More bad police behavior

The New York Times has an editorial about the NYPD:

The arrest of a New York City police officer, who was accused of violating the civil rights of an African-American man during a stop-and-frisk arrest, provides good reason for Justice Department officials and state lawmakers to investigate whether others on the force are engaging in similar practices.
Federal prosecutors charged the officer, Michael Daragjati, with violating the man’s constitutional rights by falsely accusing him of resisting arrest. The criminal complaint suggests how easily that charge can be abused. Nearly six thousand New Yorkers were taken into custody last year with resisting arrest as the most serious charge against them, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services has reported.
According to the complaint filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, text messages and calls by Officer Daragjati, which were intercepted in a wiretap in an investigation for other crimes, showed him fabricating facts and bragging to a friend that he had “fried another nigger” and that it was “no big deal”.
The African-American man was walking in a residential area of Staten Island when he was stopped, shoved against the side of a parked van, and searched by Officer Daragjati, who is white. The officer found no drugs or weapons, but grew angry when the man complained about his treatment and asked for the officer’s name and badge number. Prosecutors say that Officer Daragjati arrested the man, who put up no struggle, and falsified a police report, charging the man with resisting arrest, a misdemeanor.
The officer’s conduct might easily have escaped notice had he not been under surveillance for alleged extortion and insurance fraud, with which he has also been charged. Civil rights lawyers have long complained about trumped-up arrests of mainly minority citizens who are dragged into the criminal justice system.
Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently directed the police not to arrest people with small amounts of marijuana unless the drug is in open view. Low-level marijuana offenses have contributed to the arrests of hundreds of thousands of people since the mid-1990s. We need to know whether bogus charges of resisting arrest are widespread.

Rico says he was busted for that traditional crime, walking while black...