[HN Gopher] Illinois first state to tell police they can't lie t...
___________________________________________________________________
Illinois first state to tell police they can't lie to minors in
interrogations
Author : pseudolus
Score : 381 points
Date : 2021-07-16 10:43 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| Every American should watch this video. There is no reason to
| talk to the police, it will pretty much never help you.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
|
| Edit: The lawyer made a follow up video clarifying that in
| routine traffic stops police do have autonomy. So as long as you
| are reasonable and just showing the policeman you aren't a public
| menace is seems ok. For any other reason I'd have my lawyer on me
| no matter what.
|
| Also this video specifically pertains to the 5th US
| constitutional amendment.
|
| Also IANAL but the guy in the video is.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| There's a movie I saw a while back where the main character was
| being interrogated by police, and in the scene the suspect just
| kept responding "Lawyer" to any question they asked.
| [deleted]
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| There's a bit of a stigma, in the U.S. at least, that if you
| ask for a lawyer, you must be guilty. Probably comes from too
| much propaganda type television.
|
| Asking for someone who understands law to come and help you
| is a very smart move.
| jaywalk wrote:
| If you explicitly tell the cops that you are invoking your
| right to remain silent and request that your attorney be
| present, they have to immediately stop questioning you until
| your attorney is present. But you don't get that by simply
| being silent, saying "lawyer" repeatedly, etc. You have to
| explicitly say it.
| dlbucci wrote:
| Not sure if it also happened in a movie, but that's
| definitely from a scene in Better Call Saul.
| i80and wrote:
| IANAL, so take this with the requisite grain of salt, but the
| justice system has the power to be _real dicks_ about how the
| right to a lawyer has to be invoked[1]. I would go with a
| very explicit request for a lawyer.
|
| [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-
| crime/wp/2017/11/02...
| aketchum wrote:
| This is absolutely bonkers
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Ah, Louisiana, the state that pioneered the right to a jury
| trial for misdemeanors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_v._Louisiana
| jfengel wrote:
| Unfortunately, that advice isn't great, either. The police have
| the authority to arrest you for pissing them off. They may not
| be able to charge you with anything, but they can make your day
| a lot worse before releasing you. And there is basically
| nothing you can do about it.
|
| If a police officer pulls you over and you start pulling the
| "I've been told never to talk to the police", you're escalating
| the encounter before it even starts. That's no excuse for
| police abusing their authority, but they've got the authority
| and you don't.
|
| Lawyers have told me to use your best judgment. Cooperate as
| long as the police are being cooperative, and the odds are
| you'll go about your day with only minor aggravation. Only
| escalate to the "I don't talk to police" when they start
| getting hostile with you. This is, I'm told, what the lawyers
| themselves do.
|
| This is for minor encounters, like traffic stops or ordinary
| questions. If you're actually taken in or you're a suspect,
| yeah, shut up and wait for your lawyer.
|
| And, uh, this is the advice they give to me as a white man. It
| may not apply if you're somebody more likely to be subject to
| abuse.
|
| None of this is good. It's very, very bad. This advice is not
| about fairness; it's about trying to make your life as least-
| worst as possible.
| darksaints wrote:
| Technically they don't have that right. Detainment without
| reasonable suspicion, and arrest without probable cause, are
| crimes called Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law. It is
| a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. Funnily
| enough, if you've ever heard a cop say a variant of the
| phrase "you can beat the rap but not the ride", that is
| essentially admission of such criminal action by the cop...if
| they think that the evidence is sparse enough that you won't
| be charged with a crime, then they do not have probable cause
| grounds to arrest you, and by continuing with the arrest,
| they commit a felony.
|
| Unfortunately, we can probably count the number of cops
| charged with that crime on zero hands. I'm increasingly
| convinced that our entire police problem in the US boils down
| to our incentives that we give to prosecutors which make them
| avoid any attempt to hold cops accountable for their crimes.
| I'm not sure what the solution is, but having independent
| prosecutors for police crimes might be a good start.
|
| With regards to your point about cooperating until the cop
| starts acting adversarial, I think that advice applies to
| someone who is intelligent and informed about the law enough
| to understand when a cop is actually trying to coerce an
| admission. It might be good advice for you, but it might
| actually be terrible advice for someone else.
| jfengel wrote:
| Unfortunately, I am well aware that I don't know when
| they're trying to coerce an admission. One of the things
| I'm most terrified of is being asked "Do you know why I
| pulled you over?", and I can't think of any answer that
| doesn't have the potential to land me in a lot of trouble.
|
| I feel like that question is going to be hostile no matter
| what. I've been told by police that they don't use it, but
| didn't rule out the notion that others might.
|
| I've never had an encounter with the police worse than a
| basic traffic stop, so I've never really had to apply the
| "don't talk" advice. I hope I never do. Because I'm quite
| certain I'll do the wrong thing, regardless of what I do.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >"Do you know why I pulled you over?"
|
| The only safe answer to that, period, is "No". Even if
| you think the cop pulled you over because you were going
| 100 in a 55, you still don't know, it's not ever going to
| be a lie, and anything else can legitimately be taken as
| an admission of guilt in court
| bloak wrote:
| > "Do you know why I pulled you over?"
|
| On a scale from 1 to 10, how bad would it be to answer
| that with "Is it because I is black?" ((c) 1998-2021 Ali
| G)?
| kbenson wrote:
| > I'm not sure what the solution is, but having independent
| prosecutors for police crimes might be a good start
|
| It would have to be an almost entirely separate career path
| once you stepped into it. Once you've prosecuted a few
| cops, I'm sure that will follow you as a prosecutor
| wherever you go, and good luck hiding it. Gotta either stay
| in that game or advance to the point you no longer need to
| work with cops (become a judge I guess)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The problem is if in doing your job you piss off the
| wrong cops, you too become a target.
|
| I'm a firefighter / paramedic.
|
| Cops have arrested paramedics providing patient care on
| accident scenes for varying slights.
|
| Cops have come to hospitals where their off-duty drunk
| buddy runs a red light and t-boned someone else, and
| demanded nurses do blood draws (without a warrant) of the
| other party looking for intoxication, and then arrested
| the nurse for refusing.
|
| All groups that (rightly or wrongly, I'm making no
| judgment here, just observing) are considered to be "on
| the same side", are only on that side as long as it is
| not inconvenient to those cops, then they're as much a
| target as anyone else.
| pc86 wrote:
| A traffic stop is its own thing. You've presumably given them
| probable suspicion that you've committed some sort of
| infraction. Everything from something very innocuous like
| weaving within your lane to them seeing you run a red light.
| You're officially being detained, you're not free to go, and
| you have to answer their questions. Depending on your state,
| their questions may have to be related to the _original_
| purpose of the traffic stop unless they 've got probably
| suspicion of some other infraction.
|
| Nobody with a law degree has _ever_ suggested that at a
| traffic stop you start off by saying you 're not answering
| questions and to call your lawyer.
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm sure nobody with a law degree ever said that, but
| that's how the advice is commonly portrayed.
| ffffwe3rq352y3 wrote:
| Look at one of the top posts on reddit today: https://www.r
| eddit.com/r/funny/comments/olecn5/know_your_rig...
|
| It seems like a lot of people think that its what you
| should do! I personally think its dumb for a traffic stop
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| The lawyer made a follow up video clarifying that in routine
| traffic stops police do have autonomy. So as long as you are
| reasonable and just showing the policeman you aren't a public
| menace. So I can agree that is reasonable. For any other
| reason I'd have my lawyer on me no matter what.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Could you please link to that video?
| [deleted]
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIt-l2YmH8M
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Thanks
| kleton wrote:
| His advice probably works well for himself. It is easy to
| tell for anyone who pulls him over from the way he talks that
| he is a lawyer. And a decent lawyer can make a lot of
| inconvenient paperwork for the police department when he's
| working "for free".
| maccard wrote:
| Hard agree here. I've had two run ins with the police (in the
| UK - I made a mistake driving and was pulled over, and the
| other was just wrong place wrong time) and in both cases just
| being civil removed me from the situation in less than 15
| minutes. If I had started parroting the "I refuse to speak to
| the police" line in either scenario it would have been a
| whole whole lot worse.
| Accacin wrote:
| But the UK isn't the US, and staying silent wouldn't be
| beneficial to us, in fact it would probably make it worse.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| The video is specifically about the 5th amendment to the US
| constitution and has nothing to do with the UK legal
| system.
| jfengel wrote:
| Aggravatingly, in the US, even the most routine traffic
| stop frequently runs considerably more than 15 minutes. I
| don't know precisely what's going on. They take your
| driver's license and registration back to their car,
| presumably to run it through some kind of database.
|
| Does that take 20 minutes? I dunno. Or maybe they're doing
| paperwork, or playing solitaire, or maybe just wasting your
| time because they can. The process is incredibly opaque.
| Even if it's necessary, it's unclear why, and I've never
| had a traffic stop that didn't feel abusive.
|
| I'm always super placating about it in an attempt to keep
| it from getting even worse. Fortunately, it has only
| happened a very small number of times -- all of which were
| for minor violations that could easily have been "Hey, I
| saw you do X. Don't do that again." (Which actually did
| happen once -- for failing to turn my lights on in the
| daytime. Which was written on a sign. Presumably about some
| kind of visibility, I guess. But at least they didn't fine
| me over it, or take up more than 5 minutes.)
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Having worked with some law enforcement records software
| I can say that "paperwork" (which now involves filling
| out electronic forms) and waiting for state database
| queries to come back are definitely a time suck. The
| officers who I know would like the process to be faster
| as well. Being stopped on the roadside is a dangerous
| situation that nobody wants to be in longer than
| necessary.
| jfengel wrote:
| That's really good to know, actually. It makes the
| waiting a bit less aggravating to think that they're not
| just trying to piss me off.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I had two police officers at my door a couple of years ago,
| turns out my neighbour had died and they wondered if I'd
| heard anything or not heard anything from him.
|
| Apparently the correct advice is to refuse to say anything
| without a lawyer, which I'm certain would be the end of the
| matter. I wonder if it's lawyers (paid $500/hour or
| whatever) who suggest that advice.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| I am pretty sure it is lawyers who are suggesting the
| advice but not sure if that makes it based out of greed.
|
| If you look at it from a lawyer's perspective: The
| majority of my clients who speak to the police(either
| before or after employing me) have a large amount of
| trouble. So therefore it is ill advised to speak to the
| police.
|
| What they are missing: All the people who spoke with
| police and had no problems.
|
| It is sample bias.
| brigade wrote:
| The guys a lawyer yeah, but the advice isn't to offer the
| cop a chance to talk with you with a lawyer; it's to
| avoid talking to cops at all. Then if the cops try to
| force an interview anyway, that's where the "without a
| lawyer" comes in; if they're arresting you then they
| should have other PC and you'll be needing a lawyer
| anyway.
|
| And the whole point is that even in your case, it's not
| directly beneficial to _you_ to answer even innocuous
| questions about your neighbor's death; at best it doesn't
| change any suspicions on you, but at worst there is a
| chance that your answers could make you a person of
| interest when you weren't one before.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| The pot brothers at law made a video of how they got a guy
| off at a weed distribution plant because he kept his mouth
| shut. The prosecutor couldn't prove he was an employee,
| customer touring, or what. All because they shut up and
| didnt say anything.
| leephillips wrote:
| And the ones who tried to evade responsibility by saying
| that they weren't employees, just volunteers, got busted
| for distribution.
