Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, the most innocent possible explanation for the Baltimore police officer whose body camera footage appears to show him planting drugs in a trash-strewn alley that he “finds” shortly thereafter.

Let’s consider the additional context that Commissioner Kevin Davis provided — that the three officers seen in the video were working in an area known for drug dealing and observed an exchange. Let’s give due weight to the other body camera videos the department released showing the officers making a traffic stop, arresting the suspect and searching the same trash-strewn yard where the alleged planting took place, all of which included officers finding drugs. Let’s assume the detectives jump to the same conclusion Commissioner Davis does — that if they find a knotted bag of drugs, there must be another, unknotted one nearby. And finally, let’s grant the possibility that the officer had previously found the un-knotted bag of drugs and decided to “recreate” his discovery with his body camera rolling to provide documentation.

That’s still a really big problem.

Commissioner Davis — while stressing that he has come to no conclusions about what happened — said Wednesday that an accusation that an officer planted drugs on an individual is “as serious as it gets” and profoundly damaging to the community’s trust in the department. But recreating the scene of a drug find is serious, too.

The fact of the matter is that the most innocent explanation anyone has mustered is that a Baltimore police officer manufactured evidence. Even if police had found the drugs in the very same soup can in the same back yard where Officer Richard Pinheiro, placed them before walking back to the street, hitting record on his camera, turning around, and pretending to search through another few pieces of trash before finding this needle in a haystack, he was still manufacturing evidence. Had he provided that footage to prosecutors for possible introduction at trial, it would have been a false record. In that video, Mr. Pinheiro is an actor, not a police officer.

Consequently, it’s mystifying that Baltimore prosecutors allowed Officer Pinheiro to testify in a separate criminal case after public defenders informed State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s office of the staged video. Ms. Mosby and her deputies answered questions about the matter Thursday and said it took time to review all of the body camera videos associated with the incident, not just the one released by the public defender’s office. Before notification went out to prosecutors handling cases involving the three officers, “one case, not many, but one case, was heard in District Court in which one of the officers identified in this case testified and was cross-examined,” Ms. Mosby said. We appreciate prosecutors’ reluctance, in the words of Deputy State’s Attorney Janice Bledsoe, “to make allegations against police officers unless we carefully review the material,” and we would certainly expect them to do so before bringing charges.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. The first video shows enough to immediately pause all cases involving the officers pending further review. If the department’s internal mechanisms don’t allow that to happen, they need to be changed. Moreover, Ms. Mosby acknowledged that her office’s body-worn camera division had seen the videos before the apparently damning one was highlighted by the Office of the Public Defender, but “this was something that wasn’t immediately visible or apparent to the assistant state’s attorney” who initially reviewed it. If prosecutors don’t have the right staffing to catch something as plain as this, that needs to change, too.

Whether the officer was actually planting drugs, as public defenders allege, or engaging in a dramatization of previous events, as Mr. Davis hypothesized, the incident deals a severe blow to the department’s attempts at increasing the community’s trust for Baltimore police. We should not, of course, take this incident as condemnation of all 3,000 Baltimore police officers; we assume most of them are at least embarrassed if not outraged by what this video depicts. But it, like the cases of seven officers under federal corruption indictments, and like the incidents depicted in the Department of Justice’s 2016 report when Baltimore officers engaged in unconstitutional conduct in the presence of federal investigators, reflects a certain brazenness that comes with a dysfunctional departmental culture.

By all means, Commissioner Davis is right that we need a full investigation of this latest incident so we can understand precisely what happened and why. But there is no context in which what the officers did was acceptable. He needs to say that loud and clear. Similarly, it is inexcusable for prosecutors to put an officer on the stand when faced with such clear evidence of potential integrity issues. Rather than defending her adherence to protocols, Ms. Mosby needs to figure out how never to let that happen again.