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The New York Police Department, already saddled with corruption scandals, saw its image further tainted on Tuesday with the conviction of a police detective for planting drugs on a woman and her boyfriend.

The best place to get arrested in the city is the Bronx. Hands down. That's because the Bronx district attorney's office declines to prosecute an alarming number of cases, a Daily News probe found. Prosecutors toss cases at twice the rate of the citywide average - and more than three times the rate of their counterparts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, stats show.

The office refused to press charges for 1,195 felony arrests, or about 10% of 11,938 total felony cases. They also rejected 6,315 misdemeanors, or roughly 20% of the 31,582 total. The overall 17.3% rejection rate is more than twice the citywide average of 8.4%.

In the past month, the Bronx district attorney's office declined to prosecute a number of disturbing crimes. Among them: - A crazed woman slashed a man in his stomach, but dodged attempted murder charges because of an uncooperative victim. A cop source said prosecutors did "less than nothing" to gain his trust. - Officers found two men sitting on a park bench reeking of pot with a large bag of crack cocaine at their feet. Prosecutors deemed there was not enough evidence to prove the drugs belonged to them, records show. Steven Reed, a spokesman for Johnson, attributed the office's high case rejection rate to "rigorous screening." "Charging decisions are based on the facts of the case and the law," he said. "The deprivation of an individual's liberty is something that we take very seriously."

In a lacerating decision that accused Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of willfully ignoring the racial imbalance in the New York Fire Department, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that a court-appointed monitor would be installed to oversee the department’s recruitment efforts and ensure that more minority candidates are hired