TBH it sounds like these ones were confiscating stuff and falsifying records.
This is fairly common and cops often get away with it as it means less drugs are recorded against the results of a drugs bust – this means people often get off on posession rather than supplying so obviously they aren’t gonna say “well I had more than that!”
A few years ago I remember reading in the news some senior police officer expressing “concern” that younger officers were increasingly being sucked into the drugs culture. Despiite the best efforts of the management and control structures of law enforcement, cops are still human beings and I bet some younger ones often regret crossing the blue line sometimes….
This is also why you very rarely get cops doing deep cover operations on the rave scene, despite all the paranoia about this (the most you will get is plain clothes cops attending a commercial nightclub or lurking about at the entrance to a free party and trying to blend into the background).
The Met tried it for a bit in the mid 1990s after the Leah Betts incident. ISTR they lost several cops that way who decided to combine drugs and clubbing with “the job”, they even ran a dealing ring until one of them turned born again Christian and grassed up the rest of them!
