There are many police departments that receive a large chunk of their budgets from anti-drug grants from their states and federal departments like the Department of Justice [0]. Generally, the cops can keep anything they seize in a drug bust such as fancy cars and trucks, cash, weapons, through "civil asset forfeiture"... This is true even if the defendants are found not guilty. Sometimes the seized drugs even wind back up on the market because the cops resell them [1]. Then there's folks who just enjoy being able to wield their power over others (they were probably the kids found bullying others in school).

0: The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 1: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bmbab8/the-police-officer...

Cops being able to keep what they find in a drug bust sounds like it creates some horrible incentives and that a policy like that would almost always be negative for the person apprehended.

> What's the incentive for cops to plant drugs on people?

Paying people to catch criminals incentivizes them to create criminals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Combined with a large subset of people that have a bootlicker mentality, you end up with those that want power and worship those in power planting drugs and instigating crimes that would otherwise not have occurred.

I assume they believe they know who is guilty and just lack the evidence, so they add evidence.

Also, they may have found the evidence by some illegal means and plant the evidence to reintroduce it in an ostensibly admissible way.

I would guess a fair amount is just the whole alpha power dynamics thing. The job attracts a fair amount of people that enjoy the authoritarian role and sticking it to people at will. It's not all of them, but there's certainly a draw for that crowd.

> I would guess a fair amount is just the whole alpha power dynamics thing.

I think that's part of it. But there's also the effect that the Baltimore system/culture, the police, the politicians, the DA/prosecution, the prisons, all evolved on top of a forced labor system. Yes, slavery. The system is inherently designed to preserve that dynamic between the enslaved population and the non-slave population. It captures kids in their youth, puts them in juvi for-profit prisons, which limits their options for work in their adulthood which then puts them at risk to re-enter the jail system (forced labor) in their adulthood. Michael Wood, a former marine and former Baltimore police officer provides an interesting collection of data. His interview here shows how the system works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5nPyf-0UMc Listen to him talking about the "Knockers", a special class of police officers.

Plus closure of shipyards, factories etc.. The local economy is pretty depressed as compared to 50-100 years back but people have families and history and don't want to or can't move so are struggling to survive or can sqeeze by enough to not move..

Taking the amtrak from DC-NY at least a few years ago there were literally miles and miles of entire blocks of abandoned townhouses.. I imagine a google street view would be a good way to see this..

Also relateed - just finished binge watching HBO's 'The Wire' - though fiction and maybe jazzed up a little, it seems fairly accurate to get a picture of how messed up things are/can be based on what I absorbed 3rd hand from living in nearby DC for a good while..

The cops believe the people they are framing are bad people^, and need to be put away. They can't find evidence on the bad person, so they plant some.

^ Unfortunately, many of them see everyone who isn't a cop as a bad person - either a threat, or a criminal.

Another reason to plant evidence is if you just brutalized someone. Beating an innocent person for the crime of mouthing off to you/being black looks bad. Beating a junkie carrying a tenth of an ounce of weed... Well, they were a criminal, so it's all good.

And why wouldn't they plant evidence? Your co-workers won't rat you out, nobody will believe the the guy you arrested, and in the unlikely event that you are stupid enough to be planting drugs in front of your own body camera, you will get a paid vacation.

Because once they have "proof" that you're a criminal, then they get greater leeway in what they want to do in terms of searches and detaining you, and even if they turn up nothing, they still have something to charge you with and hang over your head.

Although these days, they don't even need to prove you're a criminal to steal your money with civil asset forfeiture, they just need to be able to find your money.

Sounds like a good reason to hold bank accounts outside of the US?

Good luck with that given current US law and the increasing number of foreign banks that want nothing to do with US citizens.

• if you arrest more drug offenders, you can meet your quota/justify your existence/get promoted/etc.

• if you arrest drug offenders, you can seize their assets for the budget

• if someone you dislike conveniently has drugs on them, you can deal with them

• you won't be held accountable

Quotas and fines / property that get seized and added to the departments budget.

Peter Moskos, a criminologist who spent a year on the Baltimore police force while doing his PhD, has a good post up about what happened -- http://www.copinthehood.com/2017/07/thats-quite-days-work.ht... It seems like the officer forgot to turn on his body camera while originally finding the drugs, and so rather than get reprimanded for forgetting to turn on the camera, he decided to recreate the crime scene and pretend he had that he had the camera on the whole time.

he has a theory about what he thinks happened.

But these cameras have a 30 second buffer, and are always recording to that buffer. The buffer is stored when the start button is pressed. That is how he got caught.

So if your camera is off, and you found a stash of drugs. Just press the start button. It'll record you finding the stash 30 seconds earlier.

That's actually why that button exists. So officers have a recording when it's needed unexpectedly.

More to the point, why was the officer's camera off in the first place?

Agreed it's a theory, though someone mentions some other site with more on the story in the comments..

However, not to excuse falsifying evidence, the 30s buffer example you mention wouldn't cover the case where you found the stash more than 30s earlier and have already disturbed with the otherwise valid crime scene..

I'd imagine in some sort of hot pursuit situation it would be pretty easy to do this and forget the button, especially if you've been working for years without them..

That's probably what I would say too, if my job required me to have a good working relationship with police.

That seems much more like the story they want you to believe rather than what happened.

>It seems like the officer forgot to turn on his body camera while originally finding the drugs

FTA: "So maybe this was a reenactment based on a true story. This scenario, which is where I would place my money ..."

It's just a guess. And I'm not entirely convinced by the argument that (also FTA) "people in Baltimore City don't get prosecuted for a stash of drugs"; because right in the first paragraph, he says "A man was arrested related to this ... he had been in jail for the past 7 months." In other words, even if the police knew they weren't going to get a prosecution, they could have just wanted to punish this guy, or try and get him to "confess", or who knows what.

And this is why we'll never have meaningful police accountability and reform. Even being caught in the act, on video, of planting evidence someone will create an excuse for why what they did wasn't wrong. Sickening.

He has a post about what he thinks happened. His take on the issue is extremely (and unreasonably) charitable, but it still involves manufacturing evidence.