Way too few want to do it right

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‘Testilying’ — a Stubborn Police Problem

Police lying persists, even amid an explosion of video evidence that has allowed the public to test officers’ credibility.

. . . .

“Behind closed doors, we call it testilying,” a New York City police officer, Pedro Serrano, said in a recent interview, echoing a word that officers coined at least 25 years ago. 

“You take the truth and stretch it out a little bit.”

An investigation by The New York Times has found that on more than 25 occasions since January 2015, judges or prosecutors determined that a key aspect of a New York City police officer’s testimony was probably untrue. 

The Times identified these cases — many of which are sealed — through interviews with lawyers, police officers and current and former judges.

In these cases, officers have lied about the whereabouts of guns, putting them in suspects’ hands or waistbands when they were actually hidden out of sight. 

They have barged into apartments and conducted searches, only to testify otherwise later. 

Under oath, they have given firsthand accounts of crimes or arrests that they did not in fact witness. 

They have falsely claimed to have watched drug deals happen, only to later recant or be shown to have lied.

No detail, seemingly, is too minor to embellish.

. . . .

In many instances, the motive for lying was readily apparent: to skirt constitutional restrictions against unreasonable searches and stops. 

In other cases, the falsehoods appear aimed at convicting people — who may or may not have committed a crime — with trumped-up evidence.

In still others, the motive is not easy to discern. 

In October 2016, for example, a plainclothes Brooklyn officer gave a grand jury a first-person account of a gun arrest. 

Putting herself in the center of the action, the officer, Dornezia Agard, testified that as she approached a man to confront him for littering, he suddenly crouched behind a van, pulled from his waistband a dark object — later identified as a gun — and threw it on the ground.

“P.O. Agard testified that she heard a hard metal object hit the ground,” according to a letter the Brooklyn district attorney’s office wrote summarizing her testimony.

But prosecutors lost faith in her account in July 2017, after learning from other officers that she was not among the first officers on the scene. 

Remember what happened to Serpico for exposing police criminality?