Prosecutors to drop 3 dozen cases due to police corruption

According to the article

Eight more cases were dropped Tuesday in the widening scandal surrounding plainclothes police officers, as San Francisco’s public defender sought years of arrest reports involving members of the implicated unit.

Seven officers and a sergeant are being investigated in the scandal, involving what Public Defender Jeff Adachi calls “police, lies and videotape.”

The allegations involve abuses of authority, some caught on videotape, in which officers appear to enter residential hotel rooms during narcotics investigations without warrants. The officers then allegedly made conflicting statements in police reports about the circumstances of the searches.

There is a statement the Chief made that caught my attention

Interim Police Chief Jeff Godown said Tuesday that he has ordered that all the plainclothes details in the district stations receive “refresher training” on searches and police reports.

Why would your police officers need refresher training on how to conduct a legal search and to not lie on the report? If you are employing officers that cannot understand the simple concept of not entering a place of residence without permission or a warrant they have no business being police officers in the first place. As far as re-training on how to fill out police reports, all reports should be written individually without allowing officers to come up with a similar story. The reports should then be handed to a supervisor. It should be handled just like witness statements taken, everyone is separated and they can talk afterwards. Or better yet let’s get rid of reports and look at video; it never lies and will be the downfall of policing as we know it today.