Two San Jose Police Department officers were arrested on Wednesday, October 28, on felony charges of tampering with evidence and filing a false police report, the department announced on Thursday, October 29. The officers are Raydarius Surry, 29, and Destiney Thompson, 30, both residents of Gilroy, California.
Source: KION Central Coast
Surry and Thompson surrendered late on Wednesday evening and were booked into county jail, NBC Bay Area reported. Surry has served with the San Jose Police Department for eight years and Thompson for six years, according to police statements reported by NBC Bay Area. The charges are allegations; neither officer has been convicted, and both are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.
A missing baggie of suspected narcotics
The investigation began in August 2026, when the department began looking into a missing small baggie of suspected narcotics. The baggie had been listed as evidence on a May 3, 2026, arrest report filed by Surry, and it was due to be tested by the county crime laboratory, police said.
Officials said Surry was notified by the department that the baggie was missing. Shortly afterwards, on August 12, Surry allegedly stopped and searched a pedestrian who had no connection to the May 3 arrest. During that stop he allegedly found a similar baggie of suspected narcotics, seized it, and took no additional enforcement action against the pedestrian, according to police.
He then allegedly booked that second baggie into evidence using the case number for the May 3 arrest, without documenting the August 12 pedestrian stop or the seizure of evidence from it, officials said. That sequence — a replacement baggie entered under an older case number, with no report of where it came from — is the core of the evidence-tampering allegation.
The second officer's alleged role
Thompson is accused of reviewing body-camera footage of the May 3 arrest to help Surry replace the missing evidence, officials said. NBC Bay Area reported police saying Thompson watched the footage to help Surry formulate a plan to replace the baggie. Police said Thompson and Surry are in a relationship with each other.
Surry was placed on administrative leave on September 2 and Thompson was placed on leave on September 18, officials said. Police said there is no evidence of any other report discrepancies or similar actions committed by the two officers.
Police evidence is not paperwork for its own sake. A seized item must be booked, labelled and tracked through a chain of custody so a court can trust that the item tested in a laboratory is the same item seized from a suspect. If an item from a different stop is entered under another case's number, the defence in the original case can challenge the reliability of the evidence, and prosecutors may have to answer for a break in that chain. That is why departments treat a missing evidence item as a serious internal matter, and why replacing it without documentation is alleged here as a crime rather than a clerical fix.
What this means in San Jose
San Jose is the largest city in California's Santa Clara County and the heart of Silicon Valley, and its police department's evidence practices affect hundreds of criminal cases that pass through county courts. For residents — including the city's large immigrant and Punjabi diaspora communities in the Berryessa, Evergreen and Blossom Hill areas — the case turns on trust: whether police reports can be taken at face value when they are used in court. The department's decision to announce the arrests itself, and to state publicly that it found no other similar discrepancies, is part of how it says it is containing that damage.
What happens next
No arraignment date was given in the department's Thursday announcement. The criminal case will now proceed through the Santa Clara County court system, where prosecutors will have to prove the tampering and false-report allegations, while the department's internal process runs alongside it. The two officers remain on administrative leave, on the dates given above. Awaaz Punjab will report the first court appearance and any statement from the officers or their representatives when those are made public.