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| By the time you realize you should (have) shut up, it's
| already too late
| staticman2 wrote:
| That video is hardly the final word on the matter, nor are
| defense attorneys necessarily paragons of good citizenship,
| honesty and integrity.
|
| If a loved one of yours is kidnapped, I imagine you'll hope the
| witnessess will talk to the police.
| minikites wrote:
| >If a loved one of yours is kidnapped
|
| How often do you think this happens? How often do you think
| police overstepping their limitations happens?
| staticman2 wrote:
| Kidnappings (and pretty much any crime imaginable) would
| happen a lot more if everyone listened to the advise of
| never talking to the police.
|
| People can protect themselves from police oversteps without
| listening to extreme advise from someone suggesting we
| pretend we don't live in a society.
|
| I'd think any reasonable advise would consider the
| probability that talking to police in any particular
| scenario would lead to bad outcomes vs good outcomes, but
| maybe that's not catchy enough to be retweeted on social
| networks.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Two recent episodes of the "Criminal" podcast [0]
| documented that it's a bad idea for even _victims_ of
| kidnapping to report to police. In this case, it wasn 't
| because the kidnappers punished the victims for
| reporting, but because the police themselves harmed the
| victims.
|
| [0]
| https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-167-48-hours-6-18-21/
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| Sure I would, but that doesn't mean it's in those people's
| best self interest to do so.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I am not so cynical as to think it would be a bad idea or
| "against self interest", in most cases, to report a crime
| to the police.
|
| I _am_ cynical enough to think that a defense attorney
| might act like a paperclip maximizer and optimize for
| "nobody goes to jail, ever, whatever the consequences to
| society" when giving advise on a Youtube video.
|
| One might also suspect the reason that video is so often
| cited is because it is so extreme, and people are biased to
| repost wacky "meme-like" catch phrases like "don't talk to
| the police" instead of more even-minded advise.
| leephillips wrote:
| Reporting a crime where you are not the victim is a bad
| idea unless you can do so anonymously. The crime could be
| part of organized criminal activity, and organized crime
| is often in cahoots with, or at least has informants
| within, police departments. It could come back to you.
| This is not fantasy; I know of people in New York that
| his happened to.
| moate wrote:
| To your first point: Cops have "meme-like" thoughts and
| sayings as well ("9 out of 10 times, the spouse did it",
| etc.) that would prove the attorney's point: by involving
| the cops, you're going to get investigated to some
| degree. The more serious the crime, the more likely this
| is.
|
| It's not cynical for a defense attorney to have the goal
| of "the people I represent never go to jail". It's
| literally his job. The fact that he then takes that
| advice out of his office and onto YouTube as part of his
| advertising his practice also seems reasonable.
|
| IDK if you murder-raped 100,000 people. Due process is
| due process. The worse the charge the higher the level of
| effort I'm expecting from the cops. If they can't get
| charges to stick, what are they even there for?
| staticman2 wrote:
| You wrote "It's not cynical for a defense attorney to
| have the goal of "the people I represent never go to
| jail"
|
| You are responding to something I never said. The
| attorney does not represent people watching the Youtube
| video. He isn't giving advise to clients but saying
| things to society at large.
|
| I have a feeling you would not actually folllow the
| attorney's advise in the real world. If you saw someone
| being raped in front of your house would you call 911 or
| would you say "the Youtuber with a law degree told me not
| to. "
|
| I suspect you would do the right thing and talk to the
| 911 operator. So why defend the video?
| moate wrote:
| To respond to what you feel is your point: 911 operators
| are not police officers in my state (NJ). They take and
| log calls and information, and may hand it over to the
| police, but they are not responsible for investigating
| crimes.
|
| I can call 911, report a crime is being committed with
| the intention of having the police intervene, provide no
| additional details beyond that, and then never speak to a
| police officer unless they subpoena testimony from me
| (and even then, issue statements through a lawyer).
|
| This is why I'm defending the video. We live in a
| society, and I fully accept that while also accepting
| that I don't trust cops ever under any circumstances
| period.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Suppose the rapist drags the victim into the bushes. The
| cops show up, look around and say "we got a report of an
| attack."
|
| I do in fact believe you are going to talk to the police
| and tell them where the attacker is. In fact I believe
| the guy who made the video will too.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If I'm a witness, I'm happy to tell them about my
| _observations_ of the crime, but I will shut them down if
| they start asking about me and my possible involvement, even
| if I think it 's just implied.
| jessaustin wrote:
| [EDIT:] Some people might think prosecutors are better such
| "paragons" than defense attorneys. They should pray they
| never find out how wrong that is.
| staticman2 wrote:
| No I do not think that. Prosecutors often switch sides to
| being defense attorneys as a career progression .
|
| If you think prosecutors are seedy you should feel the same
| about defense attorneys.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Another common "career progression" is for attorneys to
| become judges. Now we've established that everyone in the
| courtroom is "seedy". Still, citizens are often surprised
| by the awful performance of the USA justice system.
|
| Anyway, the defense attorneys to whom poor people have
| access (public defenders and other low-cost providers)
| are seldom former prosecutors, so they could possibly be
| decent humans. That they face so many obstacles is a good
| sign of the priorities of the system.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Even a simple traffic stop should make one cautious of what
| they say. E.g., when the cop says "What's your hurry?", and you
| say something trying to excuse your behavior, such as "I really
| have to go to the bathroom, sir!", you have just admitted
| guilt, and they will note that on the ticket and use it against
| you in court. I'm not saying to tell them "Sorry, I don't talk
| to cops", but rather don't admit to anything. Say something
| like, "I'm in no hurry, sir. How's your day going?". Then just
| take your ticket, and take your chances in court.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| That video is great, but these guys sum it up a bit more
| succinctly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgWHrkDX35o
| pjbeam wrote:
| Talking to the police is a bad idea at any age.
| sethammons wrote:
| A number of years ago, I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole on
| this topic. Many people think, "I've not done anything, I'll
| help this cop because it is the right thing to do." And that is
| naive. There is a risk present and you increase your personal
| risk the more you talk. I've shown my kids the scene in Making
| a Murderer where they lie to the kid and feed him lines to they
| can convict. They know if there is an emergency to call 911.
| They have also been told to not talk to cops outside of needing
| assistance.
| Clubber wrote:
| The problem is people are generally good and honest and want
| to be helpful. Many municipalities are not, they're trying to
| improve their score to justify their salary. Since people are
| generally good and honest, they naturally assume the
| government must be as well.
|
| Many police do horrible things with impunity. You can easily
| go down a YouTube rabbit hole for months with countless
| examples spanning many jurisdictions. I believe this is the
| greatest threat to our country, and that isn't hyperbole. If
| your are interested in such an endeavor for personal
| education, here's a start:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMCSd9ZNL0nshOhXwtfIJBA
| aqme28 wrote:
| Minors might not know that yet (and plenty of adults still
| don't), so I support this protection.
| pjbeam wrote:
| I do too!
| lm28469 wrote:
| Depends where you live I guess, I've "stopped" two minor crimes
| by finding the closest cop car and telling them something
| sketchy was happening. The first time they thanked me and
| didn't ask anything, the second time they asked for my
| address/name/phone nbr but never got back to me. My best friend
| also had to call the cops for a foreigner who didn't speak the
| language and had been beaten/robbed, nothing happened to the
| friend besides being thanked.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > After hours of interrogation, police told one of the teenagers,
| Terrill Swift, that if he just confessed to being at the scene he
| could go home
|
| Isn't it already illegal to interrogate a minor without their
| parents? In any case, this story sounds similar to the Central
| Park Five / Exonerated Five.
|
| Unfortunately, police in Chicago have committed lots of illegal
| acts during interrogations. I'm worried that making more things
| illegal may not have significant impact if they just deny lying
| after the fact.
| Miner49er wrote:
| > Isn't it already illegal to interrogate a minor without their
| parents?
|
| No, it's not illegal, I don't think? Parents don't need to be
| present or informed. Maybe some states are slightly different
| and I guess it might depend on the charges.
| triceratops wrote:
| That sounds crazy to me.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Some cursory searching I did revealed some state and
| federal guidelines to the contrary. "good faith requirement
| to search for the parents", e.g. CA statute requires minors
| taken into custody to consult with attorney prior to
| questioning.
|
| But there's no constitutional guarantee.
| trutannus wrote:
| Canada has laws against it, so it is illegal in some places.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Police shouldn't be allowed to lie to anyone for any reason.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Two thoughts. First, should undercover investigations be
| allowed? Should law enforcement officials be allowed to lie
| about their identity in order to obtain more evidence? It is
| not a trivial question, although I agree with you that we don't
| need secret police.
|
| Second, does simply saying that public servants aren't allowed
| to lie...work? It seems like there are many situations where
| public officials lie broadly and baldly, and there is no
| comeuppance, not even when perjurious!
| blendergeek wrote:
| I think police should not be allowed to lie in any situation
| where it is a crime for the non-cop in the situation to lie.
| O_H_E wrote:
| Huh, that does make sense to me.
| Cerium wrote:
| I think police should be able to lie, but any response to a lie
| should be presumed a lie by the justice system. So, a lie can
| be used to get an undercover cop out of trouble, but a lie
| cannot help an interrogation.
|
| Essentially, an officer of the law deciding to lie should
| invalidate all evidence gained after the lie.
| openasocket wrote:
| I honestly think police shouldn't be allowed to interview
| children at all (at least those under 13), it should be left to
| forensic psychologists. Not just interrogations, interviews of
| witnesses or potential victims too. Children are simply so easy
| to lead in questions, there's an entire field of study in
| psychology devoted to figuring out how to ask questions of
| children without leading them. Here's some examples: if you ask a
| child a yes-no question that they don't understand, they default
| to saying yes. If you ask them a multi-choice question ("Would
| you rather X, Y, or Z?") they default to whichever option was
| given last.
| O_H_E wrote:
| tbh, I think adults suffer from the same thing, maybe to a
| lesser extent.
| elpatoisthebest wrote:
| I had an experience with this (on a much smaller scale. No
| police were involved).
|
| When I was about 13 or so, I was walking home with a kid from
| school and he threw a rock at a passing car. He ran off and
| left me to deal with the driver. I explained that it was this
| other kid.
|
| I called the kid later to let him know that I ratted him out
| and apologized, but I didn't want to be on the hook for it.
