Police Routinely Frame Innocent People
And you could certainly be next.
Police planting evidence is something that certainly isn't new, technology is just making it easier to prove - even their own tech from time to time. Never trust a cop, their training, their quotas, all of their weapons, and their job description [terrorism: using intimidation and force in the pursuit of political aims] make them some of the most dangerous individuals to interact with. These cases just highlight a very small portion of the risks involved when interacting with the police AT ALL.
Forged evidence, fabricated evidence, and planting evidence are just a few unethical ways police set out to meet their quota (or even just take out their frustrations) - and you could certainly be their next target. I'm sure none of the victims discussed here ever thought it would happen to them. Unfortunately, it's not only the police you have to worry about, in many of the cases the prosecutor's helped to make convictions and plea deals on charges stemming from fraud.
Baltimore, Maryland 2019
A retired Baltimore police sergeant is charged with planting a pellet gun at the scene of an arrest and telling another officer who is currently behind bars for corruption to lie about the incident to federal investigators, according to a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday (March 5th 2019).
Keith Allen Gladstone, 51 pleaded not guilty to the charges at his arraignment. Gladstone's Feb. 27 indictment on conspiracy and witness tampering charges was unsealed at Tuesday's hearing.
In light of the indictment, the Baltimore Police Department announced Tuesday that three other officers would be suspended and investigated by the Internal Affairs department, as reported by The Baltimore Sun.
Brooklyn, NY 2015 Cops Caught Planting Guns On Multiple Citizens. In January of 2015, Brooklyn district attorney Kenneth Thompson announced an investigation into a group of New York police officers who are accused of planting guns on at least six different suspects. While the results of that investigation have yet to be released, the evidence against the accused officers, all from the 67th precinct, appears damning, to say the least. Concerns were raised after arresting officers failed to produce or name an alleged confidential informant, who they claimed had led them to 53-year-old James Herring. Herring was arrested on weapons charges and faced a 15-year prison sentence, as a result of those charges. After the officers repeatedly failed to produce the informant, Herring’s case was dismissed by the judge, but not before he suffered in multiple ways including financially from these fabricated allegations.
Washington Parish, LA. 2012 Douglas Dendinger a disabled 47-year-old veteran, was also on his way to prison on false charges. Washington Parish cops and the prosecutors they were colluding with were going to make sure that happened. This case outlines how thick the blue police "line" actually is.
In August of 2012, Dendinger was paid $50 to serve a court summons on behalf of his nephew against a Bogalusa police officer named Chad Cassard regarding a police brutality lawsuit. The handoff went smoothly, it's what happened after that is disturbing. Within 20 minutes of carrying out the task, police officers showed up to his door, arrested him, and threw him in jail on charges of simple battery, obstruction of justice and intimidating a witness. Seven witnesses provided false information on behalf of Cassard and if it wouldn't have been for Dendinger's wife recording the incident on her cell phone none of them would have ever been caught.
The seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard - never faced charges. All but one of the cops who filed false reports continued wearing badges and collecting paychecks (funded by you)? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. The attorneys haven't faced punishment. They should be looking for new careers — after they have been punished of course. But, nope.
If a group of regular people had pulled this on someone, they’d be facing "criminal" conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and whatever else the cops could conjure up. So why aren’t they? Pretty simple, the system protects and covers it's own consistently. They all work together to make money off of you.
New Jersey, 2012 Police dash cam video exonerates a New Jersey man which leads to indictment of the police involved.Not before he was falsely accused and beaten, though.
Before prosecutors were given a dashcam video from a second patrol car (which for some reason took a suspiciously long amount of time to get), Marcus Jeter faced charges of eluding police, resisting arrest and aggravated assault on an officer.
Cops were called to Jeter's home for a domestic violence situation, where no one was arrested and Jeter left shortly after police visited, according to a WABC-TV report.
Officers followed Jeter's SUV when he left his home and pulled him over. Jeter told ABC, he pulled right over and wasn't trying to escape.
Dashcam video shows two officers jump out of the patrol car and order Jeter out of the car at gunpoint. The second tape, of a backup officer responding from the other side of the highway, shows the patrol car swerve across oncoming traffic and running into the front of Jeter's SUV, causing him to hit his head on the steering wheel.
Neither that video nor the fact the officer struck Jeter's SUV with his patrol car was ever mentioned in any of the police reports of the incident.
"Get out the car!" one officer yells while he uses his baton to smash the driver's side window.
Jeter says he was scared he'd be shot (and rightfully so), so he sat where he was with his hands in the air as the officers broke the window, unlocked his door and worked to get his seatbelt off to arrest him.
"The next thing I know, as he's coming around the car, the glass gets busted and all the glass goes in my face," Jeter told WABC. "My hands are up. As soon as he opens the door, one of the officers just reached in and punched me in the face. As he's trying to take my seatbelt off, he's elbowing me in my jaw. And I'm like 'Ahhh!' and he's like 'Stop trying to take my gun! Stop resisting arrest!'"
The video shows the officers rip the innocent man from his car and throw him on the ground.
"Stop resisting! Stop trying to take my f------ gun! Just put your hands behind your back, a--hole," one officer yells.
"I've done nothing wrong," Jeter can be heard saying as his face is smashed into the ground.
"Shut the f--- up!" an officer barks back.
The officers continue to attack Jeter as he pleads with them, saying "I did nothing wrong!"
