For years, Dade's criminal justice leaders have made largely ineffectual attempts to stem the costly, widespread police abuse of court overtime documented this week in The Herald. Top officials at Dade's three biggest police departments have issued numerous memos and regulations banning Collars for Dollars. Officers ignored the guidelines or maneuvered around them. They knew it didn't matter, because punishment was rare.

Not a single cop in recent memory has been prosecuted for piling on to a case and earning money, even though a County Court judge, a defense lawyer and three retired police commanders told The Herald they consider the practice to be theft. Even though officers were occasionally accused of wrongdoing, only two -- both from Miami -- faced serious consequences. One was demoted and then reinstated, the other fired while protesting his innocence. The police chiefs blame the worst abuse on a minority of "bad apples." But prosecutors and the rest of the legal system share in the blame. A flawed system All participate in a system that lacks accountability and sends contradictory messages to police. The police flock to traffic stops and then list each other as witnesses, even if their involvement in the case was slight. "You grow up with the feeling that if you're on a crime scene, you go to court, " Miami Police Chief Donald Warshaw said. "Still, there's a big difference between two officers and 10 officers showing up in court on a routine arrest. There's no reason for that." All of those cops end up going to court because prosecutors don't screen out the unnecessary witnesses in drunk driving cases and other misdemeanors. So police officers intent on abuse know how to take advantage of the lack of screening: Go to a scene, get listed in the paperwork, get a subpoena, go to court, make money. They call it piggybacking or Collars for Dollars. It doesn't work that way in Broward County and elsewhere in the United States. And it doesn't happen with Dade felony arrests, because prosecutors in those cases conduct interviews before issuing subpoenas so they can screen out non-essential witnesses. The practice spreads Dade police veterans believe the Collars for Dollars abuse began to get out of hand in the late 1980s, when federal grant money encouraged more drunk driving arrests and special DUI training for officers. The defense bar responded with more intricate courtroom challenges. As DUI enforcement became more sophisticated, the door opened for more officers to get involved in drunk driving arrests. It became harder for supervisors to determine which officers needed to go to court. "It's always difficult to monitor something you're not intimately acquainted with, " acknowledged Metro-Dade Police Cmdr. Harriet Janosky. It's not hard to find evidence that the police failed to police themselves. Follow this paper trail: In January 1993, the Dade state attorney's office asked Miami Beach Police to start coding the name of every officer listed on the back of an arrest form according to what that officer did on the case. The code was designed to help prosecutors screen out unnecessary officers. Prosecutors later proposed the same coding system to Miami officers. Code seldom used Yet today, police rarely use the code. "It's maybe one out of 10, " said Isis Perez, Dade's chief County Court prosecutor. She admitted that even in the rare case when police include the codes, the prosecutors don't follow them. In August 1995, Carlos Alvarez, then an assistant director for Metro-Dade Police, distributed a memo outlining six clear standards for when officers should be listed as witnesses. The standards required officers to have a direct role in a case. Yet The Herald found that Metro routinely sends officers to court on DUI cases who had little involvement in the police work and couldn't offer any unique testimony. "I wrote the memo, " Alvarez said recently. "I expected the commanders to follow through on it. Obviously, they haven't." For years, Miami Police officials wrote numerous memos tightening procedures and questioning officers to curtail piggybacking. Further efforts In late 1996, Miami instituted additional checks on arrest forms to attack the problem. "We began re-emphasizing some old practices, some forgotten practices, to make sure we didn't have just a paper policy, " Assistant Chief Raul Martinez said. "We are closely checking the back of those witness lists." Officers who earned large amounts of overtime were scrutinized, but rarely punished. And the department's court overtime costs continued to go up, to $3.2 million last year. "The overtime controls we have enacted don't appear to be having much results, " Assistant Chief Martinez wrote in a memo in November 1996. Since then, things have gotten a bit better. Miami Police say their controls led to a $233,184 drop in court overtime in the first six months of this year.