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Larry Nevers

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Larry Nevers became a police officer for the Detroit Police Department at the age of twenty-eight.  During his 24 year career, he spent four years in patrol and the next twenty years in a variety of undercover assignments.  During his career, he made more than 5,000 felony arrests, received over 100 Detroit Police Department honors.  Moreover, he was awarded the Michigan Police Chiefs Association Medal.

One reader of Good Cops, Bad Verdict said, “In rationalizing the managing of the Malice Green Railroad, the philosophy of the Wayne County Prosecutor was: "Well, even a prostitute or drug dealer can tell the truth sometimes", while completely discounting the testimony of a host of "mainstream" witnesses and experts, and the credibility of two policemen with unblemished records compiled over 47+ combined years of serving and protecting some of the most predatory and parasitic residents of the ruins of a once great American city.

This book offers a very high resolution look at the people involved in sending 2 policemen to prison for doing their jobs. These officers were sentenced to more time in prison than criminal cops who were caught robbing citizens and drug dealers and a City of Detroit chief of police who embezzled millions from a fund intended to finance narcotics enforcement. Their only crime was being much too naive considering their many years on the job. They mistakenly thought the system was actually in place to support officers who took drugs and guns off the street. Instead, they learned how powerful Detroit's not-so-underground economy of drugs, prostitution, racial politics, apathy and corruption was, and still is.

For example: It is revealed in this book, through a memoir written by the Assistant Medical Examiner who conducted the autopsy of Green, that this particular medical examiner believed he had to consider "what was going on in the community" in determining Green's cause of death. What should the community's reaction have to do with the Medical Examiner's findings?

The common thread running through the opinion of every experienced policeman who's read this book is: "There but for the grace of God go I". Any policeman who can't relate to the convicted officers in this book hasn't done much policework on the street. There are those employed as law enforcement officers who I've heard say that Nevers and Budzyn got what they deserved. When I try to reconcile this statement with the job assignment of those making it, it's not hard to see that the types of "police officers" who hold this opinion are not the types who would be responding to a citizen's or another policeman's call for help at 3:00am. Instead they are so far removed from the street that their opinion holds no credibility with me.

There is a well-known principle in law enforcement management that says a community gets the kind of police service it deserves. I can think of no better example of the truth of this principle than in looking at the handling of the Malice Green case and the current state of the City of Detroit in general, and the Detroit Police Department in particular. The police department of the City of Detroit has an abysmally slow response time to crimes in progress. They have a ridiculously low clearance rate for homicides, and they continually fail to achieve the reforms mandated in a federal consent decree. This is largely due to poor leadership and not because there aren't men and women on the street who don't want to do a good job.

This book clearly shows that by holding those who fuel Detroit's underground economy --the prostitutes, the race baiters and the political opportunists-- in higher esteem than cops like Larry Nevers and Walter Budzyn, the citizens of the City of Detroit truly get what they deserve.”


Good cops, bad verdict
Larry Nevers  More Info

According to the book description, Good Cops, Bad Verdict “is Detroit police officer Larry Nevers’s own account of how a good arrest turned into a nightmare that left a stubbornly resisting cocaine user dead and two respected veteran policeman on trial for murder. Nevers, at the time only a few months from retirement as one of the city’s most decorated cops, was convicted in a racially charged trial broadcast on national television. Nevers explains in compelling detail the reasons he believes it was the criminal justice system, not he and his partner, that ran amok in the matter of Malice Green’s death.” The policemen in this case were convicted based on the word of crackheads, drug dealers, prostitutes and an EMS technician who was looking for a stress-related retirement.

About the Detroit Police Department
The Detroit Police Department is the 10th largest police department in the nation.  It has over 3,700 sworn and civilian employees with an annual operating budget of over $414 million.  The Detroit Police Department is responsible for providing law enforcement service to more than 950,000 residents; over 10,000 businesses; and 258 schools in the city of Detroit, which spans 138.7 square miles.

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