A dirty deputy with Florida’s Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office recently took to a department chat board to provide his cop colleagues with some insight on how to ruin the lives of the average citizen by planting evidence on “mouthy drivers” and filing false reports. The website, which is operated by the PBSO, allows local cops to swap secrets of the trade under the guise of absolute anonymity. A team of investigative reporters from The DC Post discovered this digital pig farm, of sorts, and found it interesting that an officer of the law was airing such controversial police tactics for anyone to read.
The post, which is entitled “Tricks of the Trade – Let’s Exchange,” indicates that for over the past 15 years an officer with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, who the DC Post refer to as Joe Deputy, has been employing dastardly schemes that involve planting drugs on innocent people just so he has the pleasure of taking them to jail. The thread begins with the following note:
“I have a method for getting people off the street that should not be there. Mouthy drivers, street lawyers, assholes and just anyone else trying to make my job difficult” wrote the deputy. “Under my floor mat, I keep a small plastic dime baggie with Cocaine in residue. Since it’s just residue, if it is ever found during a search of my car like during an inspection, it’s easy enough to explain. It must have stuck to my foot while walking through San Castle. Anyways, no one’s going to question an empty baggie. The residue is the key because you can fully charge some asshole with possession of cocaine, heroin, or whatever just with the residue. How to get it done? “I asked Mr. DOE for his identification. And he pulled out his wallet, I observed a small plastic baggie fall out of his pocket…” You get the idea. easy, right? Best part is, those baggies can be found lots of places so you can always be ready. Don’t forget to wipe the baggie on the persons skin after you arrest them because you want their DNA on the bag if they say you planted it or fight it in court.”
The DC Post later reached out to the officer on the chat board and requested an anonymous interview, which he was willing to do for a price. “How much will the interview pay? What are the conditions?” he wrote.
During the interview, Joe Deputy claims that planting drugs on innocent people is a regular occurrence. “Probably every day in my shift,” he said. “I work nights on the Road Patrol in a rough, um, mostly black neighborhood. Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
He then goes on to explain that the drug war encourages cops to use all of their available resources, regardless of their legality, in order to harvest people from the streets and put them into the criminal justice system. The deputy says that while planting drugs on people is not a part of the regular course training, the practice has been encouraged for a long time.
“It is something I see a lot of, whether it was from deputies, supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway,” he said. “One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices. It doesn’t help that your higher-ups all did the same thing when they were on the road. It’s like a never ending cycle. Like how molested children accept that as okay behavior and begin molesting children themselves.”
Interestingly, Joe Deputy throws his superior, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, under the bus by stating that not only does he know about his department’s use of these unsavory strategies, he condones it.
“Our top boss, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, supports this behavior and has for his entire career,” said the deputy. “Does our Sheriff know about this behavior? Of course he does. We have even had a judge outright accuse my agency of committing fraud upon the court in a public hearing. She was one of the ones who saw through all the lying and covering up our department does to get away with the internal crime committed by deputies on a regular basis.”
Later in the interview, Joe Deputy offers a shocking revelation that supports the existence of racial disparity in relation to drug cases by claiming that he specifically targets African Americans. “It is much easier to do this on a black person because they have no credibility anyway,” he said. “The charges stick better to blacks than to a rich white guy that can afford a lawyer.”
While the disgusting swill oozing from this cop’s mouth might seem representative of a single crooked weasel boasting the scams of Florida police, the reality is these evil schemes are part of the propeller that keeps the drug war profitable in the United States. In fact, one of the deputy’s last remarks is that officers in his department are threatened with disciplinary action if they do not make enough minor drug possession arrests, while at the same time they are told not to make official reports on some robberies in an effort to rig crime statistics.
On a side note: The DC Post says in their report that Joe Deputy provided them with identification to prove that he was law enforcement prior to the interview, and they also located documents that supports his claims.
