Homeless in Arizona

According to this article it looks like cops are framing people for possession of narcotics near the end of their shifts so they can collect over time while they book them into jail.

According to this article on the front page of todays, Feb 20, 2018 New York Times, the 2 cops that made a bogus drug arrest collected $1,400 in overtime pay while booking the 2 men they arrested.

Protecting and serving the public my *ss!!!!

Robbing and terrorizing the public is what these police criminals do.

Cops frame people for victimless drug war crimes so they can collect overtime??

It’s difficult to find a good criminal. There’s never a felon around when you need one. Fishing for low-level drug arrests is a far easier way to generate overtime.

Are arrests "Collars for Dollars"? Federal Suit Scrutinizes the Issue.

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The Arrest Was a Bust. The Officers Got Overtime Anyway.

By ALAN FEUER and JOSEPH GOLDSTEINFEB. 19, 2018

The narcotics officers from the 83rd Precinct didn’t get much when they set up outside the J & C Mini Market on Irving Avenue in Brooklyn on an autumn afternoon four years ago.

Moving in on what seemed to be a crack deal, they seized two packets, which turned out to contain little more than a residue of the drug. Two men — said to be the buyer and the seller — were arrested, but the charges against one of the men were eventually dismissed.

What the officers did get that day was more than 20 hours in overtime for hauling in and processing the men. Collectively, court papers say, they earned as much as $1,400 in extra pay.

On Tuesday, four of the officers involved in the arrests will appear in Federal District Court in Brooklyn for the start of an unusual civil-rights trial, facing accusations that they detained one of the men, Hector Cordero, simply to increase their income.

If any of the officers are found liable, another trial will be scheduled, one that could represent the biggest challenge to New York policing practices since stop-and-frisk. The second trial would examine the broader question of whether the city’s police officers habitually use false arrests to bolster their pay.

Accusations about the practice — known as “collars for dollars” — have dogged the department for decades. The Mollen Commission’s 1994 report about police corruption, which used the term, detailed the various and devious overtime schemes that have been used.

In one, the police would involve additional officers in making an arrest, maximizing the number of people eligible for overtime. In a typical arrangement, those extra officers might claim to have discovered evidence that the defendant had tried to hide, or in some other way they would enter the case as peripheral witnesses. They would need to be on hand to handle paperwork or be available to testify — so they too would get overtime pay.

In another practice, known as “trading collars,” officers sometimes directed arrests to the member of their team who stood to get the most overtime. Felony arrests are often presented to a grand jury about five days after the incident; but if an officer who took part was scheduled to work on the anticipated grand jury date, he or she might defer to a colleague who was not.

The second officer would “take the arrest,” and receive the extra pay for going to court on a day off — even if that meant testifying about events the officer had never witnessed, the report maintained.

One of the city’s most infamous overtime frauds occurred in the late 1980s among officers from the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, Brooklyn, known as the Morgue Boys. At their federal corruption trial in Brooklyn, Daniel Eurell, an officer who pleaded guilty, testified that he and his colleagues often made arrests when their shifts were almost over to ensure receiving overtime. The group would then file false reports, or “cover stories,” to justify the arrests, Officer Eurell said.

The notion that police officers have financial incentives in making arrests also emerged at the trial last month of a Queens detective convicted of perjury. The detective, Kevin Desormeau, had arrested a man on drug charges after claiming, falsely it turned out, to have witnessed the suspect dealing drugs. In arguing the case, prosecutors noted that Detective Desormeau had filed for four hours and 24 minutes of overtime for “an arrest that was illegal.”

The notion that police officers have financial incentives in making arrests also emerged at the trial last month of a Queens detective convicted of perjury, Kevin Desormeau. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times If Mr. Cordero’s allegations that he was falsely arrested to boost overtime pay are upheld, it would seem to suggest that years of attention and reform have only had a marginal effect on curbing the connection between false arrests and overtime, said Harry G. Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College who has written extensively about drugs and policing. It would also trigger the second broader trial, which lawyers and policing experts in New York said would be a rarity.

“The pattern of making arrests to get overtime pay is historic and longstanding,” Professor Levine said.

Gabriel Harvis, Mr. Cordero’s lawyer, has suggested that a second trial, should one indeed occur, would set the stage for the biggest challenge to unconstitutional policing practices in New York since a 2013 federal trial about the department’s overreliance on stop-and-frisk tactics. “Phase II is the rare opportunity for a Federal District Court to review controversial citywide practices of the N.Y.P.D.,” Mr. Harvis wrote in an email.

