Baltimore: More videos released showing police officers “manufacturing evidence”
By
Adam Soroka
15 August 2017
Earlier this month, the Baltimore public defender’s office released footage showing several Baltimore police officers appearing to collude while planting drugs at a traffic stop.
The new video was taken during a traffic stop last November and made public early this month. Shamere Collins, 35, was pulled over after a police officer allegedly witnessed her passenger conduct a drug deal. In the video, several officers are shown to be searching the front driver’s side of Collins’ car, then the camera goes off, then on again, without explanation.
In the next video clip, an officer asks if the driver’s side area has been searched, only then to find a bag of marijuana and heroin in the area that had been searched thoroughly in the previous clip.
Collins’ attorney, Josh Insley, released the footage stating it showed officers engaging “in what appears to be the staged recovery of narcotics.” In an interview with NBC, Collins admitted to recreational marijuana use but was dumbfounded when police pulled heroin from her car. “My mind—I went numb-like—I didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “They [were] telling me I was facing time and all this … so it’s like I felt numb. I didn’t know what to do.”
The footage came just a week after a previous video, again released by the public defender’s office, showed an officer planting a bag of pills under a pile of garbage in an alley as two other officers looked on. The officer planting the drugs in the first video has been suspended while the other two are on administrative leave. As a result, 41 drug and gun cases that relied on the officers’ testimony were dropped.
In both videos,…