aglionby, finding 'a fault line right to the heart of the prosecution case', ordered the jury to acquit Raymond Simpson, 37, of possessing pounds 5,000 of crack with intent to supply because of discrepancies in the evidence of two brothers called as prosecution witnesses.

Halting the trial, he added: 'I have to say that a number of these (Stoke Newington) police drugs raids come before the courts at Snaresbrook, and a number of judges, of whom I am one, are getting increasingly concerned that conflicting evidence is put by the prosecution to the jury, which puts a very difficult position before a jury and indeed the judge.'

One of the witnesses against Mr Simpson was PC Terence Chitty, who told the court he had seen Mr Simpson drop packages containing crack in amongst some cardboard boxes. On the previous week at the same court,

Michael Thompson, 38, had alleged that PC Chitty had planted crack on him when he failed to supply the names of big crack-dealers. Mr Thompson was cleared by a jury of crack possession. PC Chitty is still serving at Stoke Newington. He is one of almost 50 past and present officers at the station who have been served with 'regulation seven' notices, warning them that they are under investigation as part of Operation Jackpot.

In a separate report, Time Out said Stoke Newington officers had netted tens of thousands of pounds by running their own drug- dealers, planted drugs on other known dealers in order to reduce the competition, planted drugs on innocent citizens (mainly black) in order to maintain their 'clear-up' rate, solicited bribes, and offered drugs to people in return for their testimony in a murder trial.

Thoroughly alarmed, the Labour MP Brian Sedgemore declared: 'Until recently I had no idea that the police themselves might be the ringleaders of the (drug-dealing) crime. Now I fear the worst.'

None of the suspected officers is ranked higher than sergeant. It is hard to draw any firm conclusions from this. In Bent Coppers, James Morton says one of the problems facing the senior officer in trying to eradicate corruption 'is that it is highly likely that he has experienced it at first hand himself in his younger days. Then he may have either participated or, more probably, turned a blind eye. Now he may be at the mercy of his former colleagues. If he leans on them too heavily they have the perfect response that he, because of his higher rank, has more to lose. They may be able to cut a plea bargain by naming him. He may not have a higher-ranking officer to name.'

Morton suggests three 'sociological explanations' for police deviance. The first is a police sub-culture (or 'canteen culture') of 'drinking, whoring, excitement, fighting, racism and so on'. The second is the strain of achieving results, for which bending the rules is often a strong option. The third is the fact that officers 'commonly find themselves on their own with a suspect or a member of the public, and in this situation they have power, discretion and no supervision, a combination of circumstances which promotes rule-bending.

'Running parallel with these explanations is the public's attitude. A typical police view is that the public does not much care about procedure provided results are achieved and that lapses in principle do not become scandals.' But Stoke Newington is a scandal, not least because yesterday's police heroes are today in disgrace. Roy Lewandowski, for example, was a baby-faced detective-constable who was slashed with a knife during a successful drugs raid in 1990. Nine months later, he was commended for his 'courage and devotion to duty', at a special ceremony. A further 19 months on, in November last year, he was jailed for 18 months for stealing books and furniture from the house of a manslaughter victim. He is now out of prison, and offering to give evidence against former colleagues. Earlier this month Mr Lewandowski was reported ready to disclose how officers pocketed drugs from raids, took cash for dishonest work and planted weapons and narcotics.

Other so-called drugs-busters have also fallen by the wayside. Last year, one after another, their cases began to collapse in court, specifically because Stoke Newington police witnesses were found to be not credible. The HCDA has logged nearly 20 such cases in the past two years, five of which collapsed on a single day (4 January this year). Yet lawyers have remained anxious. Twelve firms of solicitors and 19 barristers wrote to the Home Secretary and the DPP saying they had so far identified 10 potential appeal cases, five civil actions and one possible referral back to the Court of Appeal which turned 'on allegations of shocking improprieties, in some cases involving criminal acts, by officers . . . at Stoke Newington'. They warned it could be the 'tip of the iceberg'.

Today, their scepticism does not seem out of place. Operation Jackpot was widened significantly after the trial of Ida Oderinde, a Nigerian-born mother of three who was sentenced, in 1991, to four years' jail for heroin dealing. Detective Superintendent Russell took sufficiently seriously the allegations she made at that trial to spend a full day questioning her in Holloway prison.

What Mrs Oderinde alleged was that in 1990 she had seen her friend Pearl Cameron, a major crack-dealer in Sandringham Road, receive a bag full of 'rocks' (of crack) from two police officers. Two constables, Ronald Palumbo and Barry Lyons, claimed at the trial that they had found heroin in a disused refrigerator in Mrs Oderinde's home. They were later suspended for perjury, as was another constable, Bruce Galbraith. Another Stoke Newington policeman who is alleged to have supplied drugs to a Hackney dealer (with whom he also had an affair) cannot be named, for legal reasons. Mrs Oderinde was cleared on appeal last March.

'Stoke Newington is an example of the worst sort of systematic corrupt behaviour,' says Russell Miller, one of the Group of Sixteen solicitors. 'You get a lot of incidents that appear to be isolated, then emerge as an endemic and cultural abuse of power. Complaints are then greeted with secrecy and an attempt to minimise the damage. Even the disbandment of Stoke Newington's entire drugs squad at the beginning of last year, shortly after Operation Jackpot's inquiries pinpointed nine local officers, was never officially admitted. There is a spiral of decline, and nobody is willing to do anything about it. Policemen accused of crimes such as fitting up are simply dispersed.'

A major difficulty facing Stoke Newington police is that the more their evidence is discredited in court, the greater the temptation for defendants generally to allege police misconduct and sue for compensatory damages in the event of these allegations being upheld. A good public relations machine might help, of course, but Stoke Newington has so far made a poor fist of PR (last year's publicity photo of officers and a visiting star of EastEnders may have won a few hearts and minds). Indignant responses by senior officers to references by Mr Sedgemore to a police 'Mafia' have neither converted cynics nor reassured doubters.

When the committee researching the Colin Roach case on behalf of his family asked to examine the old police station lobby where Mr Roach died, they were denied entry. Today, they can examine the new station's lobby from the High Street pavement. But they will not find the mysteries therein any less impenetrable.

(Photographs omitted)