The stop-and-frisk trial, which found the practice was unconstitutional, resulted in a huge decline in the tactic’s use and the creation of a court-appointed monitor to track it. While it remains unclear what effect a finding of liability against the city in a second Cordero trial might have, the judge in the case, Jack B. Weinstein, could take similar action.

The lawsuit has accused the officers of concocting the basis of Mr. Cordero’s arrest “in order to obtain overtime for completing the attendant paperwork,” court filings state. The officers, who are being defended by lawyers for the city, have denied the charges. The city’s Law Department said that the arrest was “supported by probable cause.”

The case began at 1 p.m. on Oct. 24, 2014, when Officer Hugo Hugasian was sitting in an unmarked police car watching the mini-market as part of a plainclothes street narcotics team. Court papers state that Officer Hugasian saw a man — later identified as Matthew Ninos — walk up to the store with a cellphone at his ear.

Then someone left the store, approached Mr. Ninos and handed him “two little zips or bags” in exchange for money, Officer Hugasian said. After a description of the buyer was sent out on a radio, Mr. Ninos was arrested on a charge of having 0.138 grams of cocaine. He later pleaded guilty to drug possession.

The seller went back into the mini-market, court papers said. Though two other officers, Peter Rubin and John Essig, went inside to find him, they were unable to identify him. So Officer Hugasian, who said that he had witnessed the deal, went into the store. Court papers state he bought a bottle of water and identified the seller as Mr. Cordero, a cashier at J & C Mini Market who is 59 years old.

Mr. Cordero was arrested within minutes, according to the papers, but when he was searched, the police did not find any drugs or drug paraphernalia. He did, however, have $580 in his pocket, which he said was “for emergencies.” Both Mr. Cordero and the owner of the store, Fausto Tineo, told the police that he had never left the market and had been serving customers when the drug deal supposedly occurred. Mr. Cordero was held for several hours, but five months later — on March 4, 2015 — the Brooklyn district attorney’s office dismissed the charges against him.

The encounter led Mr. Harvis to conclude that the arrest was a sham and had been orchestrated to generate overtime. In court filings, he noted that the street narcotics unit filed for at least 22 hours of extra pay that day — most of it by Officers Hugasian and Essig.

Both men, according to the lawsuit, had been scheduled to work on the day of the arrests from 7 a.m. to 3:35 p.m. Police records show that Mr. Cordero and Mr. Ninos left the precinct at 5:30 p.m. and were taken to the courthouse. While Officer Hugasian never met with an assistant district attorney, court papers said that he was interviewed by phone about Mr. Cordero’s arrest. Shortly after 8 p.m., the papers said, Mr. Cordero was released from the courthouse. (Mr. Ninos had also been released.) But Officer Hugasian filed documents claiming that he worked until 12:25 a.m. the next day, and Officer Essig said that he remained on duty until 11:30 p.m.

In October, Judge Weinstein issued an order saying that if any officer was found liable, a second trial would explore Mr. Harvis’s theory that “the Police Department has long been aware of a widespread practice of false arrests at the end of tours of duty.” The second trial would be likely to rely on Police Department records about overtime abuse, which the city has filed under seal as part of Mr. Cordero’s case but could become public.

“A reasonable jury may find that this practice is not isolated to a few ‘bad’ police officers,” Judge Weinstein wrote, “but is endemic, that N.Y.P.D. officials are aware this pattern exists and that they have failed to intervene and properly supervise.”

Correction: February 19, 2018 An earlier version of this article misidentified the street in Brooklyn where J & C Mini Market is. It is Irving Avenue, not Irving Place.

Source

Collars for Dollars

How the drug war sacrifices real policing for easy arrests.

Peter Moskos from the July 2011 issue - view article in the Digital Edition

When I was a police officer in Baltimore, one sergeant would sometimes motivate his troops in the middle of a shift change by joyfully shouting, “All right, you maggots! Let’s lock people up! They don’t pay you to stand around. I want production! I want lockups!” He said this while standing in front of a small sign he most likely authored: “Unlike the citizens of the Eastern District, you are required to work for your government check.”

