Florida Deputy: “Planting Evidence and Lying is Part of the Game”

http://dcpost.org/florida-law-officer-planting-evidence-lying-part-of-the-game-exclusive-interview/
 
 

This revelation started off a wave of other postings on what police officers do to put people in jail. This includes planting evidence and falsifying official reports used to lock suspects up. We left a post asking for the original poster to contact us anonymously and if certain conditions were met, we would interview him. We were contacted by a person, who we will refer to as Joe Deputy. Joe provided us evidence proving his law enforcement status and employment through the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. He has been employed as a law enforcement officer for in excess of 15 years. He agreed to speak with us on the condition of anonymity, the condition we don't ask him about anything he's done directly, and referring to him by an alias, which we agreed to do.
Jeffery Schultz: You posted about arresting people for drugs that they didn't have. Does planting evidence like this take place at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office?
Deputy Sheriff: Um, yes it does, on a regular basis. Probably every day in my shift. I work nights on the Road Patrol in a rough, um, mostly black neighborhood. Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.
Jeffery Schultz: â€œDid you observe with some frequency this …  this practice which is taking someone who was seemingly not guilty of a crime and laying the drugs on them?”
Deputy Sheriff: Yes, all the time. It is something I see a lot of, whether it was from deputies, supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. 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. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it's easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing - and quotas further incentivize such practices.  It doesn't help that your higherups all did the same thing when they were on the road. It's like a neverending cycle. Like how molested children accept that as okay behavior and begin molesting children themselves.
Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, under fire for many cover ups and controversies in his agency

