Video: Florida Officers Openly Discuss Falsifying Report to Protect Officer From Blame in Accident By Framing a Citizen

Broward County prosecutors in Florida have dropped four DUI charges against Alexandra Torrensvilas after this video showed Hollywood police officers making up a false story to pin the blame of an accident on her. The problem is that they did it in front of their dash cameras.

Officer Joel Francisco, 36, hit Torrensvilas’ car at a light on February 17 around midnight and radioed for other officers who immediately got to work to pin the blame on Torrensvilas.

Officer Dewey Pressley, 42, tells Francisco that Torrensvilas has been drinking and the officers decide to claim that she caused the accident as a DUI. She sits handcuffed in the back of a cruiser as the officers script and stage the scene.

Pressley tells Sgt. Andrew Diaz: “As far as I’m concerned. I’m going to put words in his mouth. She went to accelerate and a cat jumped out of the window at which point he thought it could have been a pedestrian, which distracted him. I mean what’s the chances of hitting a fuckin’ drunk when a cat jumps out of the window?”

Pressley adds later: “I nailed her on the video. I already hung her on video. She said she has been doing a beer party. She’s gonna blow.”

Pressley casually discusses falsifying the report with the other officers as they debate who will write it up: “I know how I’m going to word this with the cat so we can get him off the hook. I’ll write the narrative. We’re going to bend this a little bit.” The officers including a fourth officer (Civilian Community Service Officer Karim Thomas) are even shown staging the photography to best incriminate Torrensvilas.

What is most disturbing is how quick and easy the decision proved to be for the officers to falsify an account to incriminate an innocent citizen. It becomes a scene out of The Thin Blue Line. Pressley states “I don’t lie and make things up ever because it’s wrong, but if I need to bend it a little bit to protect a cop, I’ll do it.”

Once again, absent the video, it is unlikely that prosecutors would have ever questioned the account of the officers and this citizen would have been facing four criminal charges.

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