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It’s more than ticket-fixing chatter investigators caught on their wiretaps: Cops are also heard talking trash about the people they’re paid to protect, sources said. The wiretap recordings at the heart of the probe captured conversations rife with racist and inflammatory remarks, sources told the Daily News.

“There’s overtly racist language,” said one source. “And it gets a lot worse than that.”

The shocking language could cause the scandal to spiral far beyond the 17 cops already indicted, tainting cases of hundreds of officers caught on tape, legal experts said. “If a Bronx jury hears a cop call someone a n—-r or an animal, everything else they say goes out thewindow,” said one veteran defenselawyer with a client who wasarrested by a cop implicated in the scandal.

The Bronx investigation – which began as a probe into a cop suspected of drug ties – quickly grew as officers were caught on tape discussing fixing tickets and other wrongdoing, prosecutors have alleged. In the end, 17 cops – many of them union delegates – were indicted on Friday. Dozens of others will likely face departmental charges, sources said, and some already have. (more…)