As long as police officer dress up and threaten people's freedom for possession of a plant, we'll keep on seeing headlines about the absurdities of the drug war.
For several decades, different stories of police posing as drug buyers accidentally arresting other authorities posing as drug dealers have circulated. It has been multiple stories. One of the most recent instances of the phenomenon was in November 2017, when undercover cops in Detroit had a particularly heated incident in which both of the sides were undercover.
On the east side of Detroit, undercover cops from two different precincts “got into a turf war” as a local Fox2Detroit news article described. Near the notorious Seven Mile road, two special ops officers from Detroit’s 12th Precinct were posing as selling dope, only to arrest users who simply try and buy from them, “and seize their vehicles.”
That is when rather than encountering users, they met other special ops officers from the 11th Precinct. They had ordered the other undercover cops selling to get on the ground, and no one wanted to diffuse the situation before it escalated into a physical altercation, Guns were drawn, punches were thrown, and Internal Affairs said they'd perform an investigation, but it's been quiet since.
“This is probably one of the most embarrassing things I’ve seen in this department,” said Detroit Police Chief James Craig.
The situation got ugly: WXYZ-TV obtained body camera video, showing two groups of cops shouting, pushing one another and throwing hands a little bit.
“They appeared to be like Keystone cops,” Craigs added, joking about “fictional police officers depicted in comedic silent films.”
That type of thing has been happening for a very long time. It was noted in one article that in 1986, around 33 years ago, two Detroit cops lost their lives in a similar incident when plain-clothes cops raided a home, and the other officers responded to a shooting at the same place, and the police shot each other.
Approximately 23 years later, in North Carolina, an Iredell County Sherrif’s Office deputy tried to bust other cops by purchasing drugs from them: undercover Statesville officers.
To bust somebody selling “a small amount of marijuana,” in the words of an archived local Statesville news article about that, Statesville Police Chief Tom Anderson said that undercover cops from his department were working on a week-long case.
The undercover cops set up a meeting in the parking lot of a store in the area. Then they began to become suspicious the dealer they were trying to bust was undercover too.
They tried to even contact the sheriff’s office narcotics unit, called Capt. David Ramsey. They were falsely told the seller wasn't a cop.
“At that point, we proceeded like we normally do and placed him under arrest,” the chief pointed out.
Sheriff Phil Redmond said: “We had several large-scale operations going on at once, and the wires got crossed on this one,”
Several large-scale operations: to bust people for “small amounts of cannabis” and pose in pictures for that social media clout like this.
The article about this mix-up in North Carolina must have been embarrassing because it was taken down. Luckily for the sake of the truth, there is a thing called the Wayback Machine, and it was archived, and it can be found here.
Reference: Upi.com
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As long as police officer dress up and threaten people's freedom for possession of a plant, we'll keep on seeing headlines about the absurdities of the drug war.
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