Investigation Launched After Baltimore Cop Caught On Tape Allegedly Planting Drugs

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Baltimore authorities have launched an investigation after a police body camera video surfaced today purportedly depicting an officer of the Baltimore Police Department planting drugs at the scene of a crime.

The video, which was released by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, bears a time stamp of January 24, 2017, begins without sound and is shot from chest level by a body camera allegedly worn by Officer Richard Pinheiro. It shows the camera’s wearer placing what appears to be a soup can beneath a discarded wooden pallet in a trash-strewn lot. The individual is then shown leaving the lot, activating his body cam, and returning to it to “discover” the can and remove a clear bag of white capsules.

The body cam used to make the video has a feature that retains an image, but no sound from the 30 seconds prior to activation. As the first 30 seconds of this video are silent, authorities presume that the potentially damning footage was captured during this pre-activation period.

The video first came to light while the public defender’s office was working on a case scheduled for trial last week. The defendant, who was unable to pay the $50,000 bond he was assessed and had been in jail since his arrest shortly after the video was taken, was released and his charges were dropped the day after his public defender alerted prosecutors to the video.

Though the state dropped charges in that case, the public defender’s office says the officer involved in making the video was called within days to testify as a witness in another case. This elicited outrage from Debbie Katz Levi, head of the Baltimore Public Defender’s Special Litigation Section, who is spearheading a project to catalog police misconduct cases that her office encounters.

“Officer misconduct has been a pervasive issue at the Baltimore Police Department, which is exacerbated by the lack of accountability,” Levi said in a statement issued by the public defender’s office. “We have long supported the use of police body cameras to help identify police misconduct, but such footage is meaningless if prosecutors continue to rely on these officers, especially if they do so without disclosing their bad acts.”

For its part, the Baltimore Police Department issued a one-paragraph statement to the media.

“We take allegations like this very seriously and that’s why we launched an internal investigation into the accusations. We are fortunate to have Body Worn Cameras which provide a perspective of the events as reported.”

The department did not reveal whether Officer Pinheiro will be suspended during the investigation. The Office of the Public Defender says Pinheiro is a witness in over 50 other pending criminal cases.

According to a recent investigation by The Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Police Department carried out over 250 inspections of video captured by the department’s officers to determine overall compliance with the policies and procedures in place for their use. Inspectors discovered a 96 percent compliance rate in the 3,441 incidents reviewed where recording was mandatory.

The Baltimore Police Department has been a lightning rod for controversy of late, most notably in the arrest and subsequent death of Freddie Gray, Jr. in 2015. Six BPD officers were initially suspended with pay after Gray sustained mortal injuries to his spinal cord while being transported in a police van. Although his death sparked several days of protests and riots in Baltimore, none of the six officers were ultimately held criminally responsible for the incident.

[Featured Image by Win McNamee/Getty Images]