>People accused of crimes deserve to know if the officers involved in their arrest have a history of lying; judges, too, deserve to know how credible police witnesses are in their cases.
This seems like a pretty bizarre framing. A police officer with a history of filing fraudulent reports or committing perjury should not still be a police officer.
All it takes is for the district attorney (who thankfully is the person most familiar with the amount of lies each officer tells) to prosecute them for perjury.
It’s just a misdemeanor in many states so the DA can indict them without a grand jury! This is important because DAs use felony charges to pardon cops and launder it through a grand jury (we all remember the Buffalo NY cops that pushed the 75 year old man to the ground and left him bleeding from the head — cops charged with felony but GJ refused to indict, it can’t be proved but it’s obvious the DA sandbagged it).
But DAs almost never charge cops with anything, even the so-called progressive ones in the bluest states files a few token indictments against the a few token cops and then went back to business as usual.
If police are actually subject to the same system as the rest of us it will work, but DAs have pretty much always refused to do it.
I hate to say it this way, but it’s our own darn fault as voters… imagine a DA (or a local elected prosecuting attorney…) does that. If they stay in their current role, now the police become hostile and unwilling to work with them. Now let’s say they want to run for higher office / get reelected. Police union comes after them, opponent calls them soft-on-crime and anti-police. The general public doesn’t have the energy to actually follow the chain of issues or understand the situation, but they do respond to sound bytes. Often, the media can’t understand the situation well enough themselves, so even in the event you still have a local news source, they are unlikely to report in a way that the public understands what’s really happening. And - the press may not want to anger the police either, as they want the inside story. So… the wheel keeps on turning.
So the police unions dominate the conversation to the point where they drown out all other points of view, and the press might help them, and this is our fault as voters...how? It's not like there are tons of obviously tough on police prosecutors running either; even if someone happens to get nominated saying this, there's no guarantee they'd actually follow through once in office and dealing with a bunch of pressure from essentially everyone _but_ the voters between election years.
There are a ton of interests at play, and yes, voting a certain way might help, but reforming a corrupt system is definitely not as simple as "we just vote for the other guy this time".
> But do you see how that DA or PA are disincentivized to take on the police?
I don't see how to elect someone who doesn't have the same incentive with regard to the police. The fact that the disincentive to take on the police is such a fundamental part of how the job works is precisely why I don't think the problem can be solved by just electing a different DA; the system itself needs to be changed, and that requires a lot of coordination across multiple fronts. Voting for different people is necessary for that sort of change but not nearly sufficient, which is why I think that saying it's purely the fault of voters for electing the wrong people is a gross oversimplification.
Look what happened to Chesa Boudin, expect that to be the playbook opposing any prosecutor working toward systemic changes. Another example is Desantis removing elected prosecutors who oppose the police/fascist agenda.
> Another example is Desantis removing elected prosecutors who oppose the police/fascist agenda.
The desire and laws written to do this sort of thing come from lobbying organizations like ALEC [0][1][2]. This and other similar organizations basically write "model laws" and hand them to legislators to pass. That's why all the "red" states suddenly decided to outlaw trans people at the same time.
They dodge lobbying oversight laws by having legislators become "members" of their club.
No-one is outlawing anyone, these laws are harm reduction measures for risky and controversial medical interventions that are being inflicted upon vulnerable children and adults.
This cycle could be fixed in a few ways. One would be if a few citizens' invested some energy into creating an interesting video/sound clip of what's really happening in court and the news picks up on that. Or it spreads via social media like TikTok. It seems that quite a few people are interested in cops or court drama, and this could demystify the situation and show it for what it really is.
Having extensive experience in criminal courts, I can tell you that no DA that I know of would ever attempt to prosecute a police officer. For a start, the DA relies on its close cooperation with the police as 99% of the DA's office business is brought to them by the police. Secondly, any DA will tell you that convicting a police officer is incredibly hard. Juries generally do not like to convict police. Judges even less so.
Having studied thousands of police reports, what is almost worse than testilying is that most reports are works of fiction. And the reports are what gets the defendants into court in the first place. Testilying only matters if an officer takes the stand, and an officer often only takes the stand in a trial. And 99% of criminal cases are resolved by plea before trial in the USA because a defendant does not want to risk a trial where the officer can lie and send them away for decades.