|
| The driver, my parents, and the parents of the kid who threw
| the rock all met with us. Talked through the details, and
| somewhere in there they mentioned that I had called this kid to
| apologize, and I said that yeah, I had called him.
|
| It wasn't until after everyone left with the agreement that I
| was guilty and would pay the damage that my dad told me that I
| had agreed that I called this kid and apologized for lying
| about him throwing the rock.
|
| I was totally blindsided by that interpretation. I didn't
| understand that anyone had even suggested that I might have
| lied in that situation. It never crossed my mind, I thought I
| was just saying that I called him. There's nuance and
| implications in adult conversation that never crosses the mind
| of a kid.
| watwut wrote:
| Something similar can happen to adult too. Less likely to a
| child, but still, adults are not perfect rational players
| with great social skills. And not all adults are smart.
|
| Plus, this right there sound to me like very wishful thinking
| on the side of dad who don't want his kid to be guilty. It
| does not sound like honest evaluation of what was said. He
| was likely eager to interpret and twist anything just to get
| that result and succeeded.
| yabones wrote:
| If a doctor lies to a patient, they go to jail.
|
| If a civil engineer lies about the capacity of a bridge, they go
| to jail.
|
| If a lawyer lies in court, they go to jail.
|
| Why the hell are police officers not held to the same standard of
| professional responsibility??
| sonotathrowaway wrote:
| > If a lawyer lies in court, they go to jail.
|
| That's absolutely not true, prosecutors regularly place
| themselves above the law without consequences.
| mayneack wrote:
| I'm pretty sure a lot more doctors, engineers, and lawyers lie
| in a professional context than there are doctors, engineers,
| and lawyers in jail. Maybe they go to jail more than police, I
| have no idea, but surely a majority of the time they get away
| with lying.
| voisin wrote:
| Why not say they can't lie at all? What social purpose does the
| ability of a government agent to lie serve?
|
| I think a lot of this perpetuates an us/them mentality that
| pervades government.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| It's ridiculous that police can lie to you but you can't lie to
| them.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Imo, all of the major issues related to the US justice system
| could be resolved if your employer could only fire you with a
| conviction, the government had to pay for holding people not
| guilty, and if your held without trial for x amount of days,
| you must be released. All of these incentives protect working
| class people and requires prosecutors to have the literal
| smoking gun to prosecute.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Conviction rates are already sky high. The problem is not
| with charging people when evidence is low but with the
| prosecutors and the written laws that don't hold police
| accountable.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I agree with that as well, but even if cops were held
| accountable, it still leaves the scenario where lower
| income people lose much needed jobs and have precious time
| stolen from them with no recourse, just an "oops, guess we
| couldn't pin anything on ya! Now get lost!" The
| German/Austrian criminal justice system is vastly superior
| to the US one more than anything else.
| jacob2484 wrote:
| You can just plead the 5th and the lawyer will do the lying for
| you
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| It's ridiculous that police can lie to you but you cant lie to
| them.
| [deleted]
| lowmagnet wrote:
| Cool, hope they expand it to everyone.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Let's zoom out from the rights of that individual minor, too. If
| you believe in the role of police in society, you _want kids to
| be able to trust them_. You can 't teach your kids to trust
| someone who may lie to them with horrific consequences.
| Miner49er wrote:
| The police's rule in society is to enforce the law. I don't
| think they need kids to trust them to do that?
| adchari wrote:
| Enforcing the law becomes a lot harder when a community lacks
| trust in you, and kids who don't trust police officers turn
| into adults who don't trust police officers, and teach their
| children the same thing.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Bog-standard "if you get lost and separated from your
| parents" child-advice is to ask for help from exactly such
| figures as police, with the idea that this would protect them
| from ostensibly less savory options
| jMyles wrote:
| I certainly don't tell my child that, and I don't know of
| any American parents who do.
|
| Police represent the interests of the state, not the
| interests of my child.
| yardie wrote:
| That ship sailed along. In the interest of putting the police
| force ahead of the community it is supposed to protect the
| police have burned lots of goodwill. Even now being called
| police is considered an insult amongst the youth. It used to be
| snitch, narc, or opp. Now you're called "12" when you're not to
| be trusted.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If you're teaching your children to trust police, you're doing
| them a disservice. They should be taught to respect authority
| figures that are not their direct family, but never, ever trust
| their intentions.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Well, I don't really believe in the institution of police as
| it exists, so if I even had kids, I'd pass along the same
| paranoia my father taught me... but it just strikes me as a
| meaningful inconsistency in the image of police that their
| supporters have.
| slumdev wrote:
| Now maybe they can stop lying to adults, that is, if they want to
| earn back the public's trust.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Another commenter on a different story shared a dutch proverb
| that's appropriate here: reputation arrives on its feet and
| leaves on a horse.
| voakbasda wrote:
| Trust will not be regained in my lifetime. They have created a
| generational problem. I will teach my kids to fear and distrust
| them too.
| jacob2484 wrote:
| If your kids stay out of trouble, they won't be interacting
| much with them. These people literally put their lives on the
| line for public safety.
| anonymousab wrote:
| Overreach and needless brutality are par for the course.
| Bad apples and countless years of zero independent
| accountability has unfortunately spoiled the bunch.
|
| > If your kids stay out of trouble, they won't be
| interacting much with them.
|
| Unless they're black, statistically. Then they're being
| pulled aside or pulled over at night and put into these
| interactions for just existing. You can't teach your kids
| to just "stay out" of their skin color, they can't just
| "stay out" of a system of institutionalized racism.
| slumdev wrote:
| > These people literally put their lives on the line for
| public safety.
|
| This is true. It is also true that they don't need to lie
| to do their jobs.
|
| For the record, I think they're pretty good at their jobs,
| and 99.999% of the time, they act justly. But they still
| don't need to lie.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| They literally aren't even on the top ten list of most
| dangerous jobs from BLS
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-
| jobs-i...
|
| We should stop deifying police for "putting their lives on
| the line" when the vast majority of injuries on duty come
| from _traffic accidents_
| yasp wrote:
| Why not ban for all ages....?
| Miner49er wrote:
| Research shows that children are especially susceptible to
| being lied to in interrogations. I imagine limiting the ban to
| minors was a compromise from negotiating with police and
| attorney organizations and pro-police lawmakers.
| lm28469 wrote:
| If you're interested there are plenty of interrogation videos
| on yt, some by the FBI are particularly interesting. Sometimes
| they have a pretty good case but getting a confession
| tremendously speed up the process so they lie to get
| confessions.
|
| They also can lie to trigger responses and see how the suspect
| react, guilty people seem to react in way different ways than
| innocent ones. It's obviously not an exact science, even though
| it's heavily studied and has some psychology compounds, but it
| worked and put countless number of guilty people behind the
| bars
|
| A source I like is:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/JCSCriminalPsychology
|
| This timestamped video is an example of a cop lying (to
| innocent people): https://youtu.be/BemHqUqcpI8?t=704
| zucker42 wrote:
| Police claim they need to lie sometimes to effectively fight
| crime. Also, the presumption is that adults will realize the
| police are adversarial and won't blindly submit to an authority
| figure as kids are conditioned to.
| tomalpha wrote:
| That is perhaps what is claimed, but there are plenty of
| adults who for various reasons, lack capacity to make such
| judgements as well, or even realise that the Police might not
| be telling the truth. There could be lots of different
| reasons for this too - whether something like being raised to
| trust the police blindly, through to having learning
| difficulties.
| zucker42 wrote:
| I agree with this. I was merely trying to summarize the
| arguments on the other side.
| athenot wrote:
| > Police claim they need to lie sometimes to effectively
| fight crime.
|
| Pretty sure that if the roles were reversed, they would be
| the first to cry martyr.
|
| Therefore that's a Golden Rule fail.
| pnutjam wrote:
| IF!?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_B
| i...
|
| The LEOBR detailed by the Grand Lodge of the Fraternal
| Order of Police as follows:[4] Law
| enforcement officers, except when on duty or acting in an
| official capacity, have the right to engage in political
| activity or run for elective office. Law
| enforcement officers shall, if disciplinary action is
| expected, be notified of the investigation, the nature of
| the alleged violation, and be notified of the outcome of
| the investigation and the recommendations made to superiors
| by the investigators. Questioning of a law
| enforcement officer should be conducted for a reasonable
| length of time and preferably while the officer is on duty
| unless exigent circumstances apply. Questioning of
| the law enforcement officer should take place at the
| offices of those conducting the investigation or at the
| place where the officer reports to work, unless the officer
| consents to another location. Law enforcement
| officers will be questioned by a single investigator, and
| he or she shall be informed of the name, rank, and command
| of the officer conducting the investigation. Law
| enforcement officers under investigation are entitled to
| have counsel or any other individual of their choice
| present at the interrogation. Law enforcement
| officers cannot be threatened, harassed, or promised
| rewards to induce the answering of any question.
| Law enforcement officers are entitled to a hearing, with
| notification in advance of the date, access to transcripts,
| and other relevant documents and evidence generated by the
| hearing and to representation by counsel or another non-
| attorney representative at the hearing. Law
| enforcement officers shall have the opportunity to comment
| in writing on any adverse materials placed in his or her
| personnel file. Law enforcement officers cannot be
| subject to retaliation for the exercise of these or any
| other rights under Federal, or State.
| calkuta wrote:
| I believe that the only reason people participate in police
| interrogations is sheer ignorance.
|
| If you are suspected of committing a crime, do not speak to
| police, other than to assert your right to legal counsel.
| [deleted]
| bloniac wrote:
| Holy shit that's a very low bar.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| And they will trip over it, I guarantee you.
| vmception wrote:
| What's the consequence?
| tyingq wrote:
| Looks like the only consequence is _" The presumption of
| inadmissibility"_ for evidence gained that way. It does not
| appear to make it a crime or provide any consequence for any
| individual police officer.
|
| The text of the bill is here:
| https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&Sessi...
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Fewer children are coerced into false confessions?
| mkl95 wrote:
| Are they admitting they are lying to everyone?
| tssva wrote:
| Admitting would imply that they were hiding it previously which
| they were not. Why would they? The courts have generally said
| it is ok which is why legislation is required to stop the
| practice.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Aren't these the same courts who would put you in jail for
| lying to them?
| Spoom wrote:
| Lying to police is a crime.
|
| Police lying to you is not a crime.
|
| This is a very good reason to limit interactions with
| police.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Lying to the FBI is a crime but I don't believe lying to
| regular cops is a crime.
| preinheimer wrote:
| Bonus: Police lying under oath is a crime, but it's
| rampant and nothing is changing.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-
| polic...