Jeffery Schultz: Is this taught in your training academy?
Deputy Sheriff: It is not a part of the course work, but many of the Field Training officers give life lessons in how to stay out of trouble or how to stay ahead of a suspect when it comes to planting evidence or writing your reports. My training officer, who is no longer at the Sheriff's Office, would keep narcotics and a gun in his car in case he needed to put pressure on a suspect. We also regularly review the facts before writing our reports to make sure our reports match the facts as we present them. By doing this, we can present them in any way we want.
Jeffery Schultz: Has anyone ever been caught doing this? If so, what have your top bosses done about it?
Deputy Sheriff: Top bosses? It's a joke, right?
Jeffery Schultz: No, why do you say that?
Deputy Sheriff: Our top boss, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, supports this behavior and has for his entire career. As with anything, it depends on who you know in our agency. Last year, we had three deputies on the TAC unit, Kevin Drummond and Jarrod Foster, get caught falsifying information for a warrant. They got a pat on the back for a job well done. Just recently, we had a deputy, I think his name was Booth. He was caught completely lying on a car crash. Back a few more years, our Sheriff was involved a massive coverup of the death of two black deputies. He hid the report for years. This is only the beginning. The Sheriff has been involved in falsification of documents and his underling, Chief Deputy Michael Gauger, has been personally involved in an overtime scandal to steal money from the Sheriff's Office. Does our Sheriff know about this behavior? Of course he does. We have even had a judge outright accuse my agency of committing fraud upon the court in a public hearing. She was one of the ones who saw through all the lying and covering up our department does to get away with the internal crime committed by deputies on a regular basis.
Jeffery Schultz: What about planting evidence? Does Sheriff Bradshaw support that also?
Deputy Sheriff: Look, what you have to realize is that you do this at your own risk. Most supervisors look the other way, but occasionally some will not. Then what are you going to do if that supervisor writes a memo to IA? It's better just to keep it to yourself and your road patrol partners or unit partners. It is not something we advertise because we have some supervisors that are angels and don't have what it takes to do the job. Besides, we don't brag about what we do because you don't want those rumors out there. Still, Sheriff Bradshaw was caught a few years back ordering detectives to falsify evidence to implicate a black man in a robbery. This is why when his deputies do get caught in the middle of a scandal like planting evidence or lying on reports, he generally looks the other way and instructs Internal Affairs to sweep it under the run, unless he doesn't like you.
Jeffery Schultz: You have proof of this?
Deputy Sheriff: It was testimony by his own chief. His own chief made this admission, in addition to making the admission Sheriff Bradshaw used to steal firearms from the evidence room. It was always speculated guns he would steal these were to plant on suspects.
Jeffery Schultz: So, planting of evidence, is this prevalent in law enforcement agencies?
Deputy Sheriff: I can't speak for other agencies really, because I have been, you know, with the same agency from the very beginning. We have had guys come work here from new places and they always had new creative ways to get things done. So I suppose yeah, it is common everywhere. Our agency is, um, we are being sued for it right now. It will never make it to court though. There is a cap on what you can win from a law enforcement agency of $200k but our Sheriff, well, he regularly settles out of court for much more than that. It is a way to keep the misdeeds of his deputies from ever reaching the light of day. You know, because these settlements, they are all confidential. I could on'y imagine how many millions are paid out in confidential settlements every year. The taxpayer would cry I am sure.
Jeffery Schultz: Get things done?
Deputy Sheriff: Yes. Sometimes we have a guy running his mouth. Or, um, Sometimes we get a tricky situation where no one has broken the law but you know if you leave, well, you will know you just be right back trying to resolve the problem, like at domestic despute. It happens all the time and you can't force either party to leave but you know violence is imminent after you turn around and go. Well, and then sometimes we get a guy who keeps getting off but we know is guilty for something so deputies get things done. They might find a baggie of narcotics on the suspect and take him in. It's done every day here and no one asks questions. We get complaints to IA on it all the time but they always make it go away. It's a team effort and like they say, you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.”
Jeffery Schultz: You mentioned specifically “implicating a black person.” Does your agency target based on race?
Deputy Sheriff: I wouldn't say target based on race but is is, you know, um, it is much easier to do this on a black person because they have no credibility anyways. The charges stick better to blacks than to a rich white guy that can afford a lawyer. That is one school of thought. Then you still have the deputies who like doing it to the rich white guys because they say it removes the smug look from their faces. They get their kicks from the power like its a game. Most cops though, they, um… do it to get bad guys off the streets. The last group of deputies do it for personal gain.
Jeffery Schultz: Personal gain? Like what?
Deputy Sheriff: Sometimes a deputy will use the threat of planting, you know, dope on a person to get some cash or something from the perp. Uh, like a few hundred bucks can make the problem go away. It's pretty rare but it happens. Usually it's the deputies that live large and need supplemental income. They tend to keep it really quiet because that's like, you know, really bad stuff. We even had a guy put the suspect in the back of his green and white [patrol car]to drive him to an ATM machine. We were all like ‘what the hell is he doing?' And another time a deputy arrested a guy for possession after he said he found the baggie on the guy's floor board. Then he, um,  he didn't charge the guy in exchange for oral sex from the guy's wife. I thought that was, you know, really wrong. Taking things just too far. Way to far. But I kept my mouth shut because,  you know, you cross that line even a little and you don't have the right to complain about those crossing it a bit more.
Jeffery Schultz: This is terrible stuff they are doing. Just terrible.
Deputy Sheriff: Yes, um it can get pretty bad. Most of our deputies wouldn't ever think of doing that or going that far but a few, you know, there are a few bad apples in every bunch. 
Jeffery Schultz: You said “Beat the ride?” What does that mean?
Deputy Sheriff: Yes, it means you might be able to beat the charges against you but you can't beat spending the night in jail or the trouble of going through the legal system.
Jeffery Schultz: But what about the innocent people? The ones who have had narcotics planted in their possession by a deputy who end up in jail because of it?
Deputy Sheriff: These people aren't innocent. If we are dealing with someone, there is a reason for it. We don't really interact with members of the law abiding public.
Jeffery Schultz: Are there any red flags that would indicate someone had been arrested for drugs they didn't possess or that officers were planting evidence?
Deputy Sheriff: Not really. Planting evidence is done in such a way it can't be disputed. Before we write our reports, we can review all the evidence. When our fellow deputies write their supplemental reports, they usually wait until the primary officer writes his report and then uses the facts from those reports. There is no independent recollection ever, and this is standard procedure everywhere. Chances are, if you are reading a police report, you are reading a well thought out, well-rehearsed story that has little in common with what actually took place.
Jeffery Schultz: How does this Sheriff keep his job? Don't the people in your county become outraged?
Deputy Sheriff: The people in our county wear blinders. They don't care what we do or if deputies are planting evidence as long as they keep believing the lie their crime is going down and they are protected. They only care about themselves and pretty much, that is fine with us. We get some of the highest salaries in the country, incredible benefits and cars that we can use for our personal use any time we want. No matter how bad our deputies think Sheriff Bradshaw is, money talks and as long as it keeps flowing into our bank accounts, we aren't going to make any waves. And um, it is quite the opposite. Almost every civilian employee of the Sheriff's Office who voluntarily worked on the Sheriff's campaign got a nice, shiny unmarked county take home car they use when ever they want and gas paid for by the tax payer. We're talking like 150 cars or something completely obscene like that. Who is going to want that to go away?
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw testifies before a committee to raise his half-billion dollar per year budget while paying excessive salaries and benefits to campaign supporters

Deputy Joe went on to say how the leaders, at the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, including Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, threatens street cops if they don't make enough stop-and-frisk arrests, “but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics.” He continued, “Places like Wellington and Boca Raton and other places under contract need to show how the Sheriff's Office reduces the crime and manipulation of the crime codes is an easy way to do it.” Joe also stated how command officers routinely call crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.
It should be noted in addition to interviewing â€œJoe the Deputy,” we performed independent research and linked to documents and articles that support his claims. Be sure to check the included hyperlinks throughout the article.
</blockquote>This is why I personally get the chills whenever a cop is around. They have absolute authority over you, they have the power of life and death and 9 times out of 10 they are just going to get a paid vacation if they beat or kill you. 
 
My thesis adviser for grad school a middle class, educated, white dude was beaten by the border patrol recently. Luckily he has the money and the resources to sue the pigs in court. The things they told him while he was in custody (for no reason other than he refused to tell them where he was going, this is america after all). They told him that he was a traitor to the US and that they would be investigating him and his entire family for terrorism. He now has one of the top police brutality attorneys in the state but if he didn't have the money, resources and status within the community he wouldn't have a recourse.

 

Pro gun anti cop, anti Obama.