This sounds so farfetched that it could actually turn out to be true. You have to wonder how some cops get to be cops when they undergo extensive background investigations and psychological tests before they are hired.
THREE HOUSTON COPS ACCUSED OF EATING EVIDENCE IN POT CASE
By John Nova Lomax
Houston Press Hair Balls
September 26, 2011
Man, the Houston Police Department is starting to seem less like a police force and more like the world's biggest frat party these days. Hard on the heels of the dismissal of one veteran cop for driving to work drunk off his ass and crashing into a (luckily almost empty) school bus, comes an allegation that three other boys in blue chomped down on some pot brownies they had seized in a drug raid.
According to a court document, around ten or eleven on the night of May 10, a narcotics complaint was phoned in to the Kingwood Patrol of HPD. At least three officers responded to an apartment on Lake Hills Drive in Atascocita. There, according to the report, they could smell burning marijuana clear out in the parking lot.
Officers knocked on the door to the unit rented by 19-year-old Nicholas Charles Hill and were invited to come in. Once inside, according to the report, police reported seeing a small group of people seated around a bong. Hill reportedly was holding "a very large bag" of weed and had another smaller one in his lap. Police say Hill told them he was a weed dealer and that he'd just taken delivery of his supply earlier that day.
Three other people in the apartment were allegedly holding drugs, and a thorough search of the apartment turned up a couple of shotguns, an unknown quantity of 'shrooms, around $940 cash, a little more weed, and an assortment of bongs and pipes.
What this official report does not mention specifically is the tray of pot brownies Hill says the cops seized and ate right in front of him and his fellow suspects.
All of this would emerge in Hill's conversations with his lawyers Daniel Cahill and J. Julio Vela. Cahill was disbelieving at first -- although only 19, Hill has a little bit of a precocious record in drug arrests -- but investigated his client's claims nevertheless. And now he says he has what might be a smoking gun.
Hill told Cahill that after eating the brownies and arresting him and two of his buddies, the cops got on their in-car computers and started squawking about how stoned they were.
KTRK's Ted Oberg got ahold of the transcripts:
"So HIGH...Good munchies," typed one at 2:44 a.m.
"Everything should be open when we get done," responds a second cop.
"Two hours, max," replies the first.
"Probably, but this will take the whole shift," answers his buddy. (The cops in question have not been named officially.)
Hill was charged with two felonies in the incident -- one for the weed and the other for the 'shrooms. His lawyer thinks the cops should be hit with felony cases of their own: eating those pot brownies would constitute felony destruction of evidence. Cahill also says that the incident represents official misconduct, as there's nothing in the HPD code of conduct that condones officers rolling around H-Town with buzzes even Devin the Dude would envy.
Internal affairs told KTRK they were aware of the incident and the cops in question have been drug-tested, apparently long after the event in question allegedly took place. They have yet to be disciplined and may never be. As for Hill, the two felonies against him still stand, pending the results of HPD's investigation.
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