A North Carolina police officer is fighting to keep his job after he was fired for planting fake drugs on 11 innocent men over the course of two years who ended up spending a combined two-and-a-half years behind bars before charges were dismissed.
Raleigh Police Detective Omar Abdullah was terminated last week, one month after a lawsuit against him was settled for $2 million. The former “Employee of the Year” had spent more than a year on paid administrative leave where he continued to collect his $69,673 salary, according to the News & Observer.
At this time, there is no indication he will even be charged with a crime.
Then there is New York City police officer Kyle Erickson, another award-winning cop whose body camera caught him planting weed in a car he had pulled over for having a broken tail light in March 2018 after using force on the passenger who did not believe they had the right to search his jacket.
Erickson justified the use of force by claiming he had smelled weed.
Erickson, who comes from a family of cops, is also accused of planting drugs in another incident that took place a month earlier in which his body camera was inexplicably turned off for four minutes which just happened to be when he claimed to find a lit joint on the floorboard of a car his partner had just searched and found nothing, according to a lawsuit which you can read here.
At this time, Erickson has not been disciplined or charged for planting the weed.
And finally there’s Adam Schneider in Indiana who is already facing a litany of charges related to secretly recording women undressing in his home to having a sexual relationship with a confidential informant.
The women undressing were in his home trying out clothes that his wife would sell. Indiana State Police came across the videos on his phone while investigating him for having sex with the female confidential informant. His wife has filed for divorce.
But at this time, the 40-year-old New Albany police officer has not yet been charged for planting drugs on an innocent man that kept him behind bars for almost two weeks before charges against him were dismissed.
However, the man, Shane Clarke, filed a tort claim notice last month which is the pre-cursor to a lawsuit, accusing Schneider of planting methamphetamine on him that actually belonged to the confidential informant with whom he was having sex, according to WDRB.
He is also being sued for secretly recording the women who had an expectation of privacy in a lawsuit that you can read here.
The three cops who have all made headlines in recent weeks are the latest example of the failed drug war that empowers cops to destroy lives in the name of “public safety” but does nothing to curb the use of drugs and does even less to protect innocent citizens from false imprisonment.
The incidents also show how dirty cops remain protected by the system, including commanding officers, prosecutors and judges who allow them to operate with impunity.
In a country where police have the power to determine whether you live or die in a matter of seconds, it can take years to convict or fire a dirty cop. And even then, the system is so biased towards cops that there is always that chance they will successfully appeal and be rehired.
In the case from Raleigh, several other police officers, including commanding officers, were well-aware that Abdullah was planting fake drugs on suspects because they would conduct field tests immediately after the arrests which would reveal the drugs to be brown sugar instead of heroin, according to the lawsuit which you can read here.
But Abdullah would ignore these results and transport them to jail anyway where they would remain for weeks. And the other cops would remain silent, preferring to protect one of their own rather than honor the oath they swore to the Constitution.
The same can be said in the NYPD case where prosecutors refused to disclose the bodycam footage showing Erickson planting the weed on a man named Jason Serrano in March 2018 until more than a year later.
By then, Serrano had already accepted a plea deal where he pleaded guilty to resisting arrest with the agreement to charges of drug possession and obstructing government operations would be dropped.
Serrano, who had been recovering from a stab wound the day of the arrest, said he accepted the plea deal to avoid being sent to Rikers Island, the largest jail in New York City, which would have made it difficult to fully recover from the stab wound.
“If I had known any of this, I would have never taken that,” Serrano told Gothamist after learning of the video.
Last month, a New York City judge vacated his conviction on the basis of the video but the Staten Island District Attorney’s Office – who opposed the judge’s decision – says it has no plans to prosecute Erickson.
In the Indiana case, prosecutors and commanding officers have made more of an effort to discipline Schneider because he is already facing six felonies. He was also suspended without pay which is a rarity.
However, three other cops have resigned from the New Albany Police Department after being placed on paid administrative leave in July which was when the investigation into Schneider began.
At this time, New Albany police have refused to explain why they were suspended in the first place which has left local media suggesting it is related to the Schneider case.
Good Luck, have you thought of collecting a petition to demand your local & state representatives push to remove qualified immunity for all law enforcement & each case is judged case by case as the evidence supports, and not via ‘qualified immunity’, and if an officer makes a false arrest m ticket, and there is evidence to prove it is false then the officer personally becomes liable for ALL the court costs of the defendant, so the defendant has no loss, then cops might think before giving bogus charges etc.