Dear Faithful Reader,
I hope this month's Black Birdseye View finds you well and in good spirits. I'm doing well. I always return to what remains unfinished and needs addressing. It troubles me that the City of Raleigh, NC, employs police officers who have, by all accounts, gotten away with kidnapping and framing at least a dozen people (mostly Black) for selling or trafficking heroin.
At the center of this misconduct was a single RPD-paid confidential informant, Dennis Leon Williams Jr. Records show that the Raleigh Police Department arrested Williams in 2018 for selling fake drugs to an RPD informant. Despite this, in 2019, RPD approved him as a paid informant for its Vice Squad.
Three years later, RPD feigned shock and outrage when Williams once again presented brown sugar as heroin (presented fake drugs), leading to the kidnapping, framing, and arrests of countless individuals. These people spent months in jail or paid thousands of dollars in bail. Some lost their jobs; one was jailed during cancer treatments, and another was incarcerated just days after the birth of his daughter.
Most troubling to me is that there has been little consideration of the possibility that many individuals could still be imprisoned based on these trumped-up charges.
Only one of the eight officers involved in this framing ring has been investigated, terminated, and ultimately sentenced to a mere 38 days in jail and two years of supervised probation.
In addition to the officer mentioned above, the following officers were named in a dismissed lawsuit against the City of Raleigh, NC:
Lieutenant Jennings Bunch
Sergeant William Rolfe
Officer Rishar Pierre Monroe
Officer Julien David Rattelade
Officer Meghan Caroline Gay
Officer David Chadwick Nance
Officer Jason Gwinn
Omar Abdullah (Terminated, sentenced to 38 days in jail and two years of supervised probation)
Confidential Informant Dennis Leon Williams, Jr.
To date, the City of Raleigh has settled two lawsuits related to the kidnapping and framing, amounting to over $2 million. That alone speaks to their guilt. According to the lawsuit:
RPD Officers Nance and Abdullah were the officers who arrested and then recruited Dennis Leon Williams Jr.
After seven months of watching individuals be falsely arrested and detained, RPD Officer Monroe reported the ongoing scheme to Sergeant Rolfe and Lieutenant Bunch, his superior officers. Neither supervisor intervened to stop the false arrests and prosecutions.
RPD Officers Rolfe, Monroe, Rattelade, Gay, Nance, Gwinn, Abdullah, and Bunch were aware of the scheme and failed to prevent false arrests and wrongful incarcerations.
RPD Officers Nance, Monroe, Rattelade, Abdullah, and Gay were all aware that the alleged drug was not heroin but brown sugar.
Faced with negative field test results, RPD. Officers still charged 15+ Black men with selling heroin.
Is the public not supposed to see the sentencing of ONE of the EIGHT officers to 38 days in jail / two-years’ probation for kidnapping and deliberately framing people as a slap in the face.... when we consider the punishment the framed and kidnapped individuals were facing if RPD had gotten away with such corruption?
When are the records of all individuals associated with the dismissed lawsuit and any confidential informants reopened and examined for fraud? Why is District Attorney Lorrin Freeman not bending herself over backward, tying herself in a knot to scowler through the records to do her job and make sure the innocent goes as free as they can be in America? Even with all this on record, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman stated that:
"Her office did not believe that RPD knew Dennis Leon Williams Jr (the CI known as Aspirin) could present fake evidence related to the wrongful arrests and prosecutions of 15+ Black men in Wake County."
Nothing about this should sit well with you. The picture painted by the media, RPD, and the DA paints RPD as inept and easily fooled by an uneducated paid confidential informant who, single-handedly, with a lone corrupt ex-cop, tricked an entire police department into being so corrupt that it is costing the city millions.
Speaking of millions. Why is no one talking about the fact the RPD is putting millions of dollars in the hands of known criminals they have relabeled "Paid Confidential Informants to buy and sell drugs on the streets of Wake County, NC?" Why is no one questioning the distribution of drugs and drug money into our streets to fight a war on drugs the city of Raleigh, through RPD, appears to be funding or benefiting from? Who is tracking that money? What is the protocol for the distribution of that money, and might these cases be more about that money than anything else?
Until Next time
Robin Ess
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