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Yes:
|
| > Commonly used interrogation tactics, such as promising
| leniency or insinuating that incriminating evidence exists, are
| banned for suspects under 18 years old under the new law, which
| goes into effect Jan. 1.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Why wouldn't they just ban those particular things for all
| suspects, not just for minors?
| Miner49er wrote:
| Research shows that children are especially susceptible to
| being lied to in interrogations. I imagine limiting the ban
| to minors was a compromise from negotiating with police and
| attorney organizations and pro-police lawmakers.
| emteycz wrote:
| What's the purpose of your question? It's apparent they
| went out of their way to limit this to minors - so the
| reason is they want to have the ability to lie to adults.
| Probably 'because it helps fight crime' or something.
| eplanit wrote:
| They're allowed to in investigations: "we have a witness who
| saw you do it" will sometimes cause actually guilty people to
| confess, or to start naming accomplices, etc. Or, "we think
| this was an accident" can elicit "it was, I didn't mean to do
| it" as a confession.
| tomalpha wrote:
| The difficulty seems to be that it can sometimes cause
| innocent people to confess too
|
| Edit: adding this link to the excellent and oft-cited "Don't
| talk to the police [even if you're completely innocent]"
| lecture
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I thought we used to call that 'fraud'....
|
| If the police are lying to the people, then why can't we
| assume the witnesses are lying... The police are supposed to
| be more reliable, after all.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That's specifically one of the reason for Denmark to
| recommend that if arrested in the US you contact the Danish
| embassy and wait for them to send someone to help you.
|
| The idea that the police would lie and claim to have evidence
| is just completely foreign to us.
| koz1000 wrote:
| There was another awful case recently in Illinois that would be
| prevented by something like this. I'm glad Pritzker passed it.
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/naperville-sun/ct-nvs...
|
| TLDR: A high-school student made a recording of a sexual
| encounter and word got out. Kid is called to the principal's
| office where the resource officer (literally a cop that stays on
| campus) threatened the kid with being put on the sex offender
| registry among other actions. Kid slips away while staff is
| waiting for the mom to arrive and jumps off a parking garage,
| killing himself. School and police deny any wrong doing and "only
| meant to scare the kid".
| throwawayboise wrote:
| That doesn't sound like a lie. Sounds like a very real possible
| consequence, given the way the laws around that kind of thing
| are written and enforced.
| Miner49er wrote:
| This law wouldn't actually have an effect on that. Police can
| still lie to minor's in situations like this one, I think.
| sonotathrowaway wrote:
| > Wood also wrote that while the interrogation tactics used
| by the deans and police were "harsh and aggressive, they were
| nonetheless ordinary police interrogation tactics."
|
| The judge who presided over the case was under the impression
| that the student was being interrogated.
| tomalpha wrote:
| > After hours of interrogation, police told one of the teenagers,
| Terrill Swift, that if he just confessed to being at the scene he
| could go home -- so he did.
|
| What's the advantage to society of allowing interviewers to lie
| (to anyone, let alone kids)? Not just insinuate something like
| "your partner's in the next room, it's only a matter of time
| until he talks so you should come clean now", but blatantly lie
| and then be able to rely on the result of that in court?
|
| It kinda feels a _little_ like the common law doctrine of
| Promissary Estoppel [0] where if someone relies on something you
| 've promised, you can't then hold them responsible for relying on
| that thing.
|
| [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/promissory_estoppel
| lhorie wrote:
| On a more basic level, how is the context of the conversation
| less relevant than the exact wording of any given uttered
| sentence? IMHO, if a judge hears "well he told me to lie so I
| did", the whole interrogation ought to be thrown out as
| ineligible.
|
| I ran into a similar situation once: an officer wanted to hear
| a very specific thing from me, so he asked me a question, then
| interrupted me mid-sentence when he heard the substring he
| wanted (the full sentence was along the lines of "we were
| planning on doing X, but not for another 5 years", where the
| point of contention was whether they could prove whether I was
| planning on doing X immediately), never mind that I was
| explicitly explaining how his theory was all wrong.
|
| Thankfully for me, this was with the Canada Border agency,
| which has an appeals process, and surely enough, when they read
| my side of the story, they overruled the officer in my favor.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > IMHO, if a judge hears "well he told me to lie so I did",
| the whole interrogation ought to be thrown out as ineligible.
|
| So, the defendant saying those magic words should
| automatically erase any statements the defendant made,
| whether or not the magic words are true? Or should perhaps,
| both the claim of inducement and the other statements remain
| in evidence, with the trier of fact deciding on the weight to
| give each?
| lhorie wrote:
| IANAL but my understanding is that there are specific
| criteria for what is admissible and what isn't. For
| example, there are very specific heuristics for determining
| whether something is hearsay. What I'm saying is that there
| should be a clear cut list of criteria regarding which
| circumstances are admissible (e.g. was the confession made
| freely or was there coercion/promises/negotiations/etc
| involved, was the conversation recorded/unadulterated, etc)
| and that this list should be properly followed to
| disqualify potential foul play, just as is done w/ hearsay.
| Simulacra wrote:
| Police are allowed to lie to you [0] and it's been a staple of
| police investigations and interrogations ever since. In reading
| this article I'm horrified that police were _ever_ allowed to
| lie to children.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier_v._Cupp
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Police are allowed to lie to you
|
| Not everywhere. The UK hasn't allowed police to lie when
| interviewing suspects since the 1984 Police and Criminal
| Evidence Act, known as PACE.
|
| It would be a good idea if countries (not just the US and not
| just in policing) were to look for best practice outside
| their own borders occasionally.
| vkou wrote:
| The UK also considers remaining silent during an
| interrogation or trial to be an indication of guilt.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Is that strictly the case? I thought it was more like "if
| you remain silent initially that can be used against you
| if you later try to make statements in your defense"
| vkou wrote:
| My understanding is that it's both. If you bring up an
| alibi during trial, but never mentioned it during
| interrogation, it is an indication of guilt. If you don't
| say anything at all during either trial, or
| interrogation, it is also an indication of guilt.
| foldr wrote:
| I'm not sure how much difference it makes in practice.
| It's the jury that decide. A jury in the US might equally
| be suspicious of an alibi that the defendant didn't
| mention until late in the process.
|
| Also, it's not really true that merely remaining silent
| is taken to be an indication of guilt. The point is that
| an adverse inference _may_ be drawn from silence in
| basically the same way that an adverse inference may be
| drawn from a statement made to police. The prosecution
| can 't just say "the defendant said nothing when
| questioned and is therefore guilty".
| vkou wrote:
| The jury can, of course, decide to convict a ham
| sandwich, or to let a blood-on-his-hands killer go, but
| the instructions given to the jury differ. That
| difference matters. If it didn't, the US could safely do
| away with the fifth amendment, and nothing of value would
| be lost.[1]
|
| The point is that in the US, the prosecutor can't even
| suggest (well, they can suggest, but an objection will be
| raised) that the defendant's silence is an indication of
| guilt.
|
| [1] Anyone who was compelled to testify against
| themselves would just point out that they did so under
| duress, and surely, a reasonable jury would throw that
| testimony out. I certainly would. For some reason though,
| we don't expect juries to be reasonable on this point.
| foldr wrote:
| I'm not seeing the analogy with the Fifth Amendment. The
| point about the Fifth Amendment is that you can't be
| punished for refusing to offer self-incriminating
| testimony (e.g. by being held in contempt of court). So
| it's not merely protecting you from whatever prejudices
| the jury might have about someone who refuses to testify.
| It's preventing you from being punished for the mere act
| of refusing to testify (whereas you cannot punish someone
| in the UK merely for refusing to answer police questions
| - except in a handful of very specific circumstances).
|
| Indeed, yes, prosecutors have more free rein in the UK to
| suggest to the jury that someone's silence during
| question is incriminating. I just wonder if this makes
| much of a difference in practice. Do you know of any
| examples of cases in Britain where a conviction would
| most likely not have been obtained if the prosecutors
| were not permitted to do this?
| autokad wrote:
| > "What's the advantage to society of allowing interviewers to
| lie (to anyone, let alone kids)?"
|
| no one would ever get convicted if police didn't lie. If no one
| can ever get convicted, either we can murder rape and steal
| without consequence or we'd have to live in an absolute
| monitored police state. I think its beneficial they can lie.
|
| the real world isn't a SVU episode on TV with DNA, high
| resolution video, and witnesses. I don't know the percentage,
| but the vast majority of crime has and never will have evidence
| other than a witness or a confession.
|
| Also saying they can't lie is not easy, as you need an oracle
| of truth. So if something untruthful is said, does that mean
| they have to be let go? you mistake the date and they can go
| free? its impossible to police truth.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Now you sound like a DA, tough on crime. "No one would ever
| get convicted" - this is about people falsely confessing to
| crimes because of police lies.
|
| But I notice that in your statement, it's all about the
| conviction, not about the guilt.
| elliekelly wrote:
| And then he didn't get to go home for 20 years.
| totalZero wrote:
| If interrogators can't lie then interrogated individuals can
| distill information about police investigations from their
| comments. I don't believe in misleading people about the law
| itself, but I cannot deny that there is power in the
| insinuation that you have more evidence than you actually have.
| shadowfox wrote:
| > there is power in the insinuation that you have more
| evidence than you actually have
|
| This is true and there is power in all manners of things,
| including very abusive, immoral and possibly illegal things;
| there is a lot of power in threatening physical (or
| psychological) violence to people, for example.
|
| I guess the question is about which usage of power we should
| (ideally) endorse as a society as a matter of course .
| gjvnq wrote:
| This is one of the times I think Brazil manages to beat up the
| USA: we do not accept confessions unless they are confirmed in
| front of a judge. (Chapter V of the Brazilian Penal Process
| Code)
|
| Also, if you report yourself before the authorities know that
| the crime took place, you get an automatic reduction in your
| sentence (article 65 _inciso_ II item b of the Brazilian Penal
| Code)
| vkou wrote:
| The advantage is that a criminal confessing to their crimes is
| better for everyone else. Most people would rather see
| criminals not doing crime.
|
| This is so obvious, it's not clear why this has to be spelled
| out. The purpose of civil rights like the fifth amendment is
| not making life easy for criminals, the purpose is protecting
| innocent people.
|
| You can argue that the harm inflicted by some particular
| procedure to innocent people exceeds the benefits, but that
| becomes a _utilitarian_ debate, rather than one about
| philosophical dogma.
| codegeek wrote:
| In case people are not aware yet, please watch this video about
| "Don't talk to the police".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&t=1s
| pc86 wrote:
| The problem is that things get worse if you mandate the other
| side - that officers are _prohibited_ from lying in any
| interrogation. If that 's the case it becomes trivial for a
| guilty suspect to get information out of the officer because
| they know that if the officer lies [s]he'll get in trouble. So
| you end up with this weird area where you want them to be
| _able_ to lie if necessary, but in general prefer that they
| didn 't. There's not an easy answer.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I'm not sure that's "worse" - it seems that's actually what
| the situation is today but with the tables reversed.
