This is flabbergasting to me:
The conviction of Detective Arbeeny on official misconduct, offering a false instrument for filing and falsifying business records, was merely the latest example of police corruption, prosecutors said.
On Jan. 25, 2007, prosecutors said Detective Arbeeny planted a small bag of crack cocaine on two innocent people.
The detective’s lawyer, Michael Elbaz, tried to discredit the most important prosecution witnesses, Yvelisse DeLeon and her boyfriend, Juan Figueroa. Ms. DeLeon had testified that the couple drove up to their apartment building in Coney Island and were approached by two plainclothes police officers. She said she then saw Detective Arbeeny remove a bag of powder from his pocket and place it in the vehicle.
“He brought out his pocket,” Ms. DeLeon told the court. “He said, ‘Look what I find.’ It looked like little powder in a little bag.”
Later in 2007, the detective was accused of stealing multiple bags of cocaine from the prisoner van he had been assigned to; Justice Reichbach found Detective Arbeeny not guilty of those charges.
Though there had been conflicting testimony during the trial about the existence of quotas within the department’s drug units, Justice Reichbach said, a system of flawed procedures in part led to the charges against Detective Arbeeny.
In the department’s Brooklyn South narcotics unit, for instance, drugs seized as evidence are not counted or sealed until they reach the precinct and can be handled by multiple officers along the way, Justice Reichbach said, adding that such unacceptable practices “pale in significance” to the “cowboy culture” of the drug units.
“Anything goes in the never-ending war on drugs, and a refusal to go along with questionable practices raise the specter of blacklisting and isolation,” he said.
Putting aside the fact that it makes no sense to me why drugs are not counted and accounted for BEFORE they leave the scene, what amazes me is why anyone would plant drugs on someone. It doesn’t appear that this was a personal grudge or anything like that- he just did it. Aren’t there enough actual people carrying around crack cocaine in New York to keep these people busy? I mean, we’re told all the time how much drug use is going on. Why do they need to invent criminals?
A couple things to keep in mind- if this happened once, it happened multiple times. How many people has Arbeeny screwed like this.
Second, if Arbeeny was doing this, his fellow cops new and not only said nothing, but went to court multiple times to testify under oath. As Gore Vidal said, perjury is the native tongue of police.
Chris T.
Even good cops (or those that start out that way) see a lot of bad people get away with a lot of bad things, and can become cynical. After a while, it may be that taking the easy way out—planting evidence on those you already know are guilty—becomes habit, and you start planting evidence on those you “know” are guilty, even if they are in fact innocent.
This is why “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” has always been an appropriate question.
DFS
Why do they need to invent criminals?
Statistics. That’s another arrest to point to and say, we’re winning the war on drugs.
Zam
My guess is no, one in relation to the number of people they need to meet prison quotas, and two stories of intercity crime, violence, and drug abuse are likely greatly inflated by the number of white people from small towns who think that every neighborhood they enter in the big city is a “ghetto” or “the projects” and every loud noise is a gunshot, cigarette is a joint and weird smell is crack.
Zifnab
Gotta meet those quotas. If you catch a lot of perps, you’ll be in line for promotion. If you don’t catch enough, you’re clearly not doing your job. These cops clearly didn’t give a shit about stopping drug traffic. They were just aiming to hit their numbers.
Chris T.
@Zifnab: Rule of Management: “That which is measured, is managed.” When cops are measured by number of drug busts, the number of drug busts will go up.
@DFS: Indeed. The pressure comes down from above: “more drug busts please.” And as I said earlier, even cops that start out with the best of intentions can eventually give in. “Boss wants more drug busts, this guy’s obviously guilty of something, let’s get him on a drug charge.”
Martin
This has always been the flipside of racial quotas. Not for jobs or college admissions, but when you need 7 more narcotics arrests, who better to plant evidence on than black people, who are obviously guilty because the prisons are full of black people on narcotics convictions.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
More gold stars in the folder, the better the chance for advancement.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@DFS:
This.
Listen to a recent story on This American Life about one precinct in NYC and it’s move to increase arrest stats and you’ll see why this sort of thing is chronically under reported.
j low
@Chris T.:
This has got to be one of the ridiculous things I have ever read on BJ, but just pretending that cops have a extra sensory ability to determine the guilt of people on the street, the question I have is- If you are going to plant evidence in people that “you already know are guilty” why not start passing out bags of crack on Wall Street?
Beauzeaux
They were obviously DWB (Driving While Brown). Who else to plant evidence on?
Citizen Alan
Obviously not as egregious as what happened here, but the Supreme Court of Mississippi a few years back (in a case in which I wrote the appellant’s brief) affirmed that cops can take every scrap of cash in a suspect’s apartment, dump it onto the same pile as the cash found as part of the suspect’s drug stash, and then seize it all via drug forfeiture laws under the theory that it is now “co-mingled with drug money.” Kid in that case had hocked his car to pay a lawyer to represent him in a misdemeanor drug case, the money was still in the bank envelope from where he’d cashed the car dealer’s check, and the cops used the fact that he had three thousand dollars in cash in a bank envelope in a different room from where his thirty dollars worth of weed was found as “evidence” that he was guilty of felony drug trafficking.