The officers pin him up against the patrol car and start to read his Miranda rights. As they throw Jeter in the back of the car, another officer takes a swing at his head. The first plea offer for Jeter was 5 years in prison.
It wasn't until prosecutors saw the second tape, which contained the audio and shows the officer drive into Jeter's car, that all of the charges were dropped.
An internal investigation into the incident unsurprisingly found the officers did nothing wrong. Although, they were eventually suspended without pay and indicted.
Pasadena, CA 2012 A Pasadena homicide detective bragged to a co-worker that the department routinely framed suspects, according to a defense attorney who played a tape of the detective in court.
The detective, William Broghamer, is accused of intimidating witnesses in the murder trial of Rashad McCoy, a Palmdale man charged in the 2012 shooting death of Joseph Jones, a 23-year-old Pasadena resident.
Public Defender Cris Contreras tried to show a pattern of witness intimidation by Broghamer when he played for the jury a recorded interview of McCoy’s girlfriend, Mykesha Blair, as well as a comment Broghamer made after a 2011 interview with a suspect in an unrelated case.
After the 2011 interview ended, Broghamer left the recorder running. A sergeant in the room asked if somebody was in custody.
Broghamer responded, “Just pin it on anybody. That’s how we roll.”
St. Louis, 2011 St. Louis police officer charged with killing a black man "executed" him after a car chase, then planted a gun in the slain drug suspect's vehicle as an excuse for opening fire.
New York, 2011 A former NYPD narcotics detective caught in the middle of a corruption scandal testified it was "common practice" to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas (ARREST QUOTAS!!!!???!!???).
The testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the horrendous, unethical, tyrannical practice behind false arrests. Particularly in the Brooklyn and Queens narcotics squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops.
Anderson, testified under a cooperation agreement he made with prosecutors. He was caught planting cocaine, a practice coined as "flaking," on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity was low.
"I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy," Anderson testified in the Brooklyn Supreme Court.
"As a detective, you still have a number to reach while you are in the narcotics division," he said.
This conduct wasn't limited to a single squad.
"Did you observe with some frequency this ... a practice which is taking someone who was seemingly not guilty of a crime and laying the drugs on them?" Justice Gustin Reichbach asked Anderson.
"Yes, multiple times," he replied.
The judge questioned Anderson on whether he ever gave any consideration to the damage he was causing the innocent.
"It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators," he said. "It's almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they're going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway."
The city paid $300,000 to settle a false arrest suit by Jose Colon and his brother Maximo, who were both falsely arrested by Anderson and Tavarez. A surveillance tape inside the bar showed they had been framed. Without that video, the two men were certain to have been wrongfully imprisoned.
Poenix, Arizona 2005
An Arizona cop was caught on video planting a crack pipe on a mentally ill, homeless woman.
Officer Richard Chrisman of the Phoenix police department was caught on camera putting drug paraphernalia down the dress of a woman described as homeless and mentally ill. After the video surfaced, Chrisman said he did it as a joke.
New York, 1984 - 1993 A New York police criminal investigations supervisor overseeing seven counties admitted that he and another lieutenant faked fingerprint evidence so often that the New York Times called it an “almost routine fabrication of evidence in criminal cases”.
Alabama, Mid '90's
Alabama police department allegedly planted evidence on black men, resulting in 'almost 1,000' wrongful convictions.
San Fransisco, CA 1990 There’s considerable evidence that the San Francisco police have framed suspects, set up evidence, and illegally manipulated the legal system to put the wrong people behind bars. Repeatedly. That’s a crisis that requires active intervention from the District Attorney’s Office — and since Kamala Harris is on her way out the door, it has to be a top priority for her successor.
Superior Court Judge Marla Miller ruled Dec. 14 that Caramad Conley was denied his constitutional rights and convicted of murder after San Francisco cops allowed a paid witness to lie on the stand.
Miller concluded that homicide inspector Earl Sanders, who later became police chief and is now retired on a nice pension, knew that witness Clifford Polk was lying and made no effort to correct it.
That’s not the first time Sanders has been tied to an improper conviction. John Tennyson and Antoine Goff were sentenced to 25 years to life in 1990 — and spent 13 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. They were convicted after Sanders, and his then-partner Napoleon Hendrix, failed to inform the defense about key evidence.
Tennison and Goff would still be behind bars — except that Tennison’s brother read a Guardian story about the case and put a copy on the windshield of every car in the parking lot where he worked. And some of the people who parked there were lawyers for the top-flight criminal defense firm of Keker & Van Nest LLP.
The lawyers helped Jeff Adachi, then a deputy public defender, convince a federal judge that Tennison and Goff were wrongly convicted, and the two left prison in 2003. The case has now cost the San Francisco taxpayers $7.5 million.
Keep in mind these are only some of the instance when police have actually been caught. There is obviously an endless number of times things like this have occurred and the person's voice was never heard. People are still being exonerated to this moment for crimes they never committed. In nearly all of those cases no officers or detectives or other judicial "official" is ever held accountable for what they have done. It is always you, the taxpayer footing the bill on the salaries of these cops, judges, and police behaving badly - then doubling down if/when damages are awarded.
Some people say these are just bad apples and need to be removed, but the truth is closer to cancer, progressive, viscous, and terminal. The entire idea that certain humans can have an involuntary hierarchy over other humans needs to be cut out. You can't possibly grant rights, that you yourself don't even have - to someone else. These people, these cops, these judges, these prosecutors have the ability to just pick an innocent person and destroy their entire life. You are mistaken if you believe it can't happen to you.