|
| AIUI, it's pretty common that when they can't get you for the
| crime they think you committed, that they'll just goad you
| into a casual mis-statement (i.e., lying), and lock you up
| for the lie. That's exactly what happened to Martha Stewart,
| for example. What (apparently) seemed to her to be a minor
| omission that had no bearing on the case, suddenly becomes
| the cause for her prosecution.
|
| The end result of this is that anyone with a clue knows that
| the best policy is, simply, never talk to police. There's
| nothing you can say that will make things better (the die is
| already cast), and you can do yourself a world of hurt. And
| you can't even know ahead of time whether you're suspect. So
| the best course of action is simply to refuse to talk to
| police ever.
|
| How is a situation in which the public refuses to help the
| police any worse than taking these tools away from the
| police?
|
| Obligatory anecdote: I went skeet shooting with a friend. The
| next day, for some reason, I still had a bunch of spent
| shotgun shells sitting on the table. That morning the police
| came to my door, and I let them in the house to talk since it
| was cold out. They started asking for information about an
| incident where someone had shot out a car window with a BB
| gun. Later I realized that I had those empty shotgun shells
| sitting right in their sight. If you're not aware, "BB" is
| actually the designation of a particular small size of shot
| (like #8 being used for deer and #4 or #0 used for turkey or
| birds; BB is smaller than #0). So although I knew nothing of
| the BB incident, and was certainly innocent, I had
| inadvertently given the police some reason to suspect my
| involvement. In actuality, nothing came of this, but given
| the way these things go, I would have been safer to have just
| said "sorry, officer", and refused to deal with them.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Prohibiting them from lying in no way equals requiring them
| to fully answer any question that is asked.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| If a minor is clever enough to manipulate a police officer
| into self-incrimination via dishonesty _and somehow make it
| to court and the officer is actually held responsible_ then
| honestly, good for them!
|
| (I highly doubt officers will still be held responsible for
| violating the law. Look how much noise and chaos had to
| happen for a single on-film execution by cop to have
| consequences.)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Time and time again, we've seen how the justice system doesn't
| benefit society at large. At this point, I think it's naive to
| think that's its goal. Instead, we see how it's about
| controlling people like Terrill Swift & feeding the prison
| industrial complex. In a lot of states (including Il), you
| can't vote while in prison. Having a conviction greatly lowers
| your ability to find a job, get a mortgage, or access to some
| government benefits.
|
| Also Promissory Estoppel is a concept in _contract_ law. Do you
| think a reasonable person would think that a police
| interrogation is a contract? Does it meet the elements of a
| contract? I don 't think so.
| tomalpha wrote:
| I completely agree about Promissory Estoppel and contract
| law. I was (perhaps unclearly) trying to demonstrate that
| other areas of the law do address the principle of relying on
| a promise when making a decision.
|
| I think the principle could and should apply to some extent
| in this situation here too.
|
| Something like: if you were misled into making a confession -
| perhaps relying on a promise or lie told to you by the
| interviewer - then at the very least that confession should
| be considered deeply suspect.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| He said, "It kinda feels a _little_ like the common law
| doctrine of Promissary Estoppel ".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > In a lot of states (including Il), you can't vote while in
| prison.
|
| Not just while _in_ prison, but afterwards in many states.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t.
| ..
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Time and time again, we've seen how the justice system
| doesn't benefit society at large.
|
| Do you mean to imply that we've seen examples of how the
| justice system, on balance, does not benefit society at
| large? As in, adding up all the positives and negatives of
| the justice system, we'd be better off without it? If so, I'd
| want to see what those examples you mention are.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I think the only layer that we can fix these kinds of issues
| is in court.
|
| Juries should only be allowed to hear objective facts. No
| character testimonies, no eye witnesses, no confessions after
| a 12 hour interrogation. Objective facts only.
|
| This would likely mean guilty people don't get convicted, but
| I think that is a worthy tradeoff for a more fair justice
| system. An innocent person going to jail is much more
| egregious than a guilty person going free.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| This wouldn't work, because a person's intent matters for
| many crimes.
| pc86 wrote:
| Good luck telling an eye witness that what they saw isn't
| an objective fact, or the DA that the handwritten, signed
| confession in his hand isn't an objective fact.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Good luck telling an eye witness that what they saw
| isn't an objective fact,
|
| The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon studies
| that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness
| testimony is shit. If you show 10 people an event and ask
| them to describe what they saw an hour later, they will
| describe it in 10 different ways, frequently changing
| facts, adding things that never happened, or omitting
| important details. In trials, you get witness testimony
| from years before, and it's treated as if every single
| word said is absolute objective truth - like, we have the
| science to prove that no, actually, most likely it isn't,
| and it should be treated as "maybe true" at best.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon
| studies that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness
| testimony is shit._
|
| Like so many things, I think the mistake here is to
| assume you can educate your way out of this. You could
| send every citizen through a six-week course on the
| problems with eye-witness testimony and some percentage
| of them will come out on the other side of that training
| insisting that, nah, if somebody says they saw the crime,
| then they saw it. We're talking about deep psychological
| biases carefully shaped by hundreds of thousands of years
| of evolution.
| 988747 wrote:
| But disregarding witness testimonies puts us on even more
| dangerous path: in order to know "objective facts" you
| need to put surveilance cameras and microphones
| everywhere so there is a video footage of every crime.
| vkou wrote:
| It's worse than that actually.
|
| An eyewitness will tell the DA that they don't remember
| shit about what happened years ago, and the DA will
| reassure them that they police have ways of making them
| remember.
|
| Source: A close friend of mine is getting pulled in to
| testify in a criminal case about some junkie that they
| may have called the police on three years ago. He has
| called the police so many times, and has dealt with so
| many sketchy, drug-influenced people, he can't even
| remember what the person in question did.
| istjohn wrote:
| The whole point of a jury trial is for the jury to decide
| what they believe are the facts from the evidence,
| testimony, and arguments provided by the lawyers on both
| sides. You are essentially proposing that we kneecap juries
| by taking the power of fact-finding away from them and
| handing it to another authority. That would undermine the
| check on government overreach juries are meant to provide.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Because the purpose of the police are not actually there to
| protect society. They're there to protect the existing social
| order. Anything else is a fringe benefit, at best.
| ryan93 wrote:
| The existing social order is good. And actually a very
| substantial percentage of people are in prison for crimes
| against persons not property
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| What would be the difference between those two things? As in,
| what would a police who's job it was to "protect society" do
| that current police do not? Or vice-versa, would such a
| police still protect from theft or violence?
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Society is individual people and their interactions.
|
| Societal order is the dominant power structures of the
| society, with little heed given to individuals.
| sneak wrote:
| I wrote about this specifically:
|
| https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-
| ame...
| Arrath wrote:
| They would still protect from theft and violence, of
| course. Lets keep in mind that as it stands now, the police
| don't do that great in the realm of theft anyway.[0] But
| there are many shortfalls in the system as a whole, and not
| just the beat cops doing the policing. We need police back
| in neighborhoods, doing beat patrols, living the in cities
| and suburbs they police, not commuting in from an hour
| away. Being rich shouldn't be an easy out because you can
| hire a high power lawyer, or treat most offences as a minor
| fine. Why does robbing the bank from the inside get a
| relative slap on the wrist, while robbing it through the
| front door gets you shot?
|
| Lets hit a few high points:
|
| End the 'boys club', actually go after sex crimes with a
| sense of urgency and not let rape kits pile up in evidence
| rooms, untested?[1]
|
| Not run straight up black sites?[2]
|
| Properly allow freedom of speech and expression, and not
| come down harder on protests the police themselves don't
| agree with?[3]
|
| Do a little introspection and address the rampant domestic
| abuse perpetrated by police?[4]
|
| [0]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-
| the-u.s.-...
|
| [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/
| nati...
|
| [2]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-
| poli...
|
| [3]https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/us/protest-disparity-
| study-tr...
|
| [4]https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/pol
| ice-...
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Why does robbing the bank from the inside get a
| relative slap on the wrist, while robbing it through the
| front door gets you shot?
|
| Because when you rob it from the outside you're probably
| using violence to threaten people with their lives. You
| don't think that's many, many times worse than someone
| cooking the books or stealing from the register?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| There are plenty of cases where the social standing of
| the defendant is determinant of the level of violence
| brought. Consider shop lifting vs. wage theft. Both are
| non violent, the latter is estimated to be many times
| more prevalent than the former. Only one will get you
| violently arrested though, and one is _far_ more likely
| to be prosecuted than the other.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Also if you use violence once, then you are more willing
| to use it in the future. This is bad for society as a
| whole.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > What would be the difference between those two things?
|
| The difference between those things is who the police
| actually do anything for. Who gets (violently) arrested and
| who gets away with it is strongly connected with your
| position in social order. Simply put, steal $20 from the
| register or a loaf of bread from the store and the state
| will pony up tens of thousands of dollars to try and arrest
| you, detain you, prosecute you, and punish you. But if you
| decide to steal overtime from your employees, what do you
| think the chances are of you finding yourself in cuffs?
| It's estimated that wage theft involves three fold as much
| theft as other kinds of robbery _combined_ ; why is
| violence necessary to stop 1/4 of theft, but not the
| remaining 3/4?
|
| Take a look at protestors too, and see how the police
| change treatment based on the content of the protest. It's
| been shown that cops are 3x more likely to react violently
| to left wing protests than right wing protests in general,
| and 3.5x more likely to attack peaceful left wing protests
| than peaceful right wing protests. That is not protecting
| society, that is protecting the social order.
|
| > As in, what would a police who's job it was to "protect
| society" do that current police do not?
|
| Processing all the rape kits they have sitting around would
| be a fantastic start. Nationally the clearance rates for
| all kinds of violent crimes are abysmal, maybe cops should
| stop focusing on grifting overtime and do something about
| that?
|
| More importantly, a cop whose job is to protect society
| should stop doing things that are actively harmful to
| society. Such a list would include but is not limited to:
|
| Not shooting unarmed people, not choking a handcuffed man
| to death, not tear gassing whole city blocks after being
| ordered not to by their bosses, not pulling over black
| people at unusually high rates, not destroying homeless
| camps, not destroying cooling centers for the homeless
| during a historic heat wave, not lying to children to make
| them confess, not beating a family near a protest and then
| pretending that "antifa" abandoned the child at a "riot",
| not arresting citizens that they ran into while driving
| recklessly, not lying in court repeatedly and constantly to
| get convictions of the poor and powerless, not abusing
| people in their custody, not raping people in their
| custody, and not protecting other cops that blatantly break
| the law.