MonkeyBoy
COLE what amazes me is why anyone would plant drugs on someone. … Aren’t there enough actual people carrying around crack cocaine in New York to keep these people busy?
Umm it takes much less effort to bust someone you have planted drugs on than to find someone with preexisting drugs on them.
DougJ
I think I used to rent an apartment from this cousin’s cousin or brother. Real nice guy.
S. cerevisiae
You know the cops only declare a fraction of the drugs they seize. Hell, I knew some Coast Guard guys in the eighties who always had tons of the best dope – they got it from their buddies in Florida.
Zifnab
@j low:
Good point. Amend that to “people you already know can’t defend themselves in a court of law”.
Bethanyanne
@j low: I read it as sarcasm, YMMV.
joes524
@j low:
Because they prefer the powdered stuff?
Nutella
The stats angle works the other way around, too. The number of rapes went way down in Baltimore recently because many reports of rape were recorded as something else. Way easier than finding, arresting, and investigating an actual criminal.
Davis X. Machina
You don’t read enough Yglesias. Schoolteachers do stuff that bad, and worse, every day. And no one goes after them…
Chris T.
@Bethanyanne: Partly sarcasm, partly not. I knew a few guys who became cops back in the 1980s (so my personal experience is 2+ decades old). The pay was terrible and the people they dealt with were generally pretty scuzzy, if they worked beats, and some of them (particularly the ones that were not borderline criminals themselves) burned out on it, but a few got off on the whole authority thing and that kept them going.
The ones who quit (or moved out of beat cop work) had, um, “interesting” stories. Lots of domestic violence where the victim (usually the wife, occasionally the husband) would not sign a complaint so that there was nothing they could do. Lots of drug dealers who were really stupid, and a much smaller number of dealers who were smart and made sure they were only “legally guilty” (provably guilty) of something minor at most.
Fire/EMS is also crap pay and huge stress, but the guys who did it (and kept doing it) did not have that sort of moral stress that the cops had.
[Edit to add: or, as Twain may have said, “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you, it’s what you do know that just ain’t so.”]
cathyx
Why didn’t his fellow officers turn him in?
John, you were in the service. Would your fellow servicemen turn you in if you did something illegal?
Urza
Who’s this John Cole guy that’s been posting so much lately. Must be new ;p
And really, watch The Shield. Even if cops weren’t doing alot of those kinds of things before the show i’m sure plenty started after.
The Moar You Know
Maybe drug use and crime are not as bad of a problem as you’ve been told they are.
MM
As mentioned above, quotas. Also, a lot of grant money is tied to demonstrating a need. Make X number of arrests showing how prevalent drugs are, get more points on your grant application for body armor, or an APC or what have you.
The local PD used to do it with minor in possession of alcohol in my blue collar neighborhood. And later, in my middle-class college neighborhood. You hit poor neighborhoods filled with people who have records, I can see upping the game to include drugs. Why not? Most people either have records and/or can’t or won’t fight the charge.
singfoom
The drug war strikes again, perverting incentives for those who are supposed to uphold the law.
No one watches the watchers. And when one of the watchers does something bad, they get a slap on the wrist. In this case, perhaps 4 years is a good sentence, but if he did it this time, I doubt this was his first time planting evidence.
Just another episode to remind us that prohibition has hidden costs that no one talks about. But hey, don’t let any reason or logic distract us from the war on (some) drugs (that poor minorities have). It makes our nation “great”.
Mary
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: That episode of This American Life (called “You Have the Right to Remain Silent”) was incredible and terrifying. Everyone should seriously go listen to it right now.
singfoom
@cathyx: The operative phrase is “Blue Code of Silence”. That’s a one way ticket to being ostracized.
gaz
This is extremely bad for *for the prosecutor’s office* as well.
Now as I understand it, if this detective is convicted, *every* single one of his previous collars (“legit” or not) is now up for possible appeal. Detective Dipshit here could have inadvertently made it possible for some truly bad people to be let back onto the street.
Fucking.
Moron.
*facepalm*
El Tiburon
I would trust a crack-whore over most cops.
And this has nothing to do with the Drug War. Too many cops have an “us vs. them” mentality. They will do whatever they deem necessary – whether it is legal or moral – to make their arrests and convictions.
The system is also to blame. Cops have almost no accountability and can literally get away with murder.
Villago Delenda Est
I see in the first five comments, the reason for this shit is nailed solid:
It’s all bureaucratic gamesmanship. Pad those stats. Get that promotion. Move up in the hierarchy.
The actual pursuit of justice is a distant second or third, at best, to the bureaucratic game.
The Moar You Know
There is no one who I trust less than a cop. Not a priest, not a used car salesman, not a lawyer…nobody.
Villago Delenda Est
@j low:
They’re guilty because they LOOK guilty. Check out that skin color! Of course they’re guilty!
Duh.
J. Michael Neal
@Davis X. Machina: That’s one of the most egregious misrepresentations I’ve seen in a while. It qualifies as an out and out lie.
Villago Delenda Est
@Davis X. Machina:
Not to mention barber shop and beauty parlor inspectors!
