Two Queens Officers Are Accused of Giving Out Accident Reports for Bribes For the insurance industry, they are a familiar bugaboo: the people who stalk accident scenes and emergency rooms seeking patients to deliver to medical clinics for costly treatment. Far less frequently encountered are police officers abetting that process, which insurance investigators say frequently ends in fraud. But Queens prosecutors said on Thursday that two officers accepted bribes to provide accident information to so-called runners for local clinics. The officers, from neighboring precincts in northern Queens, were identified as Danny Cano, 36, and Roberto Espinal, 44. They were not working in concert, officials said, but are accused of independently taking money in exchange for providing accident victims" personal details from official Police Department paperwork. And they did so for often modest sums, prosecutors said, ranging from $40 to $1,500. Mr. Cano, an officer for seven years, and Mr. Espinal, an officer for nine, were suspended without pay. If convicted, they face the loss of their jobs and pensions and up to seven years in prison. They were arraigned in Queens criminal court on Wednesday. Bail was set at $15,000 for Mr. Cano and $10,000 for Mr. Espinal, and both were released on Thursday. Lawyers for the two officers did not respond to phone calls requesting comment. Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly commended the work of Internal Affairs detectives who built the case against the two officers, and said on Thursday at a news conference that the investigation was continuing into the surrounding nexus of runners, medical clinics and police officers. While there have been no other arrests thus far, prosecutors suggested that the runners - who were not identified - were paid to bring victims to particular clinics or doctors. It was part of a "scheme to maximize cases involving insurance providers," said Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney. According to the criminal complaint against him, Mr. Cano, of the 115th Precinct in Jackson Heights, provided whole accident reports or information from those reports of at least 13 accident victims, garnering $6,200 in bribes over the course of five months this year. Mr. Espinal, working out of the 110th Precinct in Elmhurst, was paid at least $1,500 in bribes from a runner for information on seven victims over roughly the same period, according to the complaint against him. In several instances, Mr. Espinal received text messages requesting the information and took payments of as little as $40, the complaint said. Kevin Gallagher, a retired sergeant who worked in the auto crimes unit of the Police Department, said it was not the first time officials with access to victim information had been pulled into the unsavory world of ambulance chasing. "We've seen it in the past where employees of the hospitals will give it out to a runner," said Mr. Gallagher, who now works in the New York office of the National Insurance Crime Bureau, a liaison between law enforcement and the insurance industry. Everybody who came in with an accident, they would pass on information. Insurance industry experts said there was indeed a timeworn method of creating fraudulent or exaggerated claims: find a real accident, massage the details or the nature of the injuries to make them sound worse, perhaps add a few more victims, file and collect. Accident information is sought to "give a legitimate background to a medical claim," Frank Scafidi, a spokesman for the insurance crime bureau, said. To find potential accidents, insurance investigators say, those involved in such schemes pay runners to bring patients to certain clinics that will sign off on the manufactured or exaggerated injuries, offering payments in the hundreds of dollars. "It's not illegal in New York," Mr. Gallagher said of the runners acting as go-betweens for clinics. But, he added, they could be classified as co-conspirators if there were a fraud investigation into the clinic. The police declined to say whether arrests of doctors or other clinic workers could be expected from the investigation. Not all of the schemes involve bribery, Mr. Gallagher said. Some of them set up a staged accident, just get a bunch of their friends into a car, rent a U-Haul truck and slam it into the back.