|
| Cops in the United States have effective blanket immunity
| for anything short of calmly strangling a handcuffed man on
| camera[0]. Not only is there no effective means for them to
| be prosecuted, given the close reliance DAs have on cops,
| but there is also a specific carve out for them to be
| protected from civil liability that is absurdly protective
| of them. Simply put, unless if a cop does something that
| has _specific_ precedent for, you cannot sue them. And very
| little precedent can be made because nobody can sue them in
| order to create precedent. This gets down to the level of
| "sending the attack dogs against a surrendering person in
| the woods is a violation of their rights, but not in a
| 'grassy ditch' because there is no precedent for that in a
| ditch. Case dismissed". A police force that is supposed to
| protect society would itself be expected to actually follow
| the laws that they are nominally enforcing, not be given
| special protection from illegal conduct.
|
| > Or vice-versa, would such a police still protect from
| theft or violence?
|
| Do you believe that cops actually protect you from theft
| and violence? How soon do you believe a cop will be there
| if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the
| night? Cops are really there to punish people after the
| fact, not to protect you[1][2]. How much effort they'll put
| into actually solving the crime is very much dependent on
| who you are and what happened to you. Ask a rape survivor
| how sympathetic and helpful the cops were, if you can
| stomach such stories.
|
| 0 - Make no mistake, Derek Chauvin would still be a cop if
| that had not been video taped. The official police press
| release after that was that a man died due to a "medical
| incident" in their care; a blatant lie. Makes you wonder
| how many citizens cops have murdered and blamed it on drugs
| or "medical incidents".
|
| 1 - Well, that and arrest random people to find drugs and
| steal money from citizens to fund their own department.
|
| 2 - They in fact have no legal obligation to try and
| protect you from violence.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| as my professor always said:
|
| steal $100, go to jail
|
| steal $1,000,000,000 pay lawyers so that you give back
| 200,000,000 and keep the rest.
| [deleted]
| 55555 wrote:
| Oh boy, I don't think you've seen many interrogations.
|
| I've spent the past two weeks watching JCS - Criminal
| Psychology on YouTube. Lies are clearly a core part of
| interrogations. I haven't ever seen one where lying wasn't a
| core part of the strategy of the interrogator. Go watch some
| videos on that channel. It's really, really interesting.
|
| Never talk to the police.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| my read on GP is them not asking "is this common", but "why
| do we tolerate this being common".
| cwkoss wrote:
| Are you saying lying is necessary or just that it's
| pervasive?
| cal5k wrote:
| There seems to be a lot of ignorance in this thread about
| interrogation techniques. The Toronto van killer interrogation
| is really instructive as to how the best interrogators conduct
| themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyHgtSy41VM
|
| The suspect is repeatedly reminded of his right to counsel,
| given water, asked if he is hungry, etc. The intent here is to
| firmly establish that the suspect's rights have been respected
| - key to making sure the interrogation tapes are admissible in
| court.
|
| The interrogator then proceeds to tell a series of lies about
| his background and interests to build rapport with the suspect
| - he's clearly done his research beforehand to understand which
| buttons he needs to push.
|
| By the end of the two-hours-and-change video, Minassian has
| opened up and produced a confession so good that his defence
| counsel could only try to argue that he wasn't of sound mind.
|
| Not all interrogators are this skilled - this was a very high-
| profile case, so the Toronto Police deployed their best - but
| it seems obvious that better training rather than banning
| useful techniques would result in more favourable outcomes.
|
| There is still the issue of innocent people getting caught up
| in the system or admitting to crimes they didn't commit, but
| I'd suggest that there are better approaches like, once again,
| education of the public. You might be uncomfortable and scared
| for some period of time, but you _do not have to_ talk to the
| police.
| lostapathy wrote:
| > The interrogator then proceeds to tell a series of lies
| about his background and interests to build rapport with the
| suspect - he's clearly done his research beforehand to
| understand which buttons he needs to push.
|
| I feel like there's a fundamental difference between an
| interrogator lying about his own back story to build rapport
| and them lying about other evidence, witnesses or their
| authority to make a deal, etc.
| pugetsounds wrote:
| The question then is: is that difference recognized in the
| recently passed law?
| 55555 wrote:
| From what I've seen in the USA they normally lie about
| evidence and witnesses but they are careful to never lie
| explicitly about making a deal. That can apparently screw
| up the entire case, I think because of a supreme court
| decision.
| 55555 wrote:
| Note that -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- Canada has
| a weird system where the suspect isn't allowed to leave the
| interrogation (but surely there's a time limit?). I've seen
| videos where the suspect just sits silently while an
| interrogator mentally exhausts them by asking the same
| question over and over. I believe in America the suspect
| would either just leave the room or, if already in jail, go
| back to their cell.
| cal5k wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but Canada's system differs in a few ways
| from the US. There's no right to have a lawyer _present_ ,
| only to _speak_ to a lawyer (usually by phone). So you 're
| on your own in the interrogation room.
|
| If you're not being charged with anything, you're not
| required to voluntarily show up for an interrogation. If
| you're detained, you can always ask "Am I free to leave?"
| and, if they answer yes, just walk out.
|
| Police are permitted to keep asking you the same question
| even if you repeatedly say "My lawyer has instructed me not
| to answer questions", but obviously there's a line where it
| will start to look abusive on the tape and where the
| interrogator will just get frustrated and end the
| interview.
|
| You can't be compelled to testify against yourself, but
| others can potentially be compelled to testify against you
| (on the condition that their testimony can't be used to
| incriminate them in the future).
| kwyjibo1230 wrote:
| It seems to me like there's two main kinds of lies that
| interrogators use:
|
| 1. Lies about the process / promissary lies. e.g. "If you just
| confess, you can go home." 2. Lies about evidence. e.g. "We
| talked to {Friend|Family|Co-conspirator} and they said you did
| it and they have the {item} to prove it. It's not going to look
| good if you continue to lie to me."
|
| #1 seems obviously bad to me. Too high of a risk of tricking
| innocent people into thinking they can end the stress by
| falsely confessing.
|
| #2 seems less bad, possibly beneficial. There are other
| comments about how this can speed up interrogations by getting
| people who are guilty to think they've been caught and confess.
| I could be convinced otherwise.
|
| In my opinion, sounds like 1 and 2 should be illegal for
| minors. But 1 should be illegal in general, for adults too.
| Jiro wrote:
| An innocent person who hears #2 may reason that the police
| are faking evidence, they'd better give a fake confession
| because otherwise the police will just use the faked evidence
| in court. He may not be up to date on the laws about exactly
| at what steps in the process the police are allowed to use
| the fake evidence.
|
| Alternatively, he might think that his friend actually
| implicated him and that he has the choice of saying nothing
| and being convicted because of that, or confessing to a
| lesser charge.
|
| Alternately, he might just think that police who'd fake
| evidence are corrupt, and that corrupt police could do a lot
| worse, like fake evidence against his whole family or just
| shoot him, so he'd better confess just to come out of this
| alive.
| [deleted]
| throwawaycities wrote:
| > What's the advantage to society of allowing interviewers to
| lie (to anyone, let alone kids)?
|
| I suppose in many instances lies and bluffs have resulted in
| the desired outcome.
|
| But not all lies/bluffs are the same, and I agree with you that
| telling a suspect in interrogation that they have immunity if
| they just say X is problematic, but I think it is reflected in
| the current case law and any evidence obtained in such a
| scenario would likely be suppressed.
|
| I've seen more than a few interrogations, a similar one went
| something like this:
|
| Cop: look, we just want to recover the gun, we don't care about
| anything else, just tell us where the gun is.
|
| Suspect: oh...you just want the gun?
|
| Cop: yeah.
|
| Suspect: yeah, I bet you do.
|
| Now the thing is this suspect actually shot someone from his
| car into an adjacent car, he fled and discarded the firearm,
| then returned to the scene after police had arrived and he was
| immediately arrested. It always amazed me someone so dumb as to
| drive right back to the scene of the crime and deliver himself
| into the hands of police was so aware and savvy during the
| interrogation.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Simple: The attitude held by many in the law enforcement and
| justice system is that if you get swept up by police, you're
| probably guilty of _something_ , so getting you off the street
| - even by coercing a false statement - makes the world a better
| place. The end justifying the means.
|
| My neighborhood in Chicago has a cop enclave inside it and they
| are absolutely lighting up our neighborhood political
| discussion group irate about this law, talking about how many
| murders and rapists are going to go free.
| Simulacra wrote:
| Nobody likes to lose power, especially the police.
| watwut wrote:
| How likely are they to solve rapes and murders? Afaik, rapes
| are solved very rarely. Murders are more likely to be solved,
| but the numbers are still not all that great.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > how many murders and rapists are going to go free.
|
| How many murderers and rapists are minors? Probably not many.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| A lot of gang violence in Chicago is perpetrated by minors
| as initiation rituals because they get light sentences.
| dionidium wrote:
| Unfortunately, quite a lot. Source:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/251884/murder-
| offenders-...
| AJ007 wrote:
| Especially in Chicago where an astounding number of
| murders go unsolved, most of which are gang related.
|
| While higher for whites, for African American victims,
| The close rate was near 20%, something most Americans may
| associate with Guatemala or Mexico - https://www.npr.org/
| local/309/2019/10/09/768552458/chicago-s...
|
| Based on arrest histories of gang members and failures to
| prosecute even closed cases, one should assume that there
| are a large number of serial killers operating in
| Chicago, many of who started as minors.
|
| While most middle and upper class Americans dismiss this
| as just gang members killing each other, so it's no big
| deal, this clearly would not be tolerated in a largely
| white suburban setting, gang associated or otherwise.
| rovolo wrote:
| JFYI, you may be inferring "gang-caused" from "gang-
| related".
|
| > An additional concern is the varying methods by which
| homicides are classified as "gang-related." The most
| commonly used is the "member-based" approach, in which a
| homicide is classified as gang-related if the victim was
| and/or the perpetrator is a gang member.
|
| []
| https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-5-how-
| are-g...
|
| Also, tons of people (850k - 1.4m) are classified as gang
| members. The criteria for being a gang member is very
| broad and includes friend groups who've been arrested:
|
| - The group has three or more members, generally aged
| 12-24.
|
| - Members share an identity, typically linked to a name,
| and often other symbols.
|
| - Members view themselves as a gang, and they are
| recognized by others as a gang.
|
| - The group has some permanence and a degree of
| organization.
|
| - The group is involved in an elevated level of criminal
| activity.
|
| []
| https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-1-what-
| is-a...
|
| [] 850k
| https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-4-how-
| exten...
|
| [] 1.4 million (page 9) https://www.fbi.gov/file-
| repository/stats-services-publicati...
|
| If you calculate out the statistics, there're tons of
| people classified as gang members
|
| { latino: ~50%, black: ~30%, white non-latino: ~15% }
|
| { latino: 450k-700k, black: 250-400k, white non-latino:
| 125-200k }
|
| (I don't know how they classify black latino vs white
| latino)
|
| []
| https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-11-what-
| is-...
|
| You can compare these numbers to the total population of
| males (90% of gang members are male) in the 14-24 age
| range (I excluded the 10-14 population even though it's
| included in the 12-24 age range). Classifying 10% of the
| population as being in a gang basically makes the label
| useless since you can then call almost anything "gang-
| related".
