Baltimore: More videos
released showing police officers “manufacturing evidence”
By Adam
Soroka
15 August 2017
Earlier this month, the Baltimore public defender’s office
released footage showing several Baltimore police officers appearing to collude
while planting drugs at a traffic stop.
The new video was taken during a traffic stop last November and
made public early this month. Shamere Collins, 35, was pulled over after a
police officer allegedly witnessed her passenger conduct a drug deal. In the
video, several officers are shown to be searching the front driver’s side of
Collins’ car, then the camera goes off, then on again, without explanation.
In the next video clip, an officer asks if the driver’s side area
has been searched, only then to find a bag of marijuana and heroin in the area
that had been searched thoroughly in the previous clip.
Collins’ attorney, Josh Insley, released the footage stating it
showed officers engaging “in what appears to be the staged recovery of
narcotics.” In an interview with NBC, Collins admitted to recreational
marijuana use but was dumbfounded when police pulled heroin from her car. “My
mind—I went numb-like—I didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “They [were]
telling me I was facing time and all this ... so it’s like I felt numb. I
didn’t know what to do.”
The footage came just a week after a previous video, again
released by the public defender’s office, showed an officer planting a bag of
pills under a pile of garbage in an alley as two other officers looked on. The
officer planting the drugs in the first video has been suspended while the other
two are on administrative leave. As a result, 41 drug and gun cases that relied
on the officers’ testimony were dropped.
In both videos, officers are unaware that their body-cams are set
to record a continuous 30-second loop to capture the moments before an officer
chooses to begin recording. In the first video, the first 30 seconds show an
officer plant pills in an empty can only to “find” it later in the clip. In the
second video, the officers wait for 30 seconds, then, as if on cue, begin
speaking and searching.
Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis issued a memo that
stated officers should not attempt to “recreate the recovery of evidence.” In
response, the public defender’s office released a statement saying the footage
clearly shows “multiple officers working together to manufacture evidence.”
Baltimore, just an hour’s drive from the US capital, has seen a
sharp surge of police corruption and brutality in recent years. In 2015,
Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, was abducted by police and taken for a
“rough ride” in the back of a police van, causing a spinal injury that led to
his death. The brutal killing set off protests against police violence
throughout Baltimore, leading public officials to call a state of emergency and
imposing martial law in the city.
Democratic Party officials, fearful that popular anger would break
out of their control, sought to direct protests behind the state’s efforts to
prosecute the six police officers involved in Gray’s death. The state failed to
obtain a guilty verdict for a single officer.
Last year, the Obama Department of
Justice carried out an investigation of the Baltimore Police Department that
found “there is reasonable cause to believe that BPD engages in a pattern or
practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.” In March of
this year, seven officers were indicted on charges of racketeering. The Baltimore Sun reported
they “are accused of shaking down citizens, filing false court paperwork and
making fraudulent overtime claims.”
Co
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