“Breaks The Code” With Writing
By Howie Padilla, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Former Minneapolis police officer Mike Quinn says he had no intention of writing an exposé about his former department.
But “Walking With the Devil,” the 181 pages he published as a textbook for law enforcement students, has outraged former colleagues, alienated some friends and been pulled out of one store for fear officers would boycott the business. On the other hand, frequent critics of the department hail Quinn as a hero who dares to utter law enforcement’s darkest secrets.
“I wanted to explain what are the real tough things we should be teaching recruits,” said Quinn, who joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 1975. “What were the things I ran into when I started out?”
He targeted the code of silence, the implicit rule that you never snitch on another officer.
The book, part self-confessional and part indictment of that code, is a collection of anecdotes describing events that Quinn says he either witnessed or heard about while working 23 years in the department.
He writes of officers using excessive force, including a paramedic’s allegation that an officer broke a suspect’s jaw as the suspect was restrained in an ambulance.
Quinn writes of officers turned thieves, stealing fishing tackle from a small business that had already been robbed.
He accuses supervisors of ordering him to embellish arrest reports or search warrant affidavits to suit a goal of jailing the bad guys.
Also sprinkled throughout the book are examples of police officers “breaking the code” and sympathetic references to people in law enforcement being inherently honest.
Quinn, whose assignments included serving high-risk warrants, investigating internal complaints and helping train the department’s recruits, left out names and dates.
Police Chief Bill McManus said that if Quinn truly wanted to break a code of silence, his examples would have been complete.
“Without actual names and without actual dates, all that stuff is fiction,” he said. “It’s just a novel.”
But Quinn said it was never his goal to do a tell-all, so he left the names out. The book wasn’t meant for the general public to salivate over salacious details, he said.
The omissions have led some people to question Quinn’s motives.
“He’s always wanted to be something bigger in law enforcement than he was,” said Deputy Chief Tim Dolan, who both worked beside and supervised Quinn. “I think he uses the book that way, which is really too bad.”
The book could have been more complete if Quinn would not only have named the people involved in the incidents, but also mentioned the demise of many of those people’s careers, Dolan said. It also is misleading to not give a chronology to the events, Dolan said.
“You might as well go back and put in police incidents and corruption that was in the ‘40s,” he said. “As an uninformed reader, you would think that these things just happened a few years ago.”
Police union president John Delmonico wondered what good rehashing decades-old incidents does.
“For all the efforts everybody has made to improve our relationship with the community, this certainly takes us back a few steps,” he said.
McManus challenged Quinn to come forward with any illegal acts within the department.
“If, as he says in the book, he knows these things are still happening today, he has a moral imperative to come forward and let us know,” McManus said. “Now’s his chance.”
Former Minneapolis Police Chiefs Robert Olson and John Laux declined to comment.
‘Testi-lying’ and breaking the code
Tony Bouza, who was the city’s chief in the 1980s, said Quinn was brave to write the book and potentially burned some bridges.
“There are two things that you don’t write about: ‘testi-lying’ and breaking the code,” he said. “Mike wrote about both of them.”
Bouza said as he read the book, he recognized some of the events laid out on the pages and the lack of names and dates with the events didn’t bother him.
“It’s an authentic piece of work,” he said.
Quinn, who is now a federal marshal, said he understands the reason for any backlash he may receive.
“I broke the code,” he said. “If you break the code, you’re on the outside.”
He said he has already seen the book’s effects. Former friends will go out of their way not to talk to him. He said his book was pulled from the shelves of a local uniform shop, Uniforms Unlimited, for fear of a boycott, but a store executive declined to comment.
Quinn said he hopes that as people read his book, they will see it as something more than a criticism of law enforcement or the Minneapolis Police Department.
“I hope they will realize that this is the story of one cop and the problems that all cops deal with when they work with crooked cops and other cops who make a serious mistake,” he said.
William Lewinski, a professor at Minnesota State University-Mankato, has ordered 50 copies of the book and plans on including it in his police stress class.
“It’s a really important topic,” he said. “Not only that it exists in the department, but it’s one of the ethical issues in all careers.”
Michelle Gross, vice president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, said that she understands why Quinn didn’t name names.
“He wanted to keep it more universal,” she said. “If he wanted to exploit the department, he could have done that in a news article. The problems he talks about are universal across the country.”
McManus, who became chief in February, pointed to the establishment of a Professional Standards Unit as a proactive way of ensuring policies are followed.
“My position has been clear,” he said. “We’re trying to prevent police misconduct, not react to it.”
While criticizing Quinn’s book, Dolan said that he won’t be one to deny that there is a code of silence. He likened it to codes of silence that exist at corporations or other branches of law enforcement.
“There are always pockets of things going on that shouldn’t happen, and law enforcement’s no exception,” he said. “Are we doing a better job of policing our own? That’s the question. And here in Minneapolis we are definitely doing a better job.”
And on that point, Dolan and Quinn, are in agreement.
“We really do have a clean department here,” Quinn said. “When you line it up against other cities, you see that. But it could be better, and I’m a believer that if you’re not getting better, you’re going the other way.”