Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations

East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. affects indignation about a lack of specifics in the report issued the other day by the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division accusing his police department of harassing Latinos. The mayor's indignation is nonsense.

Yes, the Justice Department's report doesn't include the names of officers. But it provides enough details to identify officers with.

Particularly the report cites at length the disgraceful case from March 2009 that exploded the bigotry and corruption of the East Haven police -- the knowingly false arrest of a Catholic priest who videotaped two officers harassing the operator of a Latino grocery store. The officers submitted an arrest report claiming that they thought the priest had been pointing a weapon at them. But the audio of his video recorded the officers acknowledging that they knew it was only a camera.

While the charges against the priest were dismissed quickly in court, to this day the East Haven Police Department has never undertaken to discipline the officers who lied in their report -- perjury that was reported and broadcast throughout the state.

East Haven's recently reinstated police chief, Leonard Gallo, was chief when the false arrest of the priest happened, and Mayor Maturo, who was returned to office in the November election after having been out of office for a couple of terms, could not have been ignorant of the details. But what should have been the mortification of the department and the town in front of the whole state seems not to have bothered the chief and the mayor in the slightest. This discrediting of the East Haven police came 2 1/2 years before the Justice Department report was issued, and it has been the giveaway that bigotry and corruption go right to the top in East Haven and thus have been protected all the way down.

Maybe names of officers will be forthcoming from the Justice Department through criminal indictments brought by the federal grand jury now investigating the East Haven police. But if Mayor Maturo and Chief Gallo don't want to wait to start upholding their oaths, they can ask the Justice Department for any identifications they can't figure out.

For starters, the mayor and the chief shouldn't have much trouble deducing which officers are responsible for the disproportionate traffic stops of Latinos, stops that, the Justice Department says, come close to 40 percent of stops made by some officers where Latino drivers constitute only about 15 percent of total traffic.

Yes, being adjacent to the "sanctuary city" of New Haven, East Haven has an illegal alien problem too. Yet the Justice Department report notes that the East Haven police have never applied to federal authorities for delegation of immigration enforcement powers. Instead, the Justice Department report says, the police department "has allowed its officers to engage in haphazard and uncoordinated immigration enforcement efforts to target Latino drivers for traffic stops." That is, rather than help to enforce immigration law, it's a lot more fun to bully people who, as recent legal or illegal immigrants, are easily terrorized.

This sort of corruption is sicker than stealing money. It's sadism -- and nothing is more dangerous than sadism in people who carry the badges and guns of the law.

People are entitled to be angry over the nullification program being undertaken in New Haven to overthrow federal immigration law and destroy U.S. citizenship and national sovereignty, nullification undertaken by supposed liberals that is far more profound than the supposed conservative nullification of the moment, mere lawsuits against "Obamacare." But such anger is no excuse for police to try to nullify the law.

Police most of all should know that the national charter and the federal and state constitutions guarantee the basic rights of due process and equal protection of the law not just to citizens but to all persons. That is, even illegal aliens have rights, and no one is to be harassed by police just because he might be thought to look or sound like a stranger. Otherwise everyone would be at risk of harassment.

There are legal, proper, and decent ways of enforcing immigration law. Maybe someday the East Haven Police Department will be entitled to carry them out. But right now the department can't be trusted to enforce any law at all. For the department is a corrupt and rogue organization resisting accountability with the approval of the mayor, and Connecticut must hope that the Justice Department won't let go of it for a long time.

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Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer.