What do FBI Director Louis Freeh, Attorney General Janet Reno, former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode, Los Angeles prosecutor Marcia Clark, and just about every big-city police chief in the nation have in common?

Hint: Ruby Ridge, Waco, a police helicopter’s fatal firebombing of a Philadelphia row house, detectives Mark Fuhrman and Philip Vannatter, and "testilying."

The common thread is that those who are supposedly running our law enforcement organizations are, in fact, more often run by them. They are prisoners of the lies frequently told by people ranging from cops on the beat to high-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also feel pressure to secure their own standing with their troops, and to bolster morale, by pretending that police lying, brutality, racism, and corruption are less widespread than they are.

Examples:

• Freeh’s promising start in 1993 has been derailed by his blindness to an apparent FBI cover-up of high-level responsibility for the fatal fiasco at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992. Freeh initially decided not to dismiss any of those who helped craft illegal, shoot-on-sight rules of engagement and to limit discipline of his close friend, Larry Potts, to a wrist-slap censure. In a March 7 letter to Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, Freeh wrote:

[F]or you to increase the proposed discipline [of Potts] inevitably sends the wrong message to both the public and the employees of the FBI…. It will also lead to the implication that the FBI and the [Justice] Department dispute the credibility of the employees involved [including] Mr. Potts… [I]t is likely to do profound damage to the relationship between the Department and the FBI [and] be perceived by the rank and file of the FBI as an unjustified attack.

Freeh also warned that Gorelick’s proposal to give Potts a 30-day suspension would cause "damage to my personal credibility."

Gorelick yielded (perhaps under pressure from Reno). Potts got a censure and a promotion to deputy director (from acting deputy). This summer, when the lid finally blew off the Ruby Ridge cover-up, Freeh had to demote Potts and then suspend him. The director lamely explained that "obviously, there was critical information I did not have" when he went to the mat for Potts.

• Reno, new to her job, had the sense to balk when the FBI started pressing its April 1993 plan for a tank-and-tear-gas assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. But after four days she approved it-a decision that led to 75 deaths. Reno initially said that she had been influenced by FBI claims that children (her obsession) "had been sexually abused" and beaten. But she could not remember who told her mat, and the FBI says it had no such evidence. While Reno was easily led by the nose, somebody was all too eager to exploit her gullibility.

• Former Philadelphia Mayor Goode claimed in a 1992 autobiography that the reason he had not gone to the scene of the 1985 police siege of a home occupied by the radical group MOVE-before authorizing police to drop a bomb on it-was that "I feared being killed" there by "unknown members of my own police force." Goode said he had been warned that police planned to shoot him and make it look like an accident. The firebombing killed six adult MOVE members and five children, and destroyed 60 homes.

• Marcia Clark and her fellow prosecutors unnecessarily dragged the credibility of their case against O J. Simpson through the muck when they sought to justify the warrantless search of Simpson’s grounds by offering the patently incredible testimony of detectives Fuhrman and Vannatter that Simpson was not then a suspect and that Fuhrman had climbed over the wall solely out of concern for Simpson’s safety. Judges Kathleen Kennedy-Powell and Lance Ito, like die prosecutors, pretended to believe this.

Such police perjury-especially to avoid exclusion of improperly obtained evidence of guilt, but sometimes to fabricate confessions and other false evidence of guilt-is so common that some of New York City’s finest have coined a word for it: testilying.

The Knapp Commission found in 1972 that a "substantial majority" of all New York City police officers were taking substantial payoffs. The Mollen Commission found in 1994 that police perjury and falsification of evidence in New York are "widespread" and often "condoned" and "encouraged" by superior officers. Four New Orleans police officers have been charged with murder in the past 18 months, and federal officials estimate that more than 10 percent of that force has engaged in criminal behavior. In Philadelphia’s ongoing police scandal, dozens of convictions have been overturned and hundreds more are under review because of falsified reports, perjury, and other illegalities by officers.

One Philadelphia officer, John Baird, received excellent performance evaluations from superiors and was awarded 15 commendations, while shrugging off 23 formal complaints by citizens. Now, as the Philadelphia Inquirer puts it, "Baird awaits sentencing in federal court after admitting that he spent years beating and threatening citizens, breaking into their homes, stealing their cash, putting drugs in their pockets, framing them, and lying fluently to cover his tracks."

Why do people like Baird and Fuhrman succeed in running amok for so long in urban police departments from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, from Chicago to Miami? One reason was suggested 30 years ago by James Baldwin, who wrote of the white urban cop: "He is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. He moves … like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is exactly what he is." So a self-justifying, tribal, siege mentality sets in.

Another reason is the organizational dynamics and politics that make it fiendishly difficult even for capable straight arrows like Louis Freeh to root out the recklessness and mendacity plaguing virtually every law enforcement institution in this nation.

Some leaders, of course, are only too glad to let their rogue cops loose on the populace. The late Philadelphia Mayor (and former Police Commissioner) Frank Rizzo comes to mind. In 1979, he and the police department’s top brass were charged by the Justice Department, in an unprecedented civil suit, with "[a]cquiescence in, condonation of, and approval of…a pattern or practice" of "physically abusing arrestees, prisoners and other persons to intimidate them or extract confessions,… [making] racial slurs,… [c]onducting illegal searches and seizures,… [illegal] use of deadly force,…[s]hooting nondangerous, nonviolent, fleeing criminal suspects [and] suspects who make gestures or verbal comments while surrendering,…discriminatory harassment of black and Hispanic persons," falsifying evidence, intimidating witnesses, and rigging brutality investigations to hide the truth.

While this complaint was dismissed on standing grounds, there was no shortage of evidence to support it. And while Rizzo is dead, the culture he helped create lives on.

The FBI is far more professional. But it is still subject to gonzo excesses like Ruby Ridge and Waco. Largely because of those episodes-in which the victims were white supremacists (Ruby Ridge) and gun-toting religious cultists (Waco) with whom many Republicans seem to feel more kinship than they do with urban blacks-conservatives have begun to notice what the American Civil Liberties Union has known for a long time: Power corrupts even more dangerously in the hands of gun-toting police than in the hands of (say) bureaucrats from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But don’t hold your breath for some kind of ACLU-Republican alliance to agree on ways to control abuse of police power, at either federal or local levels. For one thing, it may be just too hard to do. In the words of David Burnham, author of Above the Law, a forthcoming (in January) investigative book on the Justice Department:

All of the institutions of oversight are seriously flawed. The Senate has never even had a confirmation hearing for a U.S. attorney, ever. The grand jury is a fraud as a supposed restraint on prosecutors. Bivens suits [against federal officers who violate the Constitution] are a false hope: Only five of the 12,000 such suits filed over a 14-year period had resulted in an award of damages.

Nonetheless, there are a few things we can do. One is to reinforce such flimsy checks and balances as we have.

A second is to regard police testimony and evidence with appropriate skepticism when we sit on juries.

A third is to engage in a judicious dose of jury nullification-even where the untainted evidence of guilt is clear-when necessary to protest outrageous police or prosecution conduct. I (as a juror) would reserve this option for small-time drug dealers and other less-than-monstrous criminals, not murder defendants like O J. Simpson.

At the broad policy level, conservatives should learn something from liberals about the lawlessness of many urban cops. And liberals should learn something from conservatives about being parsimonious in granting more power to any government institution, absent clear need. For the more power they have, the more they will abuse it.