A policeman has been charged with faking evidence after he accidentally recorded himself planting drugs and pretending to find them.
Richard Pinheiro’s body camera caught him putting a bag of drugs in soup can in a Baltimore alley before returning to his two colleagues last January.
He then walked back to the alley and told his colleagues ‘I’m gonna check there’ before he ‘found’ the bag and said ‘Yo, hold up’.
The video starts by showing the officer appear to reach down and plant a bag of drugs inside a discarded soup can
This frame grab pulled from body camera footage that was filmed on January 24 2017 and released by the Maryland Office of the Public Defender shows Baltimore Police Officer Richard Pinheiro removing a baggie of drugs from a soup can in Baltimore
Officers then arrested a man for heroin possession. He was held for six months unable to post bail before the video became public and he was released.
Pinheiro was caught out because police cameras save the previous 30 seconds of footage without audio when they are activated.
His defence has claimed he was recreating events that had occured off camera rather than fabricating evidence.
Yesterday a grand jury indicted him on charges of fabricating evidence and misconduct.
State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby described the indictment as ‘another example of our office applying justice fairly and equally.’
The cop pulled the bag of drugs out and yelled out to his fellow officers. The defendant related to the case in question has been held since January on ‘drug charges’
After turning his body camera on, the cop then walked back down the alley way and ‘found’ the drugs
Defense attorney Michael Davey, said Pinheiro, 29, was simply trying to document how he had recovered evidence the officers had already found. He accused Mosby’s office of ‘overreach’ in prosecuting a police officer.
After the Public Defender’s office released the video last July, then-Police Commissioner Kevin Davis suspended Pinheiro’s police powers and put the other two on administrative duty.
But he cautioned against a rush to judgment, also suggesting that it may have been a reenactment of a crime scene, even if that would be ‘inconsistent with the way that police officers do business.’
Davis later clarified that re-enactments are against department policy as hundreds of drug cases across the city fell apart. The public defender’s office has said the man who was jailed that day on drug charges also was freed after months in jail.
The cop then turned and walked past two other officers who had been standing behind him the entire time
Last week, after a record year in per-capita homicides, Baltimore’s mayor fired Davis after 2 and a half years on the job. And on Wednesday, police spokesman T.J. Smith said policies changed after the video came to light ‘to ensure a clear understanding of when and how long the body-worn camera should be activated.’
Smith said Baltimore officers must now keep their cameras on from the beginning of an event until that event is concluded and they have left the scene.
Mosby’s office also announced Wednesday that it will not charge three other Baltimore police officers who were separately accused of being caught on body-camera video planting evidence last year.
In January 2017, Baltimore entered into a court-enforceable agreement to reform its police department after the U.S. Justice Department discovered longstanding patterns of excessive force, unlawful arrests and discriminatory police practices.
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