In the police world, there are good arrests and better arrests, but there is no such thing as a bad arrest. In recent years, measures of “productivity” have achieved an almost totemic significance. And because they are so easy to count, arrests have come to outweigh more important but harder-to-quantify variables such as crimes prevented, fights mitigated, or public fears assuaged.

There’s an argument that putting pressure on rank-and-file officers to make lots of arrests is a good thing. After all, we pay police to arrest criminals. But there’s a difference between quantity and quality. Quantity is easy to influence, and the rank and file can easily increase their output of discretionary arrests for minor offenses like loitering, disorderly conduct, and possession of marijuana. They are also influenced by what is known in New York as “collars for dollars”: Arrest numbers are influenced by the incentive of overtime pay for finishing up paperwork and appearing in court.

Police would love to arrest only “real” criminals, but that isn’t easy. It’s difficult to find a good criminal. There’s never a felon around when you need one. Fishing for low-level drug arrests is a far easier way to generate overtime.

When I worked in Baltimore, officers would pull up on a drug corner and stop the slowest addict walking away. While conducting a perfectly legal “Terry Frisk”—a cursory search nominally conducted for officer safety—cops would feel some drugs in a pocket. That easy arrest and lockup likely meant two hours of overtime pay.

In some cities, like New York, it’s trickier. Overtime for court testimony is harder to get, and the state’s highest court has ruled—precisely to prevent the Baltimore-style approach—that feeling drugs during a Terry Frisk does not allow an officer to search that pocket and remove those drugs. The court reasoned that the drugs are not a threat to the officer’s safety, and safety is the only justification for these sorts of frisks.

In New York state, small-scale possession of marijuana is virtually decriminalized. It’s not even an arrestable offense. But police in need of overtime are nothing if not wily. So a group of officers might approach a man in a high-crime neighborhood and, in no uncertain terms, “ask” him to empty his pockets. Fearful, resigned, or simply taking the path of least resistance, the suspect might do so, and in the process he might reveal a small “dime bag” of weed. While possessing that amount of marijuana is not an arrestable offense, it becomes one as soon as the drug is placed in “public view.”

Supporters sometimes say these small-scale drug arrests are part of a “broken windows” approach to preventing crime. This tactic comes from an influential 1982 Atlantic magazine article by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson that combined the 19th century police theories of Robert Peel with the 20th century urban philosophy of Jane Jacobs. The idea is that if you take care of the little things—disorder, quality-of-life issues, and public fear—then the big things like robbery and murder will take care of themselves.

Since Police Commissioner William Bratton implemented a broken windows policing strategy in the early 1990s, homicides in New York dropped more than 80 percent. But the crime didn’t drop because police were cracking down on drug users; overall, illegal drug use is as high as ever. When the murder rate was falling fastest in the 1990s, police never arrested more than a few thousand people per year for public-view marijuana. Only after the crime drop slowed did police turn to small-scale drug arrests to meet their “productivity goals.” It’s as if real criminals became too difficult to find, and the addiction to overtime pay remained strong as ever.

Last year in New York City, 50,300 people—mostly young black and Hispanic men—were arrested solely for misdemeanor “public-view” possession of marijuana. It’s true that some may have been up to no good. And some might have been walking down the street proudly smoking a spliff in front of the police. But nobody really believes this accounts for most of those 50,300 lockups. Many were people just going about their business, intending to smoke later, in private, in the very manner the law was intended to decriminalize.

“What is it with the drugs?” a man once asked me while I was policing a 7-11 for coffee, “When there’s shootin’ or fightin’, you don’t seem to care! But when there’s drugs, you come right away.” It’s a fair question to ask. Why do we do it? What do we gain? Especially when we know drug arrests are expensive and turn a lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens into cop-hating criminals?

The drug war, because it can’t be won, encourages outward signs of police effectiveness at the expense of good old-fashioned policing. Hard-working cops, especially those who ask for little more than a middle-class income in return for the dangerous work they do, turn to drug arrests to make ends meet. The Baltimore sergeant was right: Police officers do need to work for their government check. It’s a shame “collars for dollars” has become the easiest way to do it.

Peter Moskos ( moskos@gmail.com ), a former Baltimore police officer, is an assistant professor of law and political science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York's Doctoral Program in Sociology, and LaGuardia Community College's Department of Social Science. He is the author of In Defense of Flogging (2011) and Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District (2008).