http://m.nydailynews.com/new-york/ex-nypd-commish-ray-kelly-lied-oath-emails-suit-article-1.2386520
The Hard Truth About Cops Who Lie
By Robert Lewis and Noah Veltman — Tuesday, October 13th, 2015 ‘WNYC News’ / New York, NY
Nationwide, the spread of amateur video footage recording police arrests and sometimes the deaths of civilians has cast a harsh light not just on use of forcebut on officer credibility. Repeatedly, footage has shown the police narrative of incidents to be at best inaccurate.
Last year, New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board flagged as many officers for making false statements as it had in the previous four years combined. And the CCRB reports that it’s on pace to have more such cases this year.
With the ongoing national and local discussion about criminal justice reform, WNYC spent five months looking at the issue of police officer credibility to see how often the NYPD’s 35,000 officers are found to distort the truth and what happens to them after.
A review of more than a thousand criminal and civil court cases, and interviews with dozens of attorneys, turned up more than 120 officers with at least one documented credibility issue over the past 10 years.These are mostly officers whose testimony a state or federal judge called unbelievable. Some have apparent fabrications exposed in lawsuits or other records. It’s an incomplete list because state law makes police disciplinary records confidential, and state criminal cases are sealed if the case is dismissed even when it's due to police misconduct.
Most of these officers stayed on the force. Records show at least 54 went on to make more than 2,700 arrestsafter the date their word was challenged.
Jonathan Abel is a former fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center who studied access to police disciplinary records across the country.
“There’s just such high stakes that come with an officer’s testimony and people really have been sent to prison and to their death based on the assumption that officers are telling the truth. So it’s critically important that they be honest. That’s just like a job requirement,” Abel said.
To be sure, most officers on the 35,000-member force testify without ever raising any doubts.
Most of the officers we identified had one adverse credibility finding, and that in itself doesn’t mean an officer is a liar. We don’t know what else is on their record because disciplinary files are confidential.
“We take very seriously at the NYPD any allegation that an officer has testified falsely or even incorrectly,” said Lawrence Byrne, the Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters.
“It’s very important that we get the facts right.”
Still, in some cases the NYPD ignored red flags regarding an officer’s trustworthiness. And the department failed to put in place fixes recommended for years.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. When an officer distorts the truth, violent criminals can walk free and innocent people can go to prison. More broadly, it undermines trust in the system.
“There seems to be a big question about faith and confidence in law enforcement not only here in New York City but throughout the country,” said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association. “So, when an officer gets caught in a lie — a willful lie — it’s a violation of our oath.
“But…cops are human too, and the amount of cases that they handle has to be taken into consideration,” Palladino said. “Especially when they’re asked two, three, four or as many as five years later to recall the specifics of a particular case.”
A Perjury Charge in the Bronx
Two men were loitering in the lobby of a Bronx apartment building on a Monday afternoon in July 2012 when they caught the attention of an aggressive NYPD narcotics unit monitoring drug dealing in the area. A sergeant in the unit ordered them to step outside.
Detective Greg Larsen later testified that one of the men, Cleveland White, threw an orange prescription bottle full of oxycodone on the ground. Larsen arrested him for drug possession. It seemed like a routine bust for Larsen and the unit, which racked up arrests in buy-and-bust operations throughout the borough.
White denied the charges but it was his word against Larsen’s. Or so the police thought.
A security camera on the building captured the incident and showed White wasn’t holding drugs in his hand and never threw a pill bottle on the ground.
The charges were dismissed and White filed a lawsuit alleging cops planted the drugs. He’s back in prison on an unrelated drug case and wasn’t available for an interview.
As for Larsen, a grand jury indicted him for perjury in May 2014. The Bronx District Attorney’s Office is quietly prosecuting the case and the charges have never been reported until now.
In court filings, Larsen — who was a first-responder to the World Trade Center on 9/11 — said he was exhausted and handling paperwork for too many cases when he made the false statements. His criminal defense attorney declined to comment because it’s an active case, and advised Larsen not to talk for this story.
Records show Larsen has been sued at least 16 times, most including allegations of false arrest and brutality. Half of those lawsuits were filed before the arrest that led to the perjury charges. He’s also been the subject of civilian complaints for excessive force and abuse of authority, and was disciplined twice by the department.
Also in 2014, the NYPD conducted an internal disciplinary trial related to the White arrest and found Larsen guilty of making false statements.
In November 2014 — six months after his indictment — the department tribunal recommended the commissioner not fire Larsen immediately and instead place him on probation. In the recommendation, Deputy Commissioner for Trials Rosemarie Maldonado cited three other cases where officers made false statements in court and were allowed the keep their jobs.
In December 2014, Commissioner William Bratton – who just months earlier had vowed to root out bad cops – overruled the recommendation and fired Larsen.
The NYPD declined to talk about the Larsen case, or any case involving specific officers.
Palladino, head of the detective’s union, didn’t know about the charges against Larsen. But he said even in the rare cases where a detective faces criminal perjury prosecution, the officer is often vindicated.
“In many cases we are acquitted after a trial. So it just goes to show you, that just because the allegation is raised doesn’t really mean the detective is guilty or not,” Palladino said.
