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.