Committed police reformer Eric Adams defends cop who lied under oath to send a kid to prison
Last week, a Bronx judge berated an officer for illegally searching a teen and lying about it in court.
The officer claimed the 16-year-old refused to cooperate. In the ensuing altercation, the teen’s gun went off. But video footage viewed by the judge showed that officers had no good legal reason to stop and search him and that he was cooperative. “There was absolutely zero reason for any of those officers to approach this individual,” Judge Naita Semaj said, reported the New York Daily News. “They approached him, they detained him, they searched him, and no officer even bothered to come up with a halfway legitimate reason for any of that.”
The judge called the officer’s testimony “incredible and unreliable” testimony with “no value.” “He literally does everything you tell your child to do when they’re approached by cops,” the judge added. “He literally kept his hands up. He literally tried to record to make sure there was proof. He answered questions he had no obligation to answer.”
Enter Mayor Eric Adams, who’s pledged to balance safety with justice by holding rule-breaking cops accountable. The self-proclaimed reformer wishes everyone were being nicer to the officer. “We will never say breaking the law is a way of enforcing the law, but those officers that put their lives on the line to remove illegal guns off the street should not be demonized,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference Saturday.
False testimony by NYPD officers is such a deeply ingrained problem that some officers refer to it as “testilying.” Props for the pun, but “testilying,” masks police abuses and leads to horrid outcomes for defendants. If there hadn’t been video, Camrin Williams, the 16-year-old in question, would likely have gone to adult criminal court instead of family court, and from there, Rikers, where there were 15 deaths in 2021.
This is an easy one! “Testilying” undermines public safety. People are (obviously!) less likely to trust officers who break the law and lie about it. It threatens future convictions. The same month that Adams took office, a judge threw out 100 convictions tied to a detective caught lying under oath.
And you can try to justify the use of force in the Mean Streets of the city. But there doesn’t seem to be anything more worthy of punishment than lying, under oath, to save your own ass and destroy the life of a child.