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Video Shows NYPD Officer Awkwardly Tossing Weed Into Brooklyn Man’s Car
By
Trevor Boyer
Published Oct 18, 2019
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By
Trevor Boyer
Published Oct 18, 2019
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An NYPD sergeant dropped a pill bottle of marijuana from behind her back into the car of a suspect her partner would soon arrest for drug possession, smartphone video obtained by Gothamist shows.
The video is part of a lawsuit against the City of New York and two police officers that was filed by the car owner's friend, who was accused of passing him the drugs during a hug on a Bushwick sidewalk in May 2015.
One of the cops said she found the weed in a pocket of the car owner before the camera started rolling. But the car owner denied that the cop retrieved any drugs from his cargo shorts pockets during the search.
“Nothing came out of my pockets,” said Abdul Pullium, 38, in a civil deposition.
“As long as police believe, correctly or incorrectly, that the more drug arrests they make will lead to them possibly being promoted, there will be some bad officers who will be tempted to plant drugs on people who didn’t have any to further their careers,” said Fred Lichtmacher, civil attorney for Chaka Virgil, 39, who was accused of selling the drugs to his friend Pullium.
Smartphone video taken by a neighbor shows Sergeant Rayna Madho and Officer Tinina Alexander talk to Pullium, in a black t-shirt and dark shorts, as he leans on his car. Officer Alexander is handling the plastic pill bottle Madho says she took from Pullium’s pocket.
Both officers seem to glance at the camera, and Officer Alexander hands the bottle to her partner. Sergeant Madho shifts the bottle behind her back from left hand to right, leans over, and seems to place it into Pullium's car through an open rear window.
Both Virgil and Pullium were arrested and held overnight before being arraigned at Brooklyn Criminal Court the next day. Virgil had no criminal convictions, while Pullium had served 11 years of a 15-year sentence for second-degree manslaughter and weapons possession.
But five months and several court dates after their arrests, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office dropped the case. “We cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” a prosecutor said at the time.
Virgil filed suit against the city and the two cops in Brooklyn Federal Court in 2017, claiming false arrest, malicious prosecution, and denial of the right to a fair trial. He is seeking $500,000, court costs, and punitive damages. The case is expected to be ready for trial soon if the parties don't reach a settlement beforehand.
Officer Alexander, then working with Sergeant Madho in the 83rd Precinct as part of a narcotics enforcement unit on Pilling Street, has since been promoted to detective and then to sergeant.
Chaka Virgil was walking with a friend a little after 5 p.m. on May 27th, 2015, when the two saw his friend's cousin, Abdul Pullium, sitting on the stoop of the friend's family house on Pilling Street near Bushwick Avenue, Pullium and Virgil say in their civil depositions. (Through Virgil’s attorney, both Virgil and Pullium declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Expecting to leave soon, Pullium had parked his car in front of a fire hydrant by the house, leaving all its windows down.
After Pullium and Virgil greeted each other, they talked on the stoop for a few minutes before Virgil headed for a nearby deli. Realizing he had left his phone on the stoop, Virgil returned to the house and saw the two officers questioning his friend. Both men were soon arrested. Virgil was accused of handing Pullium a pill bottle containing a baggie with slightly less than an eighth-ounce of weed, according to court papers.
The two officers had been sitting in an unmarked police car parked near the house, just behind Pullium's car and mere feet from where the friends shared their half-hug and handshake, according to the cops’ civil depositions. Officer Alexander said that while the greeting was happening, she told her then-partner Sergeant Madho that she could see drugs changing hands. The officers said they saw no exchange of cash.
The two NYPD officers acknowledged they allowed Virgil, the man they thought passed the drugs, to leave the scene before approaching Pullium.
Sergeant Madho said she frisked Pullium and retrieved marijuana from a pocket of his shorts, which Pullium later denied.
In her deposition, Sergeant Madho’s account of the drugs’ chain of custody is murky.
“So the first time you see the alleged drugs is when they’re being passed from Alexander to you, correct?” asked Lichtmacher during Sergeant Madho’s deposition.
Sergeant Madho says yes. Lichtmacher then asked her who took the drugs out of Pullium’s pocket.
“I took the drugs out of his pocket,” says Sergeant Madho.
Asked why she dropped the drugs into the car, Sergeant Madho says, "I needed my hands free, so I put it in the backseat."
When Lichtmacher asks Alexander if her partner had pockets, she responds: "It likes [sic] like her pants have pockets, but her pants are really tight."
Sergeants Alexander and Madho did not respond to messages requesting comment.
A police source said if he believed he would need both his hands free, he also might have made the move that the video captured Madho doing.
“It’s something I would do as a cop,” he said. “I know I'm going to be going back to [the marijuana] to voucher it for safekeeping.”
“It’s better to drop it into the car rather than on top of the vehicle or on the pavement, where a passerby can easily take it. It’s a split-second decision.”
The weed drop drew criticism from John Eterno, professor and associate dean of graduate studies in criminal justice at Molloy College and a retired captain with the NYPD. He said by ditching the drugs, even temporarily, Sergeant Madho made it tougher or even impossible for prosecutors to prove in whose custody the contraband was at any point.
“Since the drugs are evidence, the officers should simply put it in her pocket. Not doing so can affect the chain of custody of the evidence,” said Eterno. “I have no idea why she would throw the evidence into a suspect's car. Safety seems like a stretch since something like that can just be put in a pocket.”
An NYPD spokeswoman referred questions about the May 2015 incident to the city's Law Department, which is defending the case in court. Nick Paolucci, a Law Department spokesman, called the video "misleading" but declined to elaborate.
"Officers saw a drug transaction between the plaintiff and another suspect. Drugs were found on the person of that other suspect," Paolucci wrote in an email.
"The court, in the end, will have a jury decide," he wrote.
Tagged
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Trevor Boyer
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