You have to say this for Edison Police Chief Thomas Bryan: He has a finger on the pulse of his townsfolk, and he's spot-on when he says the citizenry looks upon his officers with a squinty foreboding whenever they pass by.

But that's where clairvoyance ends.

Here's what the Chief thinks: The lingering distrust between the cops and the people whom they're paid to protect and serve is entirely media-driven.

"Every time these articles come out, it not only makes my job harder, but my officers," Bryan explained. "It really is unfair to our agency. If you look at the totality of the articles being written, it's always focused on the Edison Township and the department . . . in a negative light, most of the time. And they're not the facts."

Got all that?

The typical Edison denizen darts across the street whenever he spots a cop because of what he reads in the paper or watched in jaw-dropping awe on Channel 12.

It has nothing to do with the department firing or forcing out 30 cops over 20 years, or having five others currently under indictment, or facing a litany of lawsuits from employees.

Nothing to do with a 10-year vet allegedly firebombing the home of a captain at 4 a.m. while children and a 92-year-old women were sleeping inside.

Nothing to do with one cop propositioning women while on both emergency calls and routine traffic stops.

Nothing to do with cops getting all beered-up while on the job, selling drugs for sex, sending racist text messages, or stealing a cruiser to trigger an FBI alarm.

Nothing to do with having an Internal Affairs division that was so corrupt it is now under the purview of the Middlesex County prosecutor.

Nothing to do with the deplorable behavior in a department where the average salary is more than $110,000, with some having the brass taking home $200,000, and another million handed out for overtime.

And it has nothing to do with having a chief who has allowed too many in his department to devolve into a subculture of arrogant sociopaths, including a cadre of clever phrase-makers who target enemies ensnared in their "wagon wheel of death."

The average Edison citizen can look past all that.

The problem, they need to learn, is bad press.

That was Bryan's message during a Feb. 22 Town Council meeting, which adds to the snowballing farce that is the law enforcement authority of our fifth largest city.

It is his choice to invent scapegoats because it makes him feel better, but this is the same fellow who believes that his own officers poisoned and killed his dogs, so he should probably remember that the media is the least of his problems.

His handlers did not provide specific examples of the media mendacity that he cites. Nor did they clarify the "subversive campaign of disinformation" he decries as his enemy in restoring the EPD to its glorious cachet.

His original thesis was about how the current arrangement - with the Middlesex County Prosecutor monitoring his Internal Affairs department - works fine. He can produce no proof that this is actually the case, so his audience was treated to a raucous detour through Chief Bryan's persecution complex. If you like campy, paranoid fiction, it was a masterpiece of the art.

More: Recent Star-Ledger editorials.

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