The word usually refers to weapons that cops carry “just in case.”  If they shoot someone and it turns out that the person wasn’t a threat, they just put a throwaway in his hands and, bingo, a righteous shoot.  The word could also refer to the human beings that former NYPD Det. Stephen Anderson testified about.  Throwaways.

Cooperating with the prosecution, Anderson explained the problem.

“Tavarez was … was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case,” he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.

“I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy,” Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

He made clear he wasn’t about to pass off the two legit arrests he had made in the bar to Tavarez.

“As a detective, you still have a number to reach while you are in the narcotics division,” he said.

Work, work, work. When you work narcotics, you have to make busts or get busted. When there aren’t enough people to bust, you just find some throwaways. Anybody in a bad neighborhood will do.

Nathan Burney, who did time in the office of the citywide Special Narcotics Prosecutor, an office necessitated by the volume and fear of narcotics in New York City, before he came in from the cold explains what this mean to the throwaway.

Here’s what happens to you when narcotics officers arrest you for no good reason: You’re forcibly kidnapped, usually in public, in some of the most shaming circumstances imaginable. You’re hauled off in handcuffs, which fucking hurt. You’re fingerprinted, and a rap sheet is created, and unless you are very lucky the fact of this arrest will be part of your official record for the rest of your life. You’re charged with a crime, perhaps a felony.

To support the charge, officers like Anderson will provide some real drugs and say they found them on you. Maybe they’ll sit around and try to come up with an incriminating statement they’ll say you “blurted out” on the scene. Faced with overwhelming evidence, you may well take a plea just to avoid the near-certainty of prison. Your reputation is shot, your background check will kill most decent job opportunities, and you will be a convicted criminal for the rest of your life.

Because you’re not an addict eligible for a program, you’re more likely to do time. And now that the cops know you, and you’ve already got one arrest for this, you’re an easy mark — you’re all the more likely to get hassled and arrested again.

From the defense side, all of this was true. And more.  A nice guy, often named Jose, who worked in a crappy job to pay the rent and did his best to stay away from street corners were trouble often happened, found himself in the Kafkaesque situation of being taken off the street on his day off.  Nothing made any sense as he pondered for the next 28 hours what he was supposed to do. 

He and his family cobbled together money that should be used for the rent and to buy diapers for the baby to pay a lawyer.  It was all lies, he said.  But there was no DNA, no video, no witnesses to be found.  Just Jose’s word against the cop’s.  The cop had ribbons over his shield attesting to his bravery and honor. Jose had nothing.

The judge was told this was a garbage bust.  Some judges looked back with sad eyes, knowing there was nothing they could do. Most judges cared as little about the throwaways as the cops.  The first time out was usually probation, and nobody was foolish enough to turn it down.  If Jose was lucky, he never ran into a cop again.  He walked the other way when he saw one coming.  If he didn’t, he could be back.  The next time was state prison, as he was now a predicate felon. The law left no choice. 

From Burney:

This is nothing new. It was nothing new back in the ’90s when we were a prosecutor in the city’s Special Narcotics office. Near the end of each month, there would be a spike in arrests (usually simple buy-and-busts) near the end of each month. There were blocks where cops knew they could make these arrests without even trying — they called it “going to the well.”

And yet prosecutors kept prosecuting.  Judges kept judging.  And throwaways kept losing.  Even when there was evidence, witnesses that the cops were liars, some Special Narcotics prosecutors did everything in their power to protect the lying cops and prevent the evidence of their lies from coming out.  Bad, evil things. Anything to protect their darling cops.  I’ve got stories.

Cops love busts, as the overtime buys their houses in Queens and the south shore of Long Island, far away form anyone named Jose.

“Did you observe with some frequency this … practice which is taking someone who was seemingly not guilty of a crime and laying the drugs on them?” Justice Gustin Reichbach asked Anderson.

“Yes, multiple times,” he replied.

The judge pressed Anderson on whether he ever gave a thought to the damage he was inflicting on the innocent.

“It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators,” he said.

“It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway.”

Stephen Anderson said what everybody knew but nobody in an official capacity would admit.  Not a cop. Not a prosecutor. Not a judge.  Only defense lawyers and the throwaways talked about it, and nobody listens to us.  Believe us now?