The city’s Public Defender’s Office confirmed this week that they’d discovered a second body cam clip that appears to show a different group of cops “working together to manufacture evidence.”
Multiple officers are allegedly seen in the newly uncovered footage, which was captured during a traffic stop in southeast Baltimore in November 2016, WBFF-TV reported.
Debbie Katz Levi, head of the Baltimore Public Defender’s Special Litigation Section, told the station that an officer appears to plant something in the front seat of the car as six other officers stood by.
“What’s most concerning about this particular video is that it appears that officers are working in concert with each other,” Levi told CBS Baltimore. “There are approximately six officers standing around while this suspected misconduct is taking place.”
Authorities have not named any of the officers featured in the video.
The public defender’s office told the Baltimore Sun that “related charges against one of its clients” were dropped this week after the surfacing of the body cam video. WBFF said the charges were drug-related. An investigation into the video is underway.
The news of the second video comes just days after Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, threw out 34 cases because of “credibility” concerns arising from a body cam clip featuring three police officers. In that body cam video, Officer Richard Pinheiro is filmed allegedly planting drugs in a trash-filled yard as two other officers, Hovhannes Simonyan and Jamal Brunson, looked on.
Mosby said on Friday that her office would be tossing out any case that relied solely on the testimony of these three officers.
“The credibility of those officers has now been directly called into question,” she said, adding that more than 70 cases remained under review.