Raleigh police charged men on false information. They need to take responsibility.

When a Raleigh police informant falsely accused 15 Black men of selling drugs, they lost a collective two and a half years of their lives—about 913 days.

They missed cancer treatments and lost their jobs, a Thursday settlement details. Children lost their fathers for 913 days. Six potential plaintiffs, all women and children, may seek justice for the SWAT-style raids that accompanied the arrests.

The City of Raleigh said in a statement Thursday that the settlement “does not end efforts by the Raleigh Police Department to ensure this doesn’t happen again.” There was no mention of repercussions for arresting officer Omar Abdullah, or any potential reforms.

That isn’t good enough. Raleigh deserves transparency.

The use of jailhouse informants like Dennis Leon Williams Jr. has been questioned for years. The Innocence Project notes that 21 percent of death row exonerations have involved false informant testimony, yet law enforcement still relies on them.

Williams was homeless and charged with multiple crimes, including selling fake drugs, when he became an informant for Raleigh police in 2018. He received cash and worked off charges in exchange for “buying heroin” from the fifteen men and “marijuana” from another, according to the lawsuit.

Williams obstructed his body camera so nothing was recorded when he supposedly met with these men. He and Abdullah met before and after each alleged sale so that Abdullah could give him money for his work. All of this is in apparent violation of RPD procedure.

According to the lawsuit, four officers told Abdullah that they believed the “heroin” was actually brown sugar, and occasional field tests proved the drugs were fake. Some officers went to Abdullah’s lieutenant and sergeant in an attempt to stop the arrests, but they continued until May 2020. When the lawsuit was filed in April, Abdullah was still on the force as a detective.

All of the accused had their charges dropped, but spent thousands of dollars in bail or spent months behind bars. One man was jailed days after his daughter was born. Another was arrested while driving his two children, despite the “heroin” he supposedly sold field-testing negative, and spent six months in jail. The lawsuit alleged that racial discrimination could have played a part in their arrests.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman says there isn’t any evidence that Abdullah or the others knew the drugs were fake, at odds with the lawsuit’s claims. The officers involved failed to get her office the negative test results for the drugs, if they did at all. She says this all highlights the lack of prosecutors on her team, since the six employed by the DA’s office did not notice the pattern of fake drugs coming from Abdullah and Williams.

Police departments only have half of Americans’ trust, according to a 2021 Gallup poll. This number is divided among party lines: 76 percent of Republicans polled trusted the police, yet only 31 percent of Democrats did. A USA Today/Ipsos poll found that four in five Americans didn’t think officers treated everyone equally.

If Raleigh police or Freeman want to improve this trust at a local level, they need to be transparent about what happened, why it was wrong, and how they intend to keep stories like this from happening in the future.

The lawsuit asked that the offices consider multiple reforms alongside the payout for the wrongly accused. Some suggestions include testing suspected drugs within 24 hours of seizing them and ending the use of paid informants. There has been no word from Raleigh police as to whether these reforms would be considered.

It’s imperative that Raleigh residents know if and why their tax dollars are being spent on putting innocent people in jail, funding false testimonies and paying out settlements when mistakes come to light. Raleigh deserves to know why 913 days were spent behind bars, and what is being done to keep it from happening again.

This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 9:15 AM.