|
| { latino: 5m, black: 3m, white non-latino: 15m }
|
| { latino: ~10%, black: ~10%, white non-latino: 1% }
|
| [] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSDT1Y2011.B
| 01001I
|
| [] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSDT1Y2019.B
| 01001B
|
| [] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSDT1Y2019.B
| 01001A
| wyldfire wrote:
| Does this data include false convictions predicated on
| the same interrogations that are now illegal?
| [deleted]
| KittenInABox wrote:
| Cops already let a ton of rapists go free as it is, including
| themselves. I don't expect a change.
| erdos4d wrote:
| US society is designed so that a significant percentage of
| people will live in cages, far more than any other society on
| Earth currently. I guess this helps make that happen? I
| personally don't think this is right or beneficial, but it's
| something the US works very hard to accomplish and seems
| incapable of dialing back.
| voodootrucker wrote:
| I'm surprised (according to ctrl-f) no one has brought up
| Parallel Construction [1]
|
| I'm not sure what the benefit to society is, as you asked, but
| the benefit for law enforcement is that they can escape the
| intent of 4th amendment.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I also never understood this. It almost seems as if
| interrogations aren't for discovery of information but moreso
| "we have this lead and we're going to beat you into submission
| until you confirm our lead".
|
| You see it all the time with wrongful convictions and people
| signing confessions to crimes they didn't commit. I often
| wonder in these cases, do the officers, does law enforcement in
| this case really care who did it? If you bring someone in and
| interrogate them for 12+ hours and eventually they give you the
| answer you want to hear, do they never stop and ask themselves
| if the reason the person gave that answer is simply to make
| whatever they were doing stop?
|
| It seems like some of these investigations the point isn't to
| solve the crime, but to dot the I's and cross your T's. It
| seems like actual public safety is an afterthought as long as
| you "catch the criminal" on paper.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I saw something before that said something like 80% of cops
| thought they had never arrested an innocent person. From
| that, it is likely that they believe these people are the
| criminals but the crafty villains won't admit it without
| being tricked.
|
| It's slightly less disturbing to think that the cops
| legitimately think they're doing a good job over the
| alternative of intentionally ignoring their responsibility.
| Still troubling to think they could be that deluded.
| dionidium wrote:
| Police deal often with people who have long histories of
| arrest and so I think there's also a perverse component of,
| like, sure it's _possible_ they 're innocent of this
| particular crime, but we're not dealing with an innocent
| person, more broadly.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Though I also think that line of thinking is dangerous,
| if that was all it was they'd still realize they
| occasionally make mistakes.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That sounds like it would be pretty bad at motivating
| that person to quit committing crimes if they're going to
| be guilty whether they did it or not.
| dionidium wrote:
| I didn't say that what the police are doing is _good_ or
| _effective_. In fact I called it _perverse_.
| derefr wrote:
| Perhaps the FBI should "adversarially test" police forces
| with fake People of Interest, the way DHS adversarially
| tests TSA agents with fake bombs. Set up a fake BOLO for an
| individual of a certain description, then hire a set of
| undercover actors who _all_ fit that description, and drop
| them in the area, telling them to wander around acting
| suspiciously.
|
| If the officers don't realize, upon bringing five separate
| people in on the same description, that _at least_ four of
| them have to be the wrong guy, then they fail the test. If
| they end up eliminating four of the five but then
| concluding that the last guy actually did it, they _also_
| fail the test.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I wouldn't want to be the undercover actor involved in
| that. There's a non-zero risk of serious injury, or
| death.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Risk level is at the same level as for any other random
| person.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| No, it's higher. Because you aren't just a random person
| you are purposefully intending to look and act like
| someone accused.
|
| I get the whole purpose of "yes, people are stopped every
| day because they resemble someone wanted", but this is "I
| am going to go out of my way to purposefully resemble and
| act like someone who the police will take a negative
| interest in".
| a1369209993 wrote:
| This is true of any undercover operation, and should be
| vastly less true than, say, infiltrating a gang or mob
| group.
| pschuegr wrote:
| No offense, but this is exactly the kind of proposal I
| would expect from a software developer. It would work
| perfectly with a program where everything is nice and
| clean:
|
| INSERT fake_actor() 5 TIMES SELECT suspects() CHECK
| officer_state_of_mind()
|
| In the real world, as somebody already said, the
| logistics of hiring 5 actors to act "suspicious", get
| themselves arrested, set up plausible backstories that
| you would somehow have to keep from the police,
| potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal
| consequences if something go wrong, etc?
|
| I'm going to assume you're proposing this as a thought
| experiment and not something that could actually work.
|
| [And I mean this in the nicest of ways, I construct these
| kinds of "solutions" constantly too]
| Clubber wrote:
| >It's slightly less disturbing to think that the cops
| legitimately think they're doing a good job over the
| alternative of intentionally ignoring their responsibility.
| Still troubling to think they could be that deluded.
|
| Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the greater
| good of the USSR. It's extremely easy to justify bad deeds
| and fool yourself that the ends justify the means.
| lostapathy wrote:
| > Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the
| greater good of the USSR. It's extremely easy to justify
| bad deeds and fool yourself that the ends justify the
| means.
|
| Hitler as well.
|
| I went to Catholic school. Had quite the debate with a
| nun over why I thought Hitler and Stalin both went to
| heaven, since both thought they were doing the right
| thing and were just horribly misguided.
| serenloss wrote:
| I think one could make a strong argument that Stalin
| always knowingly acted in the best interest of Stalin.
| eldavido wrote:
| Great illustration of why respect for individual rights
| is so important.
|
| There will always be some megalomaniac, whether dictator,
| president, cop, or some authority figure, who "knows
| best".
|
| Individual rights are the brakes. They're the lines we've
| agreed not to cross as a society, even when we're really
| sure we "know best". Example: property rights. No matter
| how sure you are that there's stolen property in the
| building, even law enforcement doesn't get to enter
| without a warrant.
|
| Individual rights _limit_ what others can do.
| joyeuse6701 wrote:
| Agreed, which, as an aside, is why the civil forfeiture
| issue is such a scandal
| manquer wrote:
| It may not be that simple.
|
| Imagine if each of your cells had individual rights or
| every bee in a hive has freedom to do its own thing.
|
| Sometimes (most?) having centralized systems of power can
| be misused but that doesn't mean that centralized systems
| shouldn't be tried, there are evolutionary advantages to
| them.
| infogulch wrote:
| I don't know what your point is, GP's comment already
| mentions a case where authority _can_ intrude on
| individual rights: warrants, and there are many
| additional exceptions. The point of this system is not to
| make individuals untouchable, its to lift the authority
| to intrude on personal liberties out of the hands of
| individual beat cops and into a well-defined system and
| public observable record through the courts.
| airstrike wrote:
| The problem with analogies is they're not really
| accurate.
|
| Cells or bees have nothing to do with the wrongfully
| imprisoned minors in question.
| chaps wrote:
| This is a breath takingly disgusting over simplification
| and you know it.
|
| How am I not surprised that you're the founder and CTO of
| a proctoring company that does facial recognition + AI to
| detect lying with "100% unbiased results". Fucking gross,
| man.
| anon9001 wrote:
| Wow, you are not kidding.
|
| > Based on established models such as Big 5 and intrinsic
| values, TBI adds AI-powered Natural Language Processing
| to process data and help you make unbiased hiring
| decisions 100% of the time.
|
| > TBI stack ranks candidates according to their
| performance in the assessment with regards to the
| competencies predetermined by the enterprise, ranging
| from 'essential' to 'good' and then 'critical'.
|
| > Leverage psycholinguistics to analyze a candidate's
| response and predict behavior in half the time.
|
| So this company has layered AI on top of pseudoscience
| and is selling it as an automated hiring tool. I guess
| the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the results are
| indistinguishable from noise? Or maybe your hiring
| decisions are "unbiased" if you launder them through this
| software to produce a team that looks like your existing
| team?
|
| Either way, this Talview company is doing some really
| evil stuff.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > I guess the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the
| results are indistinguishable from noise?
|
| To be fair, that _is_ actually true, although I don 't
| think that's the (false) claim they're actually making.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the
| greater good of the USSR._
|
| I think a better way to phrase this would be that Stalin
| often said that what he was doing was for the greater
| good of the USSR.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| This seems like a valid, if hyperbolic, point to me. I
| think that one could make a plausible argument that one
| of the most basic implications of the principle of rule
| of law is that, at least where the police are concerned,
| the ends _don 't_ justify the means. Allowing them to
| behave otherwise isn't a slippery slope that leads to
| rampant abuse of power; it's a dead drop.
| rayiner wrote:
| This attitude is less hard to understand when you're not
| looking at it through the filter of cases where that
| happened not to be true. When I worked for a federal judge
| I saw a ton of criminal appeals. Most criminals are dumb
| and usually there was just a plethora of evidence in the
| case. I can see why it would be very easy for cops to think
| that every case was that way, rather than just 98% of them.
| I have public defender friends. They'll tell you, in almost
| every case their client is guilty of something. Their job
| is to make sure the police and prosecutors don't overreach
| or act abusively and save the rare person who really is
| innocent.
|
| That's the key factor that outsiders looking into the
| criminal justice system overlook. They think it's easy.
| "Just stop being racist, corrupt, etc." It's a system where
| day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a
| really shitty human being. Reforming the system is
| important, but it's much harder than people think.
| ska wrote:
| > It's a system where day in and day out, almost everyone
| you encounter is a really shitty human being.
|
| This is categorically not true. Police have to deal with
| some very problematic people, sure. But bad days are far
| more common that bad people, and most interactions aren't
| even that.
|
| Every police force has its share of assholes too, who are
| net cause of more problems than they solve. The most
| effective ones I've known have been aware of the systemic
| problems of thinking like you suggest, and intentionally
| work against it.
| craftinator wrote:
| > Every police force has its share of assholes too
|
| Due to the nature of the job, and the perks and impunity
| of it in the US, it actually self selects for assholes.
| The military does as well, to a much lesser extent. There
| were some days when I went to bed thinking, "everyone I
| talked to today was a self important asshole."
| rayiner wrote:
| When I say "criminal justice system" I'm talking in the
| context of this article (people who are arrested and
| prosecuted). Obviously most interactions with the police
| are with normal people and don't lead to anything major.
|
| But randomly pick out some sentencing hearings one day at
| your local federal court. They'll go over the rap sheet
| of people who actually go to prison. It's eye opening.
|
| You can even see this in the criminal justice advocacy
| materials if you read carefully. I love the ACLU but if
| you read beyond the headline in many cases it's quite
| revealing. I remember a case a few years ago where the
| headline was some "child" was imprisoned simply for being
| at a scene where a pizza delivery guy was murdered in
| broad daylight. Turns out he was actually in a gang, who
| murdered the guy in cold blood, and the legal theory is
| that the cops can't prove which kid actually fired the
| shots. You can find the legal theory compelling (and I
| do) while acknowledging that this is the kind of shit
| that turns up even when social justice types are trying
| to pick impact cases.
