On June 14, 1993, Maurice Clarke was treated at St. Thomas Hospital for burns on his chest and stomach. That much is certain.

How he got the burns isn't.

Clarke, 42, says he was beaten without cause, doused with alcohol and set on fire.

Steven Hodge receives the Police Department Officer of the Month award in September 1991 from Deputy Chief Sylvia Thomas. The Police Academy's Academic Award winner went on to receive many praises.He was assassinated March 27, and several of Hodge's fellow police officers are under investigation.

The men who did it, he says, were four St. Thomas policemen.

The officers tell a different story. They say Clarke caught fire while freebasing.

The officers, Tracy Richardson, Kent Hodge, Richard Valesquez and Francis Brooks, were fired on the orders of Gov. Alexander A. Farrelly after an internal police investigation. They didn't stay fired.

An arbitrator who reviewed their case ordered them reinstated. He said the government had not proved the officers set Clarke on fire.

The U.S. Attorney's Office and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division continue to investigate the case.

The torching is just one in a growing number of brutality and abuse charges leveled at Virgin Islands police. Complaints against officers are filed with the Police Department at a rate of four a month.

Since 1984, 34 officers have faced criminal charges ranging from grand larceny to murder; 20 have been convicted. The department has ranged in size from 315 to 518 officers.

During the same period, the police Internal Affairs Unit, which probes complaints against officers, investigated more than 260 reports of police wrongdoing and found more than 100 had merit.

Bad cops and sloppy police work hurt not only the department's image but also its ability to fight crime, experts say. Public distrust of officers often means that victims and potential witnesses don't come forward and criminals go free.

"Crime has a lot to do with law enforcement," says National Association of Police Departments Chairman Ron Nelson, whose group is reviewing the V.I. Police Department's request for accreditation. "If the department has problems it's certainly going to feed crime."

That's exactly what a six-month Daily News investigation has revealed.

Among the findings:

• More than a dozen guns issued to police officers or placed in the Police Department's evidence rooms on St. Thomas and St. Croix have ended up on the streets in the hands of criminals. Two were used in murders.
• Even the territory's top cops have been tainted. The last two police commissioners to leave office were forced out by scandals.
• The Attorney General's Office is investigating charges that three St. Croix police officers routinely shake down prostitutes from the Dominican Republic, many of whom are illegal aliens. They reportedly extort money from the women by threatening to turn them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The women, prosecutors say, were too frightened at first to complain, but some eventually did.
• Arrests are reportedly imminent in an investigation of police officers who were moonlighting on police time. Prosecutors say they are ready to file charges against several officers who collected thousands of dollars for work they did not do. Investigators say the officers would call in to their shift supervisor, tell him they were on duty, then go to their other jobs.
• Officers routinely fail to show up for pretrial hearings with prosecutors and for testimony in court. As a result, scores of cases are dismissed or lost. Prosecutors say police supervisors refuse to accept subpoenas for subordinates -- because then they would be responsible for ensuring that the officers show up in court.
• A third of all cases filed by the Attorney General's Office are dismissed in court because police fail to give prosecutors arrest reports, prosecutors say.
• Evidence in even the territory's most highly publicized cases is routinely mishandled or lost by the police. In the murder case against Roberto "Robbie" Smalls, the Forensics Division initially mislabeled the evidence it sent to the FBI Crime Laboratory in Washington, D.C. The FBI spotted the error and got the evidence on track. Smalls, the first person prosecuted for murder by the Attorney General's Office under its new expanded jurisdiction, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
• The police have done a poor job of identifying and removing problem cops. Most officers convicted of crimes received favorable performance evaluations at the time they were committing crimes.
• Police recruits are evaluated for psychological fitness for the job, but the man who for two years did the evaluations on many recruits, some of whom are now senior officers, was a fraud and was not qualified to do evaluations.
• Charges of corruption on the force are so widespread that defense attorneys routinely try to discredit police officers testifying in court. Defense requests for police personnel records occur so frequently that earlier this year Chief District Court Judge Thomas Moore was forced to set rules on how those files can be obtained.

• The five-member Internal Affairs Unit, which investigates complaints against officers, is badly understaffed and has a poor track record of following up on reports of corruption on the force. During the recent election campaign, IAU officers had to double as bodyguards for gubernatorial candidates.
• Bad cops stay on the force because union contracts make it virtually impossible to fire them.

"We are supposed to be a paramilitary organization," says Police Commissioner Anthon Christian. "But in reality we are management-union based. I would like to see disciplinary procedures removed from the union contract. Unless this is done we won't have the kind of force we all agree we need."

Since taking over as police commissioner last year, Christian has tried to clean house. Initially, he tried to get rid of 20 officers by firing them or forcing them to resign. Now most are back on the force.

"It is very hard to permanently fire officers because of the nature of union contracts," says Assistant Attorney General Elwood York. "This certainly doesn't give the police commissioner a lot of room to work with."

Confidence in the force, on the decline since the 1980s, plummeted even further this year when reports surfaced that police officers were among the suspects in the March 27 murder of traffic cop Steven Hodge. Hodge was gunned down in front of his home by three or four assailants, police say.

The murder is being investigated by the FBI. And except for one police officer assigned to work with the agency, the Police Department is being shut out of the investigation.

"Any other police department in the nation would be clamoring to find the people who killed one of its own," says a federal law enforcement agent assigned to the territory.

"This police department is just sitting back. That's unheard of."