Brooklyn, N.Y., federal prosecutors say that Daragjati, 32, stopped the man in Staten Island and frisked him, but found no weapon or contraband. After the man complained to Daragjati about how he was being treated, Daragjati arrested him with no probable cause, prosecutors say.
In the police report filed by Daragjati, he falsely claimed the man had “flailed his arms and kicked his legs,” prompting the officer to charge him with resisting arrest. The man spent 36 hours in jail on Daragjati’s trumped up charges.
On the same day Daragjati filed the false report, investigators secretly wiretapped several of his phone calls and heard him use racist slurs to refer to black people, officials said.
In one of the calls, Daragjati admitted that he could be fired if the NYPD knew how he behaved on duty. He said he would at times “throw somebody a beating,” prosecutors alleged. In another call he revealed that he had been “skating it for a long time.”
“The power to arrest — to deprive a citizen of liberty — must be used fairly, responsibly and without bias. Motivated by base racial animus, the defendant allegedly abused this power and responsibility,” said Loretta Lynch, the United States Attorney for New York’s Eastern District.
In an unrelated incident, prosecutors charged Daragjati with extortion and wire fraud that was connected to his off-duty snowplow business, and another wire fraud charge associated with an insurance scam.
Daragjati will be arraigned Oct. 17 in Brooklyn federal court.
If convicted of all charges, he could be sentenced to more than 60 years in prison and fined $850,000, officials said.
“We who enforce the law are not above the law; in fact, we should be held to a higher standard,” said Janice K. Fedarcyk, Assistant Director-in-Charge of the FBI’s New York City office.
Read more: New York Post
