By Matt Agorist
Los Angeles, CA — A Los Angeles man has escaped serious charges after being exonerated by police body camera footage which showed officers planting a baggy of cocaine into his wallet. Thanks to a persistent local media station out of Los Angeles, this body camera footage was released publicly and played a major role in the charges being dropped against 52-year-old Ronald Shields.
Attorney Steve Levine said he believed that body camera footage from his client’s arrest shows LAPD officers planting drugs. He also noticed several inconsistencies in the video that contradict statements the officers made in their police reports. The footage stems from Shields’ arrest last year after he panicked at an accident scene and fled.
On Wednesday, the case came to an end as the charges of felony hit and run, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and drug possession were all dropped. Because he did admit to fleeing the scene of an accident, Shields pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor hit and run.
Levine told reporters that the body camera footage has a “very big bearing” on the outcome his client’s case. Indeed it did as Shields was facing the possibility of years in prison.
As TFTP previously reported, according to Levine, the body cameras can be turned on and off by officers, but the recording actually starts proactively and will pick up the 30 seconds of activity that takes place in front of the camera prior to it being turned on. Levine said that the drugs were planted in this 30-second timeframe when the officers did not know that they were being filmed.
Showing the video to CBS, Levine pointed out that a white square can be seen in the officer’s hand before one of the officers picks up a small bag of drugs off the ground. The video also shows the officer awkwardly moving around the suspect and bending down towards the area that the drugs were found just after fiddling around with the white square in his hand.
“There’s a little white square here in his hand. I believe the video shows the drugs were in his right hand and transfers to his left hand,” Levine said.
Furthermore, the officers testified that the bag of drugs was found in his left pocket, but the video shows it being found on the ground. Then the officers are seen taking the drugs off of the ground and placing them into his wallet, which is an obvious breach of protocol. Next, LAPD Officer Gaxiola is seen in the video carrying the wallet to several different officers telling them “He has a little bag of narco in here.”
The judge reportedly said on Thursday that he does not agree with Levine about the white square that can obviously be seen in the officer’s hand, but it is undeniable that the footage on the body camera contradicts the information that the officers provided in their police report.
“It certainly asked questions that need to be answered,” Police Chief Charlie Beck said soon after the video aired.
The LAPD responded to these revelations in a statement saying that they will be opening an internal investigation into the use and misuse of bodycams by officers on the street. That investigation is still currently open.
Naturally, the union-supplied attorney for the cops denies any wrongdoing by the officers.
“I don’t think there’s anything nefarious whatsoever,” Bill Seki, an attorney representing two of the officers said. “It wasn’t something that was being hidden.” However, the fact that the body camera wasn’t turned on until after the drugs were placed in Shields’ wallet, indicates otherwise.
The union described the release of the video as a “circus sideshow” and praised the officers in the video below.
If you think police officers planting evidence is some anomaly, think again.
After their department gained national shame in August over a video showing an officer planting drugs to frame an innocent man while his fellow cops watched, the Baltimore Police Department showed the world the dark reality that is framing people to make arrests. Only days after the first video was released, the Baltimore Public Defender’s office released a second video that allegedly “appears to depict multiple officers working together to manufacture evidence.”
It was then announced that nearly three dozen people will have their charges dropped after the video of Officer Richard Pinheiro showed him planting drugs while Officers Hovhannes Simonyan and Jamal Brunson stood by and did nothing. Naturally, the BPD claimed nothing unscrupulous was going in in the aforementioned videos.
It is not just Baltimore cops either—as TFTP previously reported, in one of the most shocking cases of badge abuse ever exposed, the Alabama Justice Project revealed that a ring of corrupt cops in the Dothan Police Department planted drugs and guns on hundreds of young black men for over a decade, in most cases resulting in their imprisonment. Their actions were aided by supervisors and covered up by the district attorney.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project, where this article first appeared. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook.
I’m not surprised by this. Is anyone? Governments are inherently corrupt, designed by those whom want power or more of it. A kakistocracy. This, and similar, garbage has been going on since the inception of our kakistocracy(Shay’s Rebellion, 1700’s), the Pinkertons, etc. Our modern police forces originated in the early 1900’s because businessmen got tired of doing dirty work themselves or having to pay handsomely for it, so, have the tax payers pay for their own oppression, brutality, and slavery. Now it seems we might be moving back towards that era of privitization of the Pinkertons.
All those individuals whether members of the various police departments or not, who actively assisted in these incidents are participating in obstruction of justice. It is beyond important to ascertain who these individuals are, what they did and to prosecute them to the full limit of the law. They are a very real part of rampant judicial corruption in the US!