(Newser)
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NYPD narcotics officers routinely trump up drug charges against innocent people so they can meet their arrest quotas, a former detective testified. The detective, Stephen Anderson, was busted for planting cocaine on four people in 2008, a practice called “flaking,” the New York Daily News reports. He said he’d done it to help out a fellow cop who was low on arrests for the month. Asked by the judge if he had frequently witnessed such frame-ups, Anderson replied, “Yes, multiple times.”
Anderson was testifying under an agreement with prosecutors in the trial of another narcotics detective from another squad accused of doing the same, in a bid to show that the practice was widespread. Asked if he worried about the damage he was doing, Anderson replied, “It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It’s almost like you have no emotion with it. … They’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway.”
