Shoshana Walter/The Bay Citizen

Surveillance feeds from the Henry Hotel show a man in a black jacket (upper-right image) who was arrested after police found cocaine in a different jacket

San Francisco police officers have long considered the Henry Hotel to be a hub for drugs. Now, the SOMA residential hotel — or at least its surveillance system — is helping to place scrutiny on the police.

Three drug cases have been dismissed because of police misconduct revealed through surveillance videos, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said Monday. Defense attorneys released another series of videos from the hotel’s surveillance cameras at a news conference Monday afternoon, offering the videos as proof that police officers falsified police reports to arrest a 29-year-old man in December on charges of cocaine possession.

“If it weren’t for the video, my client would still be in jail or going to state prison for a crime he didn’t commit,” attorney Scott Sugarman said.

Three of the five officers in the December incident are already under investigation by the FBI and District Attorney’s Office following Adachi’s release of similar surveillance videos last week.

According to an arrest report, police arrested the man, who was visiting someone at the hotel, after finding cocaine inside a white-and-gold jacket slung over a chair inside the room. Officer Gregory Buhagiar told other police officers he’d seen the man wearing the jacket when he arrived at the hotel, but surveillance videos told a different story.

During Monday’s news conference, Sugarman and Adachi played surveillance video showing the man wearing a black jacket as he entered and walked through the hotel. Although Buhagiar testified in court that the suspect had told police the white-and-gold jacket was not his, Sugarman said police did not mention the man’s denial in the police report, allowing officers to justify the false arrest.

“My client told officers repeatedly that it was not his jacket, that his jacket was right next to him,” Sugarman said. “Police never put his statements in their report, never checked the video and never booked the black jacket into evidence.”

The man was arrested Dec. 2 and spent three weeks in jail before charges against him were dropped, Sugarman said.

“This is a case of police, lies and videotape,” Adachi said. “The police went into the room, found the jacket that had drugs in it and put it on Mr. Sugarman’s client. The officer, under penalty of perjury, lied about who the drugs belonged to.”

Assistant District Attorney Sharon Woo denied Monday that the case was dropped because of the video, saying it was dismissed because prosecutors did not want to disclose the identity of a confidential informant who had told police that a woman was selling drugs out of the room.