I don't know too many State Police troopers, but it usually makes me feel safer knowing they're out there. With all the idiots on the roads - you know who you are - it's plain that these men and women in uniform and Smokey the Bear hats are risking their lives every day.

All-too often you read a story about a trooper struck by a passing vehicle on the interstate, or a knucklehead leading state police on a high-speed chase. Few things can bring a smile to my cheeks faster than a reckless driver - usually wearing a backwards baseball hat - weaving through highway traffic at 80 miles-per-hour, who's been stopped a couple miles down the road by a trooper.

Have a nice day, jerk, because paying a few hundred dollars in fines is cheaper than wrapping yourself around a tree or a bridge abutment, which is my common, unforgiving wish when I see idiots streaking closer in my rear-view mirror.

One of my theories of life is a simple calculus, where the time speeders save in travel is subtracted later, in hospital emergency rooms.

The best way to start a day is to drive past a stopped car or tractor-trailer truck whose driver is making weak excuses for unacceptable behavior to a trooper writing up a nice, hefty ticket.

One of the worst ways to begin a workday is to attend a news conference at the state attorney general's office that includes the release of a scathing report on state troopers and the people who make the big bucks in their nice, safe offices who fail to supervise

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them.

It wasn't the best day in the careers of Public Safety Commission Leonard Boyle and Col. Edward Lynch, the state police commander, as they stood by Attorney General Dick Blumenthal the other day.

But Boyle and Lynch got away cheaply, because if reporters had copies of the huge report before the happy-talk news conference, the law enforcement executives would have had to field some tough questions about some of their own supervisory decisions criticized in the report prepared by officials in the New York State Police.

The 207-page study, which detailed about 20 cases of corruption, dereliction of duty, drug dealing, falsifying information, misuse of weapons, sexual and domestic assault and other instances of troopers running amok and their bosses covering up for them, is probably the tip of some kind of iceberg.

"Boys with guns," is a common pejorative for bad cop behavior such as the recent shenanigans inside the closed culture of the Milford Police Department and the even-more serious allegations within the 1,200-member State Police.

Most of the incidents uncovered in the State Police report occurred during the tenure of Art Spada, the former Superior Court judge who was appointed Public Safety commissioner by John "Why Should I Resign If I've Done Nothing Wrong" Rowland.

Spada, you'll remember, had a habit of driving around his state car and stopping speeders and reckless drivers. That was laudable, except Spada had none of trooper training and stands about five-feet tall in his wing tips. In the blockbuster State Police study, my personal favorite is the case of a "Trooper A" at Bradley International Airport who was caught chatting up an airline employee by that employee's supervisor, who pointed out that the worker was "on the clock."

In a threatening show of dangerous, misplaced force, Trooper A "racked" his pump-action shotgun in a crowded air terminal during this bizarre 2003 incident, which was never even reported to the Department of Public Safety's Internal Affairs Unit.

When the airline supervisor complained about the threat to another trooper, "Trooper B" failed to notify his superior officers.

In another incident Trooper B, also at Bradley, was involved in the alleged sexual harassment of a Transportation Security Administration employee, but the case was also dropped. "Trooper A received no discipline and the incident went entirely undocumented," said the report, which did not identify most troopers by name. Once word of these failures to police their own got around to airport employees, how good about the State Police do you think they felt at Bradley?

The New York investigators found that Boyle could have been persuaded by union officials when he overruled claims against a trooper accused by his estranged wife, of smoking dope in Jamaica.

Union members said that the alleged incident occurred in a foreign country where drug laws are unevenly enforced, to say the least. I sort of like the existential argument that breaking the law in another country shouldn't be confused with enforcing the law in the United States. Lynch, whose retirement is imminent, was reported to have attempted to discount a domestic-assault report against a trooper, including testimony he pointed a loaded pistol at his wife's head. Boyle said that changes are already in effect, including higher-ranking leadership on the Internal Affairs Unit. He said that all complaints against State Police personnel will be reviewed personally by a lieutenant colonel who will head the unit.

But only time will tell whether the Department of Public Safety can weed out the few bad apples and restore the state's faith in its 103-year-old Division of State Police.

Ken Dixon's Capitol View appears Sundays in the Connecticut Post. You may reach him in the Capitol at (860) 549-4670, or e-mail him at kdixon@ctpost.com.