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.”
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