The latest stench emanating from the Edison Police Department involves suspicious surveillance audio taken inside headquarters, a local prosecutor's investigation that found no criminal act, a union reaction that borders on apoplectic, and a chief's ongoing struggle to fumigate a station house that smells worse than a wastewater treatment plant.

The case is actually two years old, but it offers a good example of the enmity that defines the EPD, and screams out for the kind of mediation that we've advocated since 2013.

Because if there has ever been a department in need of an intervention - preferably through the bill proposed by Sen. Peter Barnes (D-Middlesex), which would place EPD's Internal Affairs division under the authority of the Attorney General for two years - it is in Edison.

The camera caper is benign compared to cops firebombing the home of other cops, cops selling drugs for sex, cops robbing banks, or other aberrant behaviors that resulted in 30 EPD cops getting tossed out over 20 years. But it also tells you all you need to know about the smoldering mess inside Chief Thomas Bryan's camp, and it's time for him to acknowledge that he could use some help.

Cameras inside the EPD are not programmed to capture audio, but that capability was activated on Nov. 27, 2013, when a server was rebooted remotely by the security service that installed the equipment, restoring the default setting that includes audio recording.

The investigators from the Middlesex County Prosecutor's Office found that the audio content was "dumped" on Chief Bryan's order by the vendor before they arrived. Only then, Bryan says, was it suggested that he preserve all video and audio for the MCPO.

Nobody has ever said the audio recording was deliberate, or that anyone heard anything worth keeping - which would be illegal.

But the PBA and the officers' union wants Bryan's scalp for "destroying evidence" - even while acknowledging the recordings may have resulted from a software glitch - and sent a screed to the State Commission of Investigation. The response was crickets, perhaps because the SCI knows that three Middlesex investigators already spent four months (Dec. 2013 to March 2014) on the case.

Still, while the union probably knew this was a dead end, it's not wrong to demand a state-level investigation.

Wayne Fisher, the policing expert from Rutgers, put it this way: "What this case and all the others tell you is this: There has to be some degree of trust between unions and leadership or it doesn't work," he says. "And it's not about the recording. It's about the totality of circumstances that have unfolded in the last decade in Edison."

In other words, this department is beyond the point of no return. All you need to do is talk to some of them.

Union leaders and some cops they represent complain endlessly about the chief's abuse of the IA process to achieve political ends and exact retribution, adding that the MCPO - which won't comment on the camera matter - is collusive and lacks transparency.

And Bryan is quick to point out the daggers protruding from his back. He may be a man of imperishable honor, but his speech is punctuated with Queeg-like pronouncements such as "just another attempt to undermine the chief," or "another one of my officers trying to muddy me up." He even admits his suspicion that his fellow cops killed his dog.

But the fact that he ordered the audio erased - because "the most pressing issue was the recordings being accessed and viewed" - is curious. It would have been easier to have the vendor block access to the server until the investigators took possession of the hard drives.

Someone has to step in. The Barnes bill would eliminate the political quagmire, and even though it is mute on this issue, the Attorney General can spare the three employees it takes to run the Edison IA - that's just a political choice that must be made to restore sanity to New Jersey's fifth largest city.

Trust has eroded to dust in the EPD. The union's relentless attacks are not only compromising Bryan's reform initiatives, whatever they are, but also poisoning the minds of the rank-and-file under his authority

And regardless of those lower crime stats he likes to cite, Bryan's department is still a banana republic in turmoil. If ever there was a place that needed a new sheriff in town, so to speak, this is it.

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An earlier version of this editorial stated that the State Commission of Investigation is affiliated with the Attorney General's office. It is an independent, non-prosecutorial agency.

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