Do Russian Police Fabricate Drug Offenses? Evidence From Seized Heroin’s Weight Distribution

• Author: Alex Knorre
• Date: 01 October 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0022042620918951
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0022042620918951

Journal of Drug Issues

2020, Vol. 50(4) 378 –391

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0022042620918951

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Article

Do Russian Police Fabricate Drug

Offenses? Evidence From Seized

Heroin’s Weight Distribution

Alex Knorre1,2

Abstract

Current Russian drug policy is punitive toward people who use drugs. Moreover, criminal

justice in Russia is driven by strong organizational incentives to increase performance indicators

of police such as clearance rate. Taken together, these might lead to the use of extrajudicial and

illegal police practices, as documented by several qualitative studies. In this article, we explore

quantitative evidence of such practices, namely, weight anomalies of the seized heroin that result

from minimum threshold amounts established by the law. We find significant discontinuities in

the weight distribution of seized heroin near minimum threshold amounts. Placebo tests rule

out alternative explanations of the discontinuity and show that the most likely source of the

revealed discontinuities is police manipulations with seized heroin.

Keywords

drug offenses, drug enforcement, police corruption

Introduction

At the end of September 2018, a trial had taken place in the Tosno district court, Leningrad

region, Russia. Several police officers were indicted with fabricating evidence. They were alleged

of planting drugs on a man. To do so, they had forced Aleksei, a 22-year-old person who had

already been charged with a drug offense, to find someone who could buy some narcotics. The

officers threatened to detain him in case of his refusal to cooperate. Aleksei managed to find an

appropriate acquaintance, a cook from a nearby restaurant, who agreed to buy some hash. The

police officers demanded that Aleksei plant 2 g of amphetamines, so the police could immedi-

ately arrest the cook. Instead of actual amphetamine, Aleksei used powdered chloropyramine

(harmless antihistamine) pills. The police detained the cook with the pack of cigarettes that con-

tained, according to the initial forensic examination, 2.47 g of amphetamines. Later operatives of

the Federal Security Service arrested the officers and used tasers for torture to get the confession

of guilt (MediaZona, 2018).

The story illustrates one of the illicit methods, planting evidence, that Russian police officers

might use to initiate drug-related criminal cases in Russia. Although the scale of drug-related

police misconduct is unknown, the possibility of its widespread usage aligns well with what is

1European University at Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation

2University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alex Knorre, Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint Petersburg, 6/1А Gagarinskaya Street, Saint

Petersburg 191187, Russian Federation.

Email: aknorre@eu.spb.ru

918951JODXXX10.1177/0022042620918951Journal of Drug IssuesKnorre

research-article2020