The way it used to be

 Long ago in Galveston, Texas, police officers were paid like waiters. The city provided a starvation wage. The real money came from the owners of businesses and influential residents along the beat.

When I went to work for the newspaper, people still remembered the good old days before the Texas rangers arrived in the late 1950s. The rangers were there because there was just too much corruption in local government, including the police department, to enforce state laws against gambling and prostitution.

If a local cop is employed completely by the public, with good pay and benefits, he or she works for the public. But in Galveston, it was not at all clear who was the boss.

An officer’s paycheck was a fraction of the amount contributed by business owners. What was a cop to do when the owner of a café who paid cops to overlook his slot machines didn’t like the ethnicity, color or politics of a guest and called to say he needed someone beaten up? And what was this cop to do if the café owner got into a squabble with the brothel owner next door? What if both business owners wanted someone roughed up? In those days cops in Galveston did many interesting things that had nothing to do with the law.

The public had given the cop a badge, a gun and some authority. But that authority — because it was influenced by private money — became something other than an instrument of the public’s interest. The public’s interest had been corrupted.

I ran into many old islanders who lamented the end of the good of days. But as I listened to these stories, I heard about how great it was to be able to call a cop or a code enforcement officer and get someone — a bum or an enemy — into real trouble. You could do that — and all for the cost of a “gift.” I also heard from people who didn’t remember anything good about an era when the city was run by gangsters.

Corruption is easier to see in a small city than in a nation.

But it’s corruption when an official charges people a fee to see him on public business. It’s corruption when an official accepts campaign contributions or personal gifts and then rewards the donors with public contracts. That official is using the authority granted him by the public for personal gain. That’s corruption whether the official works at City Hall or in the White House.