Former Raleigh Police Officer Sentenced To 38 Days In Jail For Fake Drug Arrests Targeting Black Men

RALEIGH – A former Raleigh police officer pleaded guilty Wednesday (Oct. 4) to felony obstruction of justice.

Former Detective Omar Abdullah was sentenced to 38 days in jail and two years of supervised probation.

Abdullah was arrested in August 2022 in connection to a string of wrongful drug arrests that took place between 2019 and 2020. Abdullah is accused of framing 23 people over fake heroin deals and conspiring to target Black men for arrest. He was arrested on July 29 and was charged with felony obstruction of justice.

He was fired from the Raleigh Police Department in November 2021 after being on paid leave for more than a year.

Authorities said that, between December 2019 and May 2020, he used an informant named Dennis Leon Williams Jr. on controlled drug buys that led to 15 Black men being arrested and jailed on drug trafficking charges.

Charges against all 15 men were dropped, and Raleigh officials agreed to pay 13 of the men a total of $2 million to settle a lawsuit over their wrongful arrests. Some of the people wrongfully accused did not spend time in jail, but they may have had their property destroyed during searches.

None of the men wrongfully convicted were in the courtroom on Wednesday. 

Judge Patrick Nadolsk said former Raleigh Detective Abdullah failed to use his ability to protect.

“I’ve always tried my best to work hard,” Abdullah said.

Abdullah pleaded his case Wednesday in the courtroom and tried to explain what went wrong. “I never maliciously looked to harm anybody or to change any type of evidence or anything like that,” Abdullah said.

However, Abdullah’s actions did harm others. Williams was arrested, and he was charged with five counts of obstruction of justice.

Three families sued the city of Raleigh this year after a “no-knock” raid on the wrong home in May 2020. Abdullah led that raid.

“He made glaring errors, no doubt,” defense attorney Ryan Ellis said of Abdullah. “And he lost his job from RPD because of those errors.”

Ellis says his client was manipulated by an informant who had his own agenda.

However, Nadolsk didn’t agree.

“The evidence in this case, from the state’s perspective, was clear,” said Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman. “He, at the end of the day, had the authority and made the decision to bring the charges, and he knew that those people should not have been charged as they were.”

This article first appeared on WRAL.