Recruit recorded trying to buy drugs from undercover officer

CLAYTON COUNTY, Ga. — Police have arrested an officer accused of trying to buy drugs on her lunch break, and it's all caught on tape.

Channel 2's Mark Winne obtained undercover video that shows the officer, who was wearing the camera with his gun drawn, as he walked up to the Clayton County officer's car.

Butts County Sheriff Gene Pope said a Clayton County corrections officer and deputy in training, Christina Danielle Allen, made an appointment for her lunch break to buy a highly addictive painkiller, Roxicodone.

"That's a heavily abused drug?" Winne asked Pope.

"Yes it is," Pope said.

Pope said she even asked the alleged drug dealer for a police discount before she left the Georgia Public Safety Training Center, where she was in training to move up to deputy.

"We were monitoring a phone used by a known drug dealer and that phone started receiving texts regarding the purchase of some pills," Pope told Winne.

Allen's arrest was caught on camera from the arresting officer.

On the video you can hear the officer say to Allen, "That has got to be the stupidest thing a law enforcement officer can do! OK? You're under arrest for possession of a controlled substance. You will not finish the academy. You will not go back to work as a police officer. You understand that?"

"She came up, made the purchase and we made the arrest," Pope said.

Allen has now been charged with drug possession and violating her oath.

An investigator told Winne, Allen had been abusing pills since January, using them to alleviate pain and get sleep.

"She'll be placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of this investigation," Deputy James Beveridge of the Clayton County Sheriff's Office told Winne. "If she has an abuse problem could she have gotten help? She certainly could've. All she had to do was bring that to any person in the Sheriff's Department from a supervisory standpoint and we would have immediately gotten her help."

Allen's mother told Winne by phone her daughter does not take drugs, has been drug tested in recent months and passed, and takes pride in her job.

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WSBTV