He received a medal for valor, following a shootout in Queens. And he seemed to have a sixth sense for finding drugs and guns. In a decade on the force, he had made, by his own count, 350 arrests.
The man, Detective Kevin Desormeau, was regarded as courageous, cunning and tireless. His supervisors within the New York Police Department heaped on such praise that in their -telling he sounded half comic-book hero.
But prosecutors now say Detective Desormeau, 34, struggled with one aspect of police work: telling the truth. After relying on Detective Desormeau’s word in hundreds of cases, prosecutors no longer believe him credible. In two cases, prosecutors have accused Detective Desormeau and his partner of making up crucial details when arresting people, even testifying about criminal activity that may never have occurred. They have said they are reviewing some of his old cases, though how many is not clear.
The two detectives were indicted earlier this year, adding to the body of evidence that police perjury and half-truths remain a persistent problem for the New York Police Department. And as more arrests and confrontations are being recorded, evidence of police falsehoods are more apparent.
The issue of false or misleading statements by the police has, on a national level, been intertwined with the issue of excessive force and the debate over whether police are too quick to shoot people, particularly black men. In cases in recent years, from Chicago to North Charleston, S.C., police officers have given accounts of fatal shootings that turn out to be at odds with what cameras captured.
Review Board Notes Rise in New York Police Officers’ False Statements MAY 14, 2015
But the phenomenon of false or misleading police statements has not been confined to high-profile cases in which officers try to justify the use of deadly force. In New York, the practice of routinely making up facts to justify a dubious arrest was entrenched enough that it got its own nickname more than 20 years ago — “testilying.”
There is a long string of gun arrests over the years in which judges have cast doubt on the officers’ accounts. And troubling instances keep emerging. In recent years, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a city agency that investigates police misconduct, has documented an increase in cases in which police officers give false statements.
“There is lying going on on a regular basis,” said Richard Emery, who until last year was the chairman of the review board. While he credits the department with effective reforms regarding use-of-force and unconstitutional search and seizures, he said, “the one major lapse in the fantastic work of the N.Y.P.D. is not addressing police lying.”
Lawrence Byrne, the department’s top legal official, disclosed in a recent panel discussion at the City Bar Association that 73 officers have “been fired or forced out of the department in the last five years for either perjury or making a false statement,” and that about twice that many officers had faced lesser penalties for false statements “in the last few years.”
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