Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

William Rashbaum has an article in The New York Times about more bad governmental behavior:

Early one morning, last September, more than fifty members of the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) gathered in Manhattan during a continuing investigation into widespread ticket-fixing by New York officers. They were briefed and divided into teams, and then piled into cars and vans bound for all twelve precinct station houses in the Bronx, and others around the city, to seize copies of tens of thousands of summonses.
But almost as soon as the Internal Affairs teams set out, and long before the first one arrived at its target station house, their plans were exposed by a betrayal that some investigators suggest is far more insidious than the ticket-fixing itself, according to a person with knowledge of the events of that day a year ago.
A union official was captured on a wiretap telling a union colleague under scrutiny in the case that he had received a call from someone in the Internal Affairs Bureau, and that the caller had warned him that the investigators were on the way, the source said. The call came shortly after the teams headed out toward the precincts.
Investigators suspect that the call was just one of roughly half a dozen instances during the three-year ticket inquiry in which officers believed to be assigned to Internal Affairs leaked information about the case to police union officials, all of them officers who were under scrutiny, several people with knowledge of the events said.
The suspected leaks may be the most damning of the departmental weaknesses unearthed to date in the ticket-fixing investigation. The leak accusations seem to lend support to the argument, long put forward by many current and former prosecutors and police officials as well as academics, corruption experts and politicians, that the Police Department is incapable of policing itself.
The timing of some of the suspected disclosures underscores the gravity of the problem. The first came just a few days after Internal Affairs investigators and the Bronx district attorney’s office obtained authorization for their first wiretap on the phone of a police union delegate, one of those with knowledge of the case said. “The first delegate’s phone is tapped in December of 2009,” that person said. “Almost instantly, there is another Bronx IAB leak.”
Of the seventeen or so officers who are expected to be indicted in the coming days, most will probably face ticket-fixing charges. But one, a respected and well-liked lieutenant who worked in Internal Affairs in the early days of the case, will probably face charges that she leaked information, people with knowledge of the case said. Moreover, the Internal Affairs unit that handles the department’s most sensitive corruption inquiries, known as Group 1, is investigating several other officers who are suspected of leaking Internal Affairs information, one of the sources said.
It appears that those are administrative, rather than criminal, inquiries.
Deputy Inspector Kim Y. Royster, a spokeswoman for the Police Department, would not address the scope of the leak inquiry, but said, “There were only two sources that were definitively identified in IAB as leaking information. Once this was discovered,” she added, “the investigation was contained by IAB”. She said the operation was moved from the Bronx Internal Affairs office and the investigators were vetted and limited to a small group. Inspector Royster would not say whether the lieutenant was one of the two people from Internal Affairs who had been identified as leaking information. And while she said that the Internal Affairs Bureau had determined that none of its other current members had leaked information, she could not say whether others who had left their assignments there or who served elsewhere were under investigation for leaking information about the case. The leaks, she said, had no impact on the case.
But several of the people with knowledge of the investigation said that one leak, in February of 2010, when investigators were eavesdropping on several police officers and union delegates, resulted in some discussions of the ticket-fixing investigation among a group of Bronx delegates at a union meeting. They were told, one source said, to conduct ticket-fixing business only face to face. After that, for several months, few telephone conversations about ticket-fixing were intercepted, although they eventually picked up again, the sources said. In other instances, some police union officials would speculate about whether their phones were tapped, and then blithely proceed to have incriminating conversations, the sources said.
Several people with knowledge of the case said the profusion of leaks raised questions about the department’s policy of drafting reluctant investigators and supervisors to serve in Internal Affairs, a unit that is still reviled in the department because of its focus on fellow officers. The policy was instituted nearly two decades ago, to ensure that Internal Affairs had a pool of capable investigators and managers, but it still rankles many, in particular those who have been drafted to serve there.
But Inspector Royster said the drafting of officers into Internal Affairs played no role in the leaks. She said it was not true that Internal Affairs’ selection process “may have exacerbated the leaks.”
The investigation began in late 2008 with an anonymous complaint against an officer in the 40th Precinct, Jose Ramos, and eventually led to well over two dozen wiretaps, roughly half of them on the cellphones of police union delegates and trustees, several officials have said.
In addition to the expected indictments against seventeen officers, ten of whom will most likely be accused of ticket-fixing crimes, more than five hundred officers face possible administrative charges.

Rico says it's the old 'who watches the watchers' problem... But "police union officials speculated about whether their phones were tapped, and then blithely proceed to have incriminating conversations"? They're too stupid to keep as cops, even if they weren't crooked...