Pueblo, CO bust falls apart because cop staged his bodycam footage to frame his suspect

Evidence tampering is an attempt to change the evidence to make it show something it didn’t originally.

Frame implies an intent to make a person look guilty of a crime they were not guilty of.

There’s no reason to think that the officer thought the defendant was innocent. Rather, the cop made an error that resulted in some evidence (the bodycam footage) not being gathered so he attempted to manufacture the evidence instead.

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And this is why it shouldn’t be up to the cops to turn their cams on and off.

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I agree. ‘Frame’ does have the implication that the person being framed is innocent.

Then again, we are only sitting here judging the defendant as guilty because of the manufacture of evidence so whatever we call it I think the cop deserves a conviction.

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I think most framing involves people that officers believe guilty. In this case (imho) is not framing because it looks like that the cop was not aware that he was tampering with evidence. Somehow this is more worrying than a “simple” bad cop…

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Honestly, I’m not sure cutting their balls off would solve their problem aggression. We see issues in the females with problem aggression as well.

Jurys only need plausible innocence to acquit… so possible evidence of a frame is plenty to acquit.

But I don’t agree with the distinction you seem to be making between evidence tampering and framing. Too much hair-splitting for me.

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If you want your answer to be illuminating instead of cryptic, you might want to spell out what you’re thinking. “Not all evidence tampering is an attempt to frame someone”… example? Bonus if example is relevant to this case.

I think “doing the right thing” would have consisted of doing the search with the camera on from the get go. Given that he didn’t, the next “right thing” would have been either not to redo the search, or to make it explicitly clear in the video that it was a re-enactment. Given that that didn’t happen, the next “right thing” would have been to confess to such without being under duress.

But yeah, once he’d failed to have his cam on, then illicitly re-enacted the search, then stayed silent about having done so, and then was confronted with tough evidence-based questions about inconsistencies in the evidence… yes, THEN he did the right thing. Bravo for him, I wish all people had such heart.

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It’s a huge distinction:

Scenario A: Cop finds gun and drugs in car, realizes his camera is off, recreates the footage of him finding the evidence. He has tampered with evidence to cover up his mistake.

Scenario B: Cop PLANTS gun and drugs in car, creates footage of him “finding” the evidence. He has tampered with evidence to frame an innocent person.

I wouldn’t call that splitting hairs.

Ok, I see the distinction you’re pointing out. In concept, scenario A seems less harmful than B. However: we disallow A anyhow because it opens the door to gross abuse, namely “I only re-enacted it and didn’t admit to doing so because I forgot xyz” would become the standard excuse for all kinds of things that in fact WERE frameups. So despite seeing the distinction you mention, I still remain as opposed to both kinds of tampering, for basically the same reason: that I don’t want innocent people to be punished.

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I don’t think anyone (definitely not me!) is saying anything about one being “less harmful” than the other, or that either scenario should be allowed. The cop should be fully punished for what the legal system knows he did, and be investigated for whether he has any habit of this sort of thing… and whether or not it actually was an attempt at a frame.

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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.

Really? I quite clearly said, in the bit that you quoted, that it’s bad enough even if it’s one without the other! I think you jumped to conclusions there and read something that I had not said.

That they are different things. The only thing I was doing was pointing out specific factual details that were either not correct or badly worded. A few details of the writeup did not match the facts as reported by ARS, and I was pointing that out. That’s not a value judgement, and I think I’ve made it as clear as I possibly could that I was in no way intending to defend or absolve anyone.

Sure, I’ll say that reconstructing a search on video is “less harmful” than intentionally framing an innocent person. What’s controversial about that?

Yes, they’re both wrong, but one has the intent of (poorly, sloppily, perhaps even criminally) fixing a procedural error and one has the intent of framing someone for a crime they didn’t commit. How is that distinction unimportant?

This came up because Cory wrote that the cop “staged his bodycam footage to frame his suspect.” That’s not quite true. He staged his bodycam footage to recreate finding the evidence. Still wrong, still bad, but not a frame.

Just to make sure my position is completely clear, I wasn’t saying this isn’t true. Just that it’s not an accurate statement of what Ars reported or of what’s known.

What is known is suspicious as hell, which would be why the lawyers dropped the charges so fast. The cop’s excuse shouldn’t just be taken at face value.

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