EDITORIAL:Misuse of police funds
Asahi
Why has no one been found guilty of the crimes?
This year, three prefectural police organizations admitted they had misappropriated funds intended for criminal investigations and taken in huge amounts under the table. The authorities said they had disciplined the police officers responsible, who had paid back the money at the year's end.
The tricks the Hokkaido police used to raise secret slush funds included misusing the system of paying informants who were cooperating in criminal investigations. The Hokkaido police amassed 1.1 billion yen by fabricating receipts and pretending to have paid people who had supposedly tipped them off about crimes. The police took the names of ``informants'' from a telephone book and stashed the cash.
In one case, the Board of Audit found that Hokkaido police had forged receipts issued by fictitious restaurants. The board also discovered fabricated help-wanted ads supposedly run by the restaurants. Out of the roughly 10,000 police officers in Hokkaido, one in four received some kind of punitive action.
Meanwhile, the Fukuoka's prefectural police misappropriated a portion of the funds budgeted for criminal investigations, with some sections faking payments to police informants. The slush funds created in this manner reached 170 million yen.