It district attorney's started prosecuting cops, the system would crumble and come to a fast halt. There is no credibility in court and the charade continues.
It might have to be a federal or state system that prosecutes this kind of stuff in the end, because the local system wont do it. Put the DAs, the police and maybe the judges on the hook. And the federal people who would do this (FBI maybe?) would have to be completely disconnected from the local police / judge organizations, probably on rotations like a foreign diplomat service.
The key is they have to be completely different career systems, where they don't fraternize or socialize with each other, and you'd probably have to make it somewhat antagonistic culturally so they don't end up doing something similar.
Which is why it has to be a different organization. Internal affairs is a systematic failure probably because it's within the same organizational tree as everyone else. It's really hard to incentivize people to do the 'right thing' when the incentives make it career suicide to do the right thing because you'll become a dangerous pariah as soon as you do.
Also to start I'd start with actions in court / evidence, not in the field until that organization starts running out of those actions to enforce because they've installed enough fear in the police system. That way the police can never have the cultural excuse to do their crap because 'their life is in risk and it's a split second decision' because your lying on boring safe paperwork and court where you have plenty of time to think about your actions, and over %50 of this will probably be lawyers actions too.
What is the first steps? Probably allying in blue states with anti-police movements and working with them in lobbying for a state enforcement arm that enforces specifically against unjust plea deals, testilying, withholding exculpatory evidence and focusing on prosecutors with out of the norm high conviction rates first. You'd also have to make it pay as well as private, which will also be hard. A wealthy state like california can fund such a thing, and it would probably be small, like 40 lawyers & their support staff, and be crazy effective. Unjust plea deals will probably be last politically if it is at all possible because the system will scream about it will screech to a halt and to address that is a much bigger issue.
You could make it so private citizens could bring criminal trials if the DA passes on them. This solves the DA and prosecution corruption problem where they are unwilling to prosecute for personal or career reasons.
Obviously there are risks to opening up the floodgates to private criminal prosecution, so you need restrictions and checks to avoid abuse by the wealthy and powerful. However, in some sense, the wealthy and powerful can already do that in the current system via access to the DAs, so it is not as much of a risk increase as it would seem.
The key here is figuring out a robust set of restrictions. Just to get ahead of the responses, I do not claim to have a comprehensive solution, so there is no point quibbling with me about how my proposal is incomplete. Take the problems you point out as areas of improvement and think about how they could be solved.
Chicago has tried this again, and again, and again. They keep dissolving each body when it fails to prosecute any officers and start a new one, which does the same. Almost every employee ends up being related to the police or SA and none of them want to find anything wrong.
This is only the right solution on paper. Not in reality, sadly.
"People who are part of the legal system should be held to an even higher standard, as their lying undermines trust in the system itself."
They should. Instead the system protects itself by insisting that secrecy must be maintained to preserve public trust. That's the reason they give for making judicial complaints so secret that you can't even subpoena judicial complaints to show a pattern of bias or misconduct by a judge.
Agreed - but if they're no longer able to effectively testify in court, they'd presumably no longer be able to do real police work - at best they'd be put in some administrative duty.
the unions are only another symptom of the problem: if you get rid of all the bad cops, you don't have enough workers left to do all the work we currently assign to police. bad cops don't keep their jobs because they have a powerful union, they keep their jobs because the demand for police officers is so high. and that's the same reason the union has so much power.
if you want accountability, reduce the number of policing jobs to some number lower than the number of people who want to be police.
> if you get rid of all the bad cops, you don't have enough workers left to do all the work we currently assign to police
maybe, maybe not
you would definitely open up the profession to all the people who consider themselves honest, and thus who have avoided a career in policing, which is rife in corruption, rewards corruption, and penalizes honesty
and let's be honest, it pays a TON for what isn't even close to one of the most dangerous professions, so neither pay nor danger are what keeps smart, honest people away
currently, most such people would avoid it because of the culture (particularly the culture of corruption), and bad police don't want and, indeed, deter such people from joining their ranks
> bad cops don't keep their jobs because they have a powerful union
almost universally, they do: the union literally prevents firing most bad police officers
Remember the Defund the Police thing? Turns out that places that diverted money to non-police alternatives for things like mental health calls have been doing well so far. So, get rid of the bad cops and give that money to people who can help without a gun.
The issue is, the officer helps the prosecutor. Who is going to prosecute you if you’re helping the prosecution? It’s a case of turning a blind eye because it suits the state.
I’m in total agreement though that if a police officer is found to have lied under oath, in statement, or report - they’re done. Same as one who discharges their firearm outside of a hostage/terrorist/school-shooting. Gunning down civilians, whatever their crime, is murder. Shooting someone because they are running and you can’t run fast - is murder.
You realize the police sometimes have to shoot at people who are trying to murder them? Violent criminals deserve to have their threat capacity neutralized in the most effective way possible. If it can't be done with non-injurious force then so be it.
There are some few cases where it's reasonable for the police to shoot someone. But when they all have guns and no training for de-escalation or sound rules of engagement, they end up shooting rather a lot of people who aren't even trying to murder them, let alone likely to succeed.
I ran the background on an officer in a case against me. He had been found guilty in an internal investigation of badly beating an unarmed Mexican man. In his sworn statement he said the guy had run in front of his car. This didn't match the testimony of six different witnesses who all saw the incident.
The report found him guilty of the beating and noted his testilying. I think he was given a few days suspension for this. No criminal charges, obviously.
In another case, I told a friend to investigate the background of the lead detective against him. When we ran his file we found he had already been fired from the police department for using the computer system to change the upcoming court dates for another officer so he would miss court and not testify against a friend of the detective who had been pulled over for a suspected DUI.
Usually, yes. You might want to make a motion in limine to the court before trial to let them know you plan to do it and to get the court's approval. This will also put the prosecutor on notice and might stop them from using the witness altogether.
I always use FOIA to access the police department records during pre-trial for defendants. The prosecutors are supposed to supply useful information like this to the defense, but I've never known it to happen without some prodding.
At the very minimum they should not be a cop. Better still would be if we considered this a serious felony and a cop who did this was liable to trade in their blue uniform for an orange one. I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.
I follow a simple rule: Anyone who probably has video of something controversial (like a car wreck or a fight) can be trusted IFF the bring out the video within 48 hours.
A delay strongly implies they are trying to lie.
As a bonus, posting the video to YouTube within a short time proves you did not spend a lot of time editing it before posting it. This is increasingly important in the era of AI fakes.
This would make a great rule for court cases: Anyone who publically posts video within 48 hours is assumed to be in the right. Anyone who likely had video but did not post it within 48 hours is assumed to be in the wrong.
There is no legitimate reason cops do not post video of their shift as soon an they get back to the police station.
Disagree--bodycams will sometimes record things that legitimately shouldn't be released. (Extreme example--cop rolls up on a 10 year old being raped. You think that should be out there???) Thus police video needs to be reviewed before release. The defense should *always* have access to the whole thing, although sometimes with restricted access (like a lesser version of a SCIF--they can go to a secure location and examine it but not make copies.)
What we need is bodycams with secure digital signatures. The camera signs the video when it makes it, the key set during manufacture and not accessible by *any* means. The public key for the camera can be accessed from the camera as well as from the manufacturer--the defense can verify the image actually came from the camera. I'd actually like to see this for all cameras but it's less important for others. (Note that this would *not* indelibly fingerprint an image--it would be like the EXIF data, the user could remove it if desired. You can make an image anonymous, you can't pretend an image is from some other camera.)
How often do cops roll up on a 10-year-old being raped, such that graphic things are recorded on the body camera?
And, if that did happen, and I was the 10-year-old, I would prefer proof that justice was done over privacy. Source: I was sexually abused as a child, and the perpetrators only paid fines ("victim restitution") to avoid prosecution. One of my goals in life is to end that.
If I were the accused, I would also prefer evidence over privacy.
Needless to say, you don't speak for all 10 year-olds. I've been sexually assaulted and if videos of that were put online, I would feel much more vulnerable than I do today despite not getting an ounce of justice. There must be a middle ground between no recording and your proposal that police should post CSAM to youtube.
Yup--release important stuff, but blur victims and incidental derogatory things. (Roll up on a scene, there's a druggie shooting up in the background. Blur.)
Anyone can do a FOIA to get anything released, but they must pay for the review and blurring of things that shouldn't be shown. Defense gets the raw video without paying.
You say we should blur out a druggie in the background.
I think the public needs to have the unedited video to know the truth.
For example, unedited police body cam videos can show if a neighborhood is getting better or worse over time.
Video of druggies shooting up over time can be used to retroactively track the distribution of a new illegal street drug.
I do understand the desire to blur the naked sexual assault victim, but there will be problems with that. If the video is unblurred, Internet sleuths can match multiple attacks to one attacker, or even discover several attacks in the same style and trace it back to a particular jail they were an in before where they learned techniques.
even better, constantly hash sign footage as it is generated, publishing the signatures immediately, preferably signed by sensor itself so authorities don't have access to the private key.
Is it truly futile to hope for the occasional technologist to bring rigor to the matter?
If one thinks of Almond Strowger, he nearly single handedly initiated the weeding out a specific form of corruption (corruption of human telephone operators, to redirect economic traffic) for about a 100 years by inventing the automatic telephone exchange and phone numbers.
Years ago a co-worker or mine was assigned to a jury on a murder case. Without going into details, he told me the worst thing that can happen to you is to find yourself in the hands of any jury.
OK, one detail, the accused had a lengthy history of mental illness. The police and the prosecutor tried to paint this a some sort of joke and sought the death penalty! After much arguing and the legal definition of mental illness defined, a life sentence was given.
My co-worker begged all of us to sit down with our families and have a talk about the legal system and it's flaws.
The US police, justice, and carceral systems are over-zealous and punitive. The US has among the highest incarceration rates on the planet (including a large pre-trial detention population) and their conditions are often inhumane.
To be fair, juries are an approximate averaging system of guesswork by people who weren't there, listening to other people who weren't there arguing for the interests of 2 sides who present different stories.
One thing I never understood, that "Miranda rights" are celebrated as some sort of civil rights victory in the US.
It's actually not great that everything you say will be used against you. Ideally, police should not be belligerent hateful scumbags eager to pin any crime they can at you. That they have to announce that they are, isn't really helping much. I wonder if it actually makes it worse - that they have come to see it as their right, their right to nail suckers who make the mistake of seeing them as fellow decent humans.
The point of Miranda isn’t to make the police collect all evidence of crimes, that’s what they always did. They’re not (necessarily) hateful scumbags, collecting evidence of crimes is literally their job. The arresting, detention, etc, is secondary. What Miranda does is make it clear that:
* You have the right to remain silent
* That’s important because if you aren’t silent, they can use anything you say against you
The second point explains why the first is so important. And it’s important to tell people that being silent is their right and won’t be held against them, while what they say may be. Unfortunately it’s become so perfunctory that I think people don’t actually pay attention to the words and why they are the way they are.
Because the alternative is worse. Notably, Miranda v Arizona set off a huge effort by the right to undo it or at least limit it in major ways. The fact that this incredibly small thing was seen as a huge gift to "bad guys" is an indication of just how little a segment of the population cares for rights of the accused.
It's not the role of the police to be pinning crimes on people, that's the judicial system. The police just collect evidence, and, as I understand it, the Miranda warning just means that there's no "off the record" when talking to the police.
In other words, it doesn't mean "we're going to twist what you say as much as we can", it means "we'll tell the court whatever you tell us, even if that's self-incriminating".
Yep. AIUI, Miranda's only change to the status quo was to make it mandatory for the cops to _tell_ you what the status quo is.
Prior to Miranda they didn't have to tell you shit, and were probably justifying it to themselves with some lame "Ignorance of the law is no excuse, so if you don't know that you have a right to an attorney, that there is no 'off the record' conversation with a cop, and that you don't have to tell us shit, then that's your own damn fault." justification.
The judicial system prosecutes the cases that the police bring to them, with the evidence collected by the police, with the witnesses, etc. all found, interviewed, and provided by, the police!
It's not quite that. The police don't HAVE to write everything down, or record everything, etc. And they're anti-aligned with you. So things you say in custody can and will be used against you, but not everything you say can be used in your defense.
Which is why you should never talk to cops without your attorney, especially if you're being arrested.
Police are allowed to lie in pursuit of their work. Miranda compels them to tell the truth, if only once, when arresting a suspect. That Miranda is celebrated is an indication of the sorry state of policing... but don't shoot the messenger.
Also? Look at Canada. Here, cops are also allowed to lie, we don't have Miranda rights, we don't have the strength of the 5th amendment, and while you're allowed to ask for an attorney, the police are in no rush to get you one and they'll continue questioning you without an attorney present. They're not supposed to question you without that attorney, but who's going to stop them?
That was surprising to me so I dug into the citations [1][2] that correspond to that line in Wikipedia.
Citation [1] actually uses the "can and may" verbiage.
Citation [2] refers to the "will" verbiage as "now familiar verbiage" in a footnote, but it doesn't seem to be arguing that that verbiage is prescribed or accurate -- just that it's now familiar. It also incorrectly quotes that verbiage as coming from the original court ruling, so clearly they lost track of where they actually got it from (since it's not there).
I did find a quora answer [3] which gave an origin story for the "can and will" verbiage, but at this point I'm not ready to trust anything written on the topic that doesn't have solid references.
The gap between "can and may" and "will" might seem a bit nit-picky, but vintermann's interpretation depends very heavily on that "will."
There's also nothing special about being arrested that makes it so that anything you say could be used against you in court. It's really a just reminder that your right to remain silent may have value to you.
I have too - and I'm supposedly one of the privileged people (white male) that get to skate through.
It wasn't a particularly big deal - it was just a speeding ticket. But maybe that makes it even worse, that a cop is willing to casually lie about the smallest things.
In the big picture, maybe his success with his lie does more harm than even if he'd let go free someone he believed was guilty. Maybe I get to skate on a speeding ticket, but at least it doesn't give me a story I can tell everyone, for the rest of my life, about how the cops cheat and lie.
So what is the solution here? They're already supposed to keep lists. Has the CO law made improvements? The way I envision it would be that the problematic offices just end up with empty lists because they evaluate that some action didn't meet the threshold.
Maybe we can do something about complaints and misconduct for judges too?
Right now judicial misconduct is considered so secret that you can't even subpoena exculpatory contained in those complaints. The reasoning is that public knowledge of mistakes and wrongdoing would undermine the courts. I think that position is outdated and trust would be kmproved if mistakes were corrected and bad actors were removed from the system. This is especially important at the magisterial level where there is minimal training, minimal requirements, and often a background that leads to bias (lots of ex-cops as magistrates).
Part of why I bring this up is that I have submitted a complaint in the past and they simply closed it even though the magistrate was unprofessional, yelling, completely onesided (retired cop), etc. Some of the things like unprofessional conduct and yelling are even examples given by the judicial board, yet they simply closed the compliant without investigation. I guarantee this happens with the Giulio lists too - close it in favor of those in power.
The system is so corrupt/rigged at this point, I'm not sure if we'll ever get to a reasonable level of accountability and fairness. I guess it's always been this way (and worse) though.
It's time to make accountability match the crime. [In my jurisdiction, at least] police officers are considered officers of the court, and considered more trustworthy than other witnesses, under oath or not. When a police officer abuses that by perjuring themselves, there should be a additional punishment. Some kind of modifier, like a hate crime, that really makes it hurt.
I agree that police who lie should be dismissed from the job and also prosecuted if warranted.
I also believe that failure to obey a lawful order from a cop should result in hard jail time.
Once both are passed, I think police will have less incentive to lie and violent encounters will be dramatically reduced. When citizens realize that failing to obey a lawful order results in long jail sentences, all kinds of bad behavior will melt away.
The problem with this is that it would quickly become prohibitive with criminals going after the authorities who prosecuted them. I think immunity has to stand so long as they didn't break the rules but we need the system to do a better job of going after the bad apples.
That's fundamentally impossible. It's nonsensical to suggest that the government punish a private citizen for doing what the government forced that private citizen to do.
Any attempts to implement your proposal will lead to exactly one inevitable outcome: lawlessness. This is because, if the government does start punishing a certain class of private citizens for doing what the government forces them to do, private citizens will no longer voluntarily join that class.
I have over a decade of experience in prosecuting and defending cases under the UCMJ, I have an LL.M. in military criminal justice, I am qualified as a Special Trial Counsel, and I recently served as the Marine Corps Senior Defense Counsel for the National Capital Region.
Let me assure you that military law enforcement has qualified immunity.
That's a bad-faith interpretation of removing qualified immunity. If a police officer's actions can be found to have been necessary to their duty, the laws already protect them. Nobody proposes to "punish a private citizen for doing what the government forced that private citizen to do." The proposal is to hold them accountable when they exceed their remit.
> That's a bad-faith interpretation of removing qualified immunity.
No. On the contrary, it is the only good faith engagement with the issue. Bad faith arguments are in the majority on this thread.
> If a police officer's actions can be found to have been necessary to their duty, the laws already protect them.
Yes. By qualified immunity.
> Nobody proposes to "punish a private citizen for doing what the government forced that private citizen to do."
Yes. Removing immunity would do exactly that.
> The proposal is to hold them accountable when they exceed their remit.
That is already the substantive law. That's why the immunity is "qualified." *
(* EDIT: I should note that we're conflating a couple concepts here for the sake of general discussion, because the precise applicable doctrine depends on the method of holding them accountable. Qualified immunity is specifically a doctrine invoked in civil suits, typically in § 1983 suits.)
If it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, they should be prosecuted.
If it can be proven by a preponderance standard, the prosecutor should issue a Brady notice to the defense bar, which will in most cases naturally result in the police officer being fired or assigned to administrative duties.
I respect and appreciate your position. I believe we both have high expectations of prosecutors and law enforcement.
At the risk of presuming too much, your position wrt QI and other reforms might be summarized as "We already have sufficient rules. The rules must be followed. The proposed reforms would eliminate an important safe guards as well as not achieve the desired outcome."
Qualified immunity is indeed a doctrine, not a law. It is a construct of the Supreme Court and not subject to congressional oversight (or indeed any oversight other than the whim of a ruling judge). That is a fundamental problem which congress needs to fix.
From a practical standpoint, actual real-life laws already protect law enforcement officers in the process of their duties; the removal or codification of qualified immunity would not affect that in the slightest. Since the vast majority of qualified immunity invocations concern financial liability in civil suits, it would be simple to implement a liability insurance program (like medical malpractice insurance, but for police work) to shield officers from life-ruining financial responsibility for their actions.
Qualified immunity is doctrine and it is the law. It is doctrine that arises as a necessary implication of the foundation of a legal system.
> laws already protect law enforcement officers in the process of their duties; the removal or codification of qualified immunity would not affect that in the slightest
This is nonsensical. Qualified immunity is the very thing that protects law enforcement officers (and all other government officials) in the process of performing their duties.
To say that removing qualified immunity would have no effect on qualified immunity is not only tautologically false, it's a vile and dishonest attempt at gaslighting.
Thanks for the pointless personal attacks, but what you say is, in addition to needlessly insulting, factually incorrect. The US title code is littered with disclaimers preventing laws from "interfering with a law enforcement officer's execution of duty." In fact the US title code has to explicitly spell out what is inappropriate "under color of law," which term it defines, and most of those infractions listed are rights violations or discriminatory actions.
Fifteen states have the Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights codified into their statutes. The rest are either considering it or have something very similar codified into law.
Qualified immunity is not "the very thing" protecting law enforcement officers. It is, however, "the very thing" our elected representatives have almost no input into or control over. Removing qualified immunity would in fact not affect any of these actual laws, and replacing it with a codified law would enable more consistent and just application of the concept, which as I said before is currently just something a judge can decide whether and how to apply.
Correcting your ignorant claims is not 'gaslighting.' Your emotional distress over the matter does not qualify you to accuse me of abuse, and I don't appreciate your mischaracterization of my posts.
No. I'm sorry, but your understanding of this topic is fundamentally wrong, and it's so far off the rails that I don't know how to go about fixing it over the Internet.
Sovereign immunity, and the qualified immunity for agents of the sovereign which arises as a corollary, is a fundamental principle of Anglo-American law. It has nothing to do with whatever patchwork of the U.S. code you seem to be implying.
> if the government does start punishing a certain class of private citizens for doing what the government forces them to do, private citizens will no longer voluntarily join that class.
The government "forces" the police officers to engage in this malfeasance?
>There was a dead body found in a car rented by Breonna Taylor.
Is the implication here that she's therefore a bad person and therefore the police's actions were justified? If so your presentation was heavily misleading. From wikipedia
>In December 2016, Fernandez Bowman was found dead in the front seat of a car rented by Taylor and used by Glover.[12] He had been shot eight times.[12] An unrelated party was later arrested for Bowman's death[51]
I don't condone bad cops and I am very strong on prosecuting them, but the way the media and the protesters portrayed Breona Taylor as a totally innocent victim of a botched police raid was lacking in some important details. The rental car under her name, and a person found shot dead inside of it, didn't bode well for her. When's the last time you rented a car and a person was found dead in it? Your boyfriend's a drug dealer and arrested on drugs and gun charges and you are having calls with him in jail about holding onto his money? I am glad I grew up where I did. It taught me some life lessons street smarts that seem to be non-existent in those who grew up quite differently. Breona didn't deserve to die, but she was not a wholly unrelated, innocent victim in this scenario as the media and protesters tried to paint. All of your choices have consequences.
Lie detectors aren't remotely reliable enough to be used like this. Sufficiently skilled people can beat them and people tend to react to the sensitive questions (is the machine going to falsely say I'm lying???) even when telling the truth.
However, I do believe they have a role in law enforcement. The same hardware can be repurposed for a guilty knowledge test. The police keep secret the details of the crime. If they catch a suspect they hook them up to a lie detector and make them repeat the details--some true, some false and compare the reactions. (I do not consider this compelled testimony as they're just reading a script.) Someone who shows a sufficient pattern of hitting on the true ones knows the details. It won't false positive because the innocent doesn't know which answers are the guilty ones (to be safe the person doing it should likewise not know so you don't get a Clever Hans effect) and won't tense up because if it. It could statistically but if you have enough questions you can make this possibility vanishingly small. There still is a chance of a false negative if the guy can beat it (unlikely) or actually didn't note the details you're asking about.
Well, they can be effective as a prop to psychologically manipulate the subject into thinking you know when they’re lying, to try and pull out a confession. But that mostly only works if the subject doesn’t know it’s pseudoscience and believes polygraphs actually work…
From what the anti-polygraph people say, apparently it only takes about 30 minutes of training before most people can actually manipulate the polygraph in a controlled way.
Which means every cop will know how to get past them. I grew up in a family with a number of members in law enforcement and other parts of the justice system. Cops actively teach each other what to say/what to do in court and when they themselves are questioned.
The county I had lived in at that time was the worst. The guy in the sheriff's office that administered the lie detectors was "criminal scum" himself. For the longest time there were allegations of criminal behavior, but he finally pissed someone off and they hired a PI to follow him around. Caught this 40+ year old member of law enforcement giving minors alcohol at a party and hitting on them. It broke on the news and he was fired from his law enforcement position, but no criminal charges where ever brought...
What was even better, he was quietly brought back on as a consultant to administer lie detector tests!
Interesting that you should bring up some pseudoscience. It is well-known that jury trials often employ myriad methods of pseudoscience to admit artifacts into evidence, and to admit "expert witness" testimony into the record.
Police, prosecutors and judges are incentivized and desperate to get a great record of convictions, and so they're positively motivated to do that by any means necessary. If you watch copaganda shows like NCIS or CSI, or the lovely Canadian Murdoch Mysteries, you will be introduced to a lot of smart scientists who use a lot of smart science to catch bad guys. Well, guess what, a lot of the "science" actually used in court, and believed by everyone on all sides of the case, and the spectators as well -- that "science" is fake, it's quackery, it's just an excuse to get convictions.
Now there are whole categories of testimony and evidence which are always excluded and stricken from the record, because they are known to be invalid, such as "hearsay", and I think that if courts and the justice system compiled lists of pseudoscience and quackery, and then excluded that sort of crap out of hand, we would approach fairer trials and better justice for all.
"The fact that a witness is employed by law enforcement is just another witness. No better. No worse than anybody else that's going to take the stand. And you, ladies and gentlemen, will determine the truthfulness, the veracity, and the weight of the evidence, and the testimony they're are going to be giving to you."
Perhaps some subtlety was needed and “everyone” is too large of a swath but judges are not dolling our perjury charges a dime a dozen and taking the stand doesn’t make some just answer carte blanche.
This seems like a pretty bizarre framing. A police officer with a history of filing fraudulent reports or committing perjury should not still be a police officer.