Jason Arbeeny, NYPD Cop Accused Of Planting Drugs On Innocent People, Found Guilty

A scandal-plagued New York Police Department suffered more bad news Tuesday, when a 14-year veteran of their ranks was convicted of planting a bag of crack cocaine on an innocent Coney Island couple, The New York Times reports. Jason Arbeeny was found guilty of falsifying business records, official misconduct and offering a false instrument for filing.

From The Times:

The detective's lawyer, Michael Elbaz, tried to discredit the most important prosecution witnesses, Yvelisse DeLeon and her boyfriend, Juan Figueroa. Ms. DeLeon had testified that the couple drove up to their apartment building in Coney Island and were approached by two plainclothes police officers. She said she then saw Detective Arbeeny remove a bag of powder from his pocket and place it in the vehicle.

"He brought out his pocket," Ms. DeLeon told the court. "He said, 'Look what I find.' It looked like little powder in a little bag."

Testimonies during Arbeeny's trial revealed shocking NYPD corruption, with cops desperate to meet quotas.

Former officer Stephen Anderson, who was arrested in 2008 for the false arrest of four men on drug charges in Queens, testified about the process of framing innocent people, known as "flaking":

It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators. It's almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they're going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway.

A woman named Melanie Perez also testified that other cops in the Brooklyn South Narcotics Squad forced her to do drugs and then engage in sex acts. Perez explained, "What was I going to do? I did it."

Last spring, The Village Voice obtained tape recordings of NYPD officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant that revealed precinct bosses threatening street cops if they didn't make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks.