That seemed to me to be what maxp was implying. If I’ve got that wrong, then I daresay he could have made that clearer.
I’d say the same about your earlier entry, where you wrote
That’s definitely evidence tampering (which is bad enough!), and it violates the department’s policies, but it’s only possible evidence of a frame.
… which to me very strongly implies that evidence tampering is not as bad as framing. If that’s not the distinction you were chasing, I guess my next question would be “What distinction were you trying to make?”… but at this point I think we’re doing some tail-chasing here. If you have something to add, I’m happy to let you have the last word.