What's the incentive for cops to plant drugs on people? I assume they get some kind of bonus or have a performance review rating on how many "criminals" they apprehend?
0: The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 1: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bmbab8/the-police-officer...
Paying people to catch criminals incentivizes them to create criminals.
I think that's part of it. But there's also the effect that the Baltimore system/culture, the police, the politicians, the DA/prosecution, the prisons, all evolved on top of a forced labor system. Yes, slavery. The system is inherently designed to preserve that dynamic between the enslaved population and the non-slave population. It captures kids in their youth, puts them in juvi for-profit prisons, which limits their options for work in their adulthood which then puts them at risk to re-enter the jail system (forced labor) in their adulthood. Michael Wood, a former marine and former Baltimore police officer provides an interesting collection of data. His interview here shows how the system works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5nPyf-0UMc Listen to him talking about the "Knockers", a special class of police officers.
Taking the amtrak from DC-NY at least a few years ago there were literally miles and miles of entire blocks of abandoned townhouses.. I imagine a google street view would be a good way to see this..
Also relateed - just finished binge watching HBO's 'The Wire' - though fiction and maybe jazzed up a little, it seems fairly accurate to get a picture of how messed up things are/can be based on what I absorbed 3rd hand from living in nearby DC for a good while..
^ Unfortunately, many of them see everyone who isn't a cop as a bad person - either a threat, or a criminal.
Another reason to plant evidence is if you just brutalized someone. Beating an innocent person for the crime of mouthing off to you/being black looks bad. Beating a junkie carrying a tenth of an ounce of weed... Well, they were a criminal, so it's all good.
And why wouldn't they plant evidence? Your co-workers won't rat you out, nobody will believe the the guy you arrested, and in the unlikely event that you are stupid enough to be planting drugs in front of your own body camera, you will get a paid vacation.
Although these days, they don't even need to prove you're a criminal to steal your money with civil asset forfeiture, they just need to be able to find your money.
• if you arrest drug offenders, you can seize their assets for the budget
• if someone you dislike conveniently has drugs on them, you can deal with them
• you won't be held accountable
But these cameras have a 30 second buffer, and are always recording to that buffer. The buffer is stored when the start button is pressed. That is how he got caught.
So if your camera is off, and you found a stash of drugs. Just press the start button. It'll record you finding the stash 30 seconds earlier.
That's actually why that button exists. So officers have a recording when it's needed unexpectedly.
However, not to excuse falsifying evidence, the 30s buffer example you mention wouldn't cover the case where you found the stash more than 30s earlier and have already disturbed with the otherwise valid crime scene..
I'd imagine in some sort of hot pursuit situation it would be pretty easy to do this and forget the button, especially if you've been working for years without them..
FTA: "So maybe this was a reenactment based on a true story. This scenario, which is where I would place my money ..."
It's just a guess. And I'm not entirely convinced by the argument that (also FTA) "people in Baltimore City don't get prosecuted for a stash of drugs"; because right in the first paragraph, he says "A man was arrested related to this ... he had been in jail for the past 7 months." In other words, even if the police knew they weren't going to get a prosecution, they could have just wanted to punish this guy, or try and get him to "confess", or who knows what.