New York Detective Guilty of Lying About Drug Arrest

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A Queens jury on Wednesday convicted a detective of lying under oath in a trial that raised troubling questions about the prevalence of false statements by police officers in routine cases.

The jury found that the detective, Kevin Desormeau, had concocted a story about witnessing a man deal drugs to two women on a street corner on a summer evening in 2014. In sworn testimony, Detective Desormeau claimed to have intercepted the man after the transactions and arrested him on the sidewalk.

But videotape from security cameras showed that the man had been playing pool inside a nearby Caribbean restaurant at the time he was said to have been selling drugs outside.

In finding Detective Desormeau, 34, guilty of perjury and related charges, the jury accepted the prosecution’s argument that he had not witnessed the man dealing drugs and had simply decided to search him on a hunch, which turned out to be correct: He seemed to have had crack cocaine on him.

Detective Desormeau was regarded as a particularly hard-charging member of an aggressive plainclothes unit that made drug and gun arrests across Queens. He received a medal for valor after a shootout, and his superiors often praised him in glowing terms. He has made more than 350 arrests in his career.

At his trial, prosecutors suggested that Detective Desormeau had decided that making lots of arrests was the route to glory in the New York Police Department, which was why he decided to falsify evidence.

He and his partner, who was also on trial, “were only interested in advancing their careers by getting high arrest statistics and getting promoted,” an assistant district attorney, Yvonne Francis, told the jury at the trial’s outset last week.

Detective Desormeau and his partner, Detective Sasha Neve, still face charges related to false statements in Manhattan in a separate case, in which prosecutors have accused them of lying about the circumstances of a gun arrest, also from 2014.

Detective Desormeau offered little visible reaction to his verdict, other than lowering his head. Detective Neve, who was tried alongside him, was found guilty of official misconduct, a lesser charge. But the judge overseeing the case, Michael B. Aloise of State Supreme Court, immediately struck down her conviction, saying there was insufficient evidence. Detective Neve grew tearful with relief.

As both detectives left the courtroom, other officers from their old unit, the Queens gang squad, patted their backs in support. The officers have packed the tiny courtroom over the last week; one officer was overheard describing the case as a “witch hunt.”

That was a theme that Detective Desormeau’s lawyer, John Arlia, tried to develop on Tuesday during closing statements. “We can’t have people being indicted for perjury for just a little white lie,” Mr. Arlia said. At another point, he claimed that the district attorney’s position was so exacting that “everybody is going to be here for perjury if that’s the case.”

Prosecutors described the two detectives as having little compunction about covering up an illegal search with a false cover story so that a case would not be thrown out in court for constitutional violations. This type of perjury — in which officers embellish or invent allegations of suspicious behavior to justify illegal searches, often of black men — has long plagued the criminal justice system, though it is rarely exposed and, even in those instances, rarely punished.

The fact that two detectives were charged with falsifying the circumstances of not just one but two arrests they made as partners is extremely unusual. And it raises the question about how often plainclothes officers and detectives, who conduct a disproportionate number of street stops and vehicle searches, offer false narratives about arrests.

But the trial in the Queens case offered little exploration of the larger question. Instead the testimony remained focused only on what happened inside a small Caribbean restaurant called Yogi’s, and on what might have happened on the street out front.

Yogi’s is where the man whose rights were violated when he was accused of dealing drugs has spent much of his time in recent years, playing pool on the single coin-operated pool table in the center of the restaurant.

The man, Roosevelt McCoy, 48, was not a sympathetic character: He has spent much of his life in prison for crimes that include killing two men. The jury watched Mr. McCoy shoot a couple of games of pool that were captured on the restaurant’s security camera. His last game ended abruptly with a few balls still on the table, when the two detectives entered the restaurant and ordered him to go outside.