Barry
“Aren’t there enough actual people carrying around crack cocaine in New York to keep these people busy? I mean, we’re told all the time how much drug use is going on. Why do they need to invent criminals?”
It’s easier and safer than dealing with real criminals.
Villago Delenda Est
@cathyx:
I hoped I trained my soldiers well enough to turn me in if I…or any other officer…ordered them to commit an atrocity.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
Just had a cop lie flat out to the traffic court judge in NYC. Motherfucker just did it and I was out $150 for a bicycle violation (couldn’t stop, due to ice in the intersection after the 2/1/11 Snowpocalypse).
Can someone tell me definitively whether a cop’s testimony in civil court is somehow deemed more reliable (i.e., “valuable”), when the cop and the defendant both are under oath? Because we both had only eyewitness accounts of the incident, and I feel that the cop’s testimony betrayed an appalling lack of knowledge about what constitutes reasonable safe operating conditions for a cyclist.
My situation isn’t life-and-death/”yer-taillight’s-busted-boyah,” but it saddens and enrages me that a cop can lie to a judge without fear of legal reprisal.
Rafer Janders
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
That’s the problem: when your metric isn’t reducing crime but increasing the number of arrests. A safe area should have zero arrests, but cops don’t get rewarded for making zero arrests, they get rewarded for making arrests — so the system, paradoxically, incentivizes police to inflate the amount of crime.
Villago Delenda Est
@Barry:
When I was living in the suburbs of Tacoma in the 80’s, there was a part of Tacoma proper called “Hilltop” that was, essentially, a free fire zone. Various drug dealers and their operatives would freely fight over turf, endangering anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way.
The Tacoma PD could not be found in the Hilltop neighborhood. They’d be on South Tacoma Way, several miles away, on hooker patrol.
The hookers were not nearly as vicious as the drug dealers.
At one point, an off duty Army Ranger who lived in the Hilltop neighborhood took matters into his own hands, and actually returned fire when his home was caught in the crossfire of some gang dispute.
It took a private citizen’s initiative (and guts) to bring the Tacoma PD off the hooker patrol and into Hilltop.
mere mortal
Yup. I could feel the steam coming off my head as I listened to it in the car.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=414&act=2
uila
Dear John Cole, Dave Chappelle wants a word with you.
curiousleo
A school police officer union had “U Raise ’em. We cage ’em” t-shirts made. Nice.
JCT
@The Moar You Know: My father was an ADA in Los Angeles when I was growing up. He had unbelievable stories about planted evidence and perjury by cops. My dad drilled it into our heads that policemen were not necessarily honest and that they were not always on the “right side”. When he finally qualified for prosecuting death penalty cases he left the DA’s office, the behavior of the LAPD cemented his anti-death penalty views.
Sobering lessons for a kid, that’s for sure.
Rafer Janders
@Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods:
Oh, cops lie all the time on the stand. All the time. There’s even a term for it, “testilying.” I’ve seen them do it time and again in situations where I knew for a fact that the facts were not what they said they were.
Joel
@Davis X. Machina: That was definitely one of Yglesias’ greatest misses. It was below Sullivan-bad, and that’s saying something, cause when Sullivan is wrong, he’s usually very wrong.
Cermet
@J. Michael Neal: That was his sarcasm for what a rep-a-thug would answer.
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
Now now, Cole. I have it on good authority (from proper, level-headed Democrats here at BJ) that talking about the drug war is unimportant, because who cares if some hippies get hassled by the man? Plus, as Jewish Steel will tell you, all of his friends never got busted for smoking pot, so it’s safe to assume that anyone who does get busted had it coming. Also, merely talking about this will drive people away from the party, and we need those people for more important matters.
Without them, how will we know which matters that involve millions of destroyed lives are important enough to care about?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@j low:
I belive he meant cops “know” in the same sense all white people know blacks are gangsters.
Stockbrokers can afford really good lawyers who might just prove you are planting evidence. Black people get public defenders.
The sicking though is a good chance these cops started out wanting to do the right thing but got hammered by their bosses into giving the right number of arrests for War on Drugs(r)
Rita R.
@uila:
Chapelle’s “sprinkled with crack” bit was the first thing I thought of when this story broke.
J. Michael Neal
@Cermet: That’s certainly not the impression I get from the post. It seems that Joel didn’t think so, either. There is something about Yglesias that brings out the complete idiot in a lot of his critics and prevents them from actually reading what he is writing.
Gustopher
How many cases did this officer touch? Every single one of them has grounds for appeal.
And then there are the officers who perjured themselves to cover for this officer… Alas, I doubt the folks convicted based on evidence from those officers will have as easy a time of it.
I hope Detective Arbeeny is sentenced to many years of prison and that he is raped by the other inmates. He deserves everything bad that ever happens to him.
Elmo
And once again, the behavior of criminal thug cops is giving the other 1% a bad name. Dammit.
Paul in KY
@cathyx: I’d expect an NCO to do that (unless it was something really petty).
Paul in KY
@Villago Delenda Est: Or they found you stealing stuff or handling heavy duty weapons/explosives in a dangerous/cavalier manner.