|
| Or heck George Floyd. I think the media overlooked a
| really important angle on this story that would have
| spoke to religious people. Floyd was a guy who spent most
| of his life being a pretty bad person:
| https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-us-news-ap-top-
| new...
|
| But he had found Jesus, he was turning his life around
| and reaching out to kids, and when Derek Chauvin murdered
| him he cut short what could have been a path to
| redemption. Reflexively saying "criminals don't deserve
| to be murdered" when Floyd's background comes up is a
| tautology. Sure. But does pretending that stuff never
| happened help you understand the real human story of
| Floyd, Chauvin, and the people in that community? Why
| making progress on criminal justice reform is so hard
| even as it's extremely necessary? Is your phat dismissal
| and reduction of people to a demons and angels binary
| persuasive to anyone who doesn't already agree with you?
| ska wrote:
| Even if you are talking only about people prosecuted,
| "98% shitty people" is ridiculously hyperbolic.
|
| It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police
| work which was more my point; lots of people make excuses
| for the excesses of these systems based on this sort of
| "98%" (or whatever big number) argument; mostly those
| excuses are pure fertilizer.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > mostly those excuses are pure fertilizer.
|
| Fertilizer is good and useful (it helps plants grow);
| what you're talking is raw sewage, complete with draino
| and hastily-disposed medication.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Even if you are talking only about people prosecuted,
| "98% shitty people" is ridiculously hyperbolic.
|
| Good people don't rob their neighbors because they're
| "having a bad day." They're shitty people. And no,
| poverty doesn't excuse it. People in Bangladesh, where
| I'm from, are vastly poorer. If poverty caused crime,
| they'd go around stealing, joining gangs, etc. But mostly
| they don't. In Bangladeshi villages, crime is lower than
| in U.S. cities. And when they do those things, nobody
| hesitates to call them shitty people!
|
| I'm extremely sympathetic to police reform, because I
| think even shitty people don't deserve to be abused by
| the state. But let's not mince words here.
|
| > It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police
| work which was more my point
|
| That may be your point, but I wasn't talking about
| pulling people over for speeding. My point was in the
| context of this article, which is about someone who was
| prosecuted for brutally raping and murdering a woman.
| antiterra wrote:
| It depends on what part of the system you're in, and much
| of the criminal justice system exists after an initial
| filter and with a particular pipeline that it's almost
| impossible to avoid a bias against on a day to day basis.
|
| If your job is to do image/video forensics on hard drives
| of people already arrested or served with warrants, it's
| generally either unremarkable or traumatically upsetting.
| The latter is going to have the most impact on your
| perception, and would likely color your worldview on
| things like encryption or the overall goodness of
| humanity.
| ska wrote:
| This is true, I originally had a comment about narrower
| roles but thought it was a a distraction. If you are
| looking at the justice system as a whole, the pool of
| people shifts a fair bit. However, you have to pick an
| extremely narrow role before you are anywhere close to
| GP's "almost everyone is shitty" characterization.
|
| My comment was more aimed at general policing, the vast
| majority of which fits my characterization.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >This attitude is less hard to understand when you're not
| looking at it through the filter of cases where that
| happened not to be true
|
| Nope, the attitude of "I never make mistakes" still
| baffles my mind. I get that most people they're dealing
| with are causing some amount of trouble, they should
| still regularly doubt their instincts. That would also go
| a long way to answering demands to "stop being racist."
|
| >It's a system where day in and day out, almost everyone
| you encounter is a really shitty human being.
|
| If they hold that mindset, they should just extend it to
| themselves and the other people in the criminal justice
| system.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Interrogations are where they think they have a case against
| you but it's not good enough so they try and mislead you into
| making their jobs easier by giving them more evidence against
| you.
|
| If they're going through the effort of asking you questions
| in a controlled setting it's because they're trying to make
| sure anything they get is 100% unambiguously admissible in
| court.
| notJim wrote:
| I think your baseline assumption about the US "justice
| system" should be that it is a horror show from top to
| bottom. If you expect any kind of rationality, fairness or
| common sense idea of justice, you will not find it.
| IQunder130 wrote:
| This does raise the question of how many cases are actually
| up in the air at all. One would think that given the IQ
| distribution of criminals a majority of cases involving
| arrests are quite open and shut, with suspects usually being
| caught either red handed or after not covering their tracks
| at all.
|
| A justice system optimized for public safety will err on the
| side of putting aggressive, anti-social individuals behind
| bars rather than making absolutely sure they really did do
| the thing most of them were caught doing. Public safety is
| therefore orthogonal or even somewhat opposed to the pursuit
| of truth.
| Jenk wrote:
| The show on Netflix "Making a Murderer" has some scary
| examples of this. Not only of the lying during interrogation
| but of just how pervasive this mentality is.
|
| During an appeal to the 7th (iirc) District Court, the ADA's
| argument always came down to "What about Justice for the
| victim'a family?" like somehow it isn't even relevant anymore
| if they have the wrong guy or not - if they decided that the
| recently convicted was wrongfully convicted, it would be
| unfair to the victim's family to let him go, even if he isn't
| guilty.
| briandear wrote:
| I completely agree. Some of the Jan 6 protestors have
| recently plead guilty to trespassing or similar petty
| nonsense after being held im solitary confinement for over 6
| months in a DC jail. Solitary confinement for what ends up
| being a trespassing misdemeanor.
|
| Actual public safety is an afterthought. The point isn't to
| solve a crime, but to punish enemies or to boost conviction
| rates.
| peteretep wrote:
| > Actual public safety is an afterthought
|
| Are we talking about the people who participated in a
| violent insurrection against the US, or is this another
| group?
|
| If you want to have nice things (eg: a democracy) then you
| can't be letting people who commit some mild treason off
| just because they're dumbasses who got caught up in the
| moment.
|
| The next yahoo who decides they want to try and block the
| peaceful transfer of power needs to 100% understand that
| they will be prosecuted.
| adolph wrote:
| The parent comment says they "plead guilty to trespassing
| or similar petty nonsense" so I'd assume they weren't
| charged with "violent insurrection" and "mild treason."
| peteretep wrote:
| And they got Capone for tax evasion. Brushing off a
| conviction under 18 U.S. Code SS 1752 -- which seems to
| be what people are being charged[0] with -- as "petty
| nonsense" is itself misleading, as it's the part of law
| that deals with "PRESIDENTIAL AND PRESIDENTIAL STAFF
| ASSASSINATION, KIDNAPPING, AND ASSAULT"[1]
|
| [0] https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-
| riot-ar... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18
| /part-I/chapter-84
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _does law enforcement in this case really care who did it?_
|
| Law enforcement is an organization and all the baggage that
| usually comes with organizations still applies (eg
| maintaining the organization is a priority). LEOs are people
| that want to do people things - it's a job, not a way of
| life.
| Clubber wrote:
| They also have a lot of political pressure to "solve
| crimes," which is literally a score board. I'm not excusing
| what they do in any way. It's a big mess of a system with
| too many incompetent bureaucratic careerists who seem to be
| short on ethics.
|
| I liken it as a game which didn't take hackers into account
| when designing the system, and the hackers are now rampant,
| ruining the game, except it isn't a game.
| Simulacra wrote:
| _They also have a lot of political pressure to "solve
| crimes," which is literally a score board._
|
| While also being handicapped (budget cuts) and undermined
| (blamed) by politicians. On the one hand politicians
| demand lower crime, but at the same time denounce the
| police as the source of societal conflict.
| pope_meat wrote:
| Police spending was 0.05% of the GDP in 1980, it's 0.25%
| of the GDP now.
|
| So, somehow were spending more and the opinion is that
| were spending less.
| weeblewobble wrote:
| LAPD budget is about 15% of the total LA city budget.
|
| NYPD is about 11% of total NYC city budget
| handrous wrote:
| Maybe looks are deceiving, but officers and their
| vehicles sure _look_ like they 're having a whole lot
| more money spent on them than they were in, say, the 90s.
| They have more stuff, it all looks fairly new, and it all
| looks slicker, meaner, and more "apart" from normal
| folks, than it used to. I'm not talking about SWAT or
| armored cars or any of that stuff, either, but normal
| stuff that ordinary officers wear, carry, and drive.
| Firehawke wrote:
| This. The rules that allow them to confiscate and sell or
| use materials deemed to be "having been used in aid of
| committing a crime" means the funding is actually
| drastically higher than it once was.
|
| High enough for them to buy APCs for staging public
| relations events.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Because it's effective I guess? A couple hours of successful
| interrogation can save tens or hundreds of hours of
| investigation. And one of their main goals is to elicit
| information that can be independently confirmed. For example,
| if someone confesses to a shooting and tells the police where
| they hid the gun, and the gun is found there, that's a good
| indication that the confession was probably legitimate.
|
| Edit: Geez, I was just answering the question... At the end of
| the day, it's up to society to determine whether it thinks the
| effectiveness of the method is worth the potential moral hazard
| of false confessions under pressure. In my opinion, there does
| need to be better policy for police departments to assign
| little weight to confessions with zero corroboration that
| cannot even accurately describe the facts of the case.
| Aerroon wrote:
| What if wrongful convictions based on police officers lying
| in interrogations penalized the police officer doing
| interrogations? Do you think the interrogators would still
| continue using these methods?
|
| Eg the police officer that interrogated Terrill Swift will
| now be held criminally responsible for inducing a false
| confession.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| I think better rules on what quality of confessions police
| and prosecutors take into consideration would probably be
| sufficient. Eg. if the suspect says "okay, fine, I did it"
| after hours of interrogation but cannot describe what the
| victim looked like, what weapon they used, where they hid
| it afterwards, etc, that confession should be considered
| near-worthless. The real issue isn't inducing the false
| confession, it's assigning it such a high evidentiary value
| and presenting it to a jury out of context.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Because it's effective I guess?
|
| So the end justifies the means. I'm not a fan of that
| philosophy, as it can be used to justify all kinds of things
| and leads to a lack of integrity.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Agreed, and moreover is there even any evidence that it
| _is_ effective? Or rather, _effective at uncovering the
| truth_ as opposed to _effective at eliciting a [potentially
| untruthful] confession_?
| [deleted]
| ashtonkem wrote:
| And that's how authoritarian police states are build. One
| "but it's effective" and "they're just criminals" at a time.
| By the time "good citizens" discover that it's being used
| against them too, it's far too late.
| glitchc wrote:
| Doing away with anyone who may possibly commit a crime is
| even more effective at combating crime than the existing
| options. Let's go with that. Heck, let's take care of it at
| birth, most efficient of all! /s
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Doing away with anyone who may possibly commit a crime
|
| That's been tried at various times and places in world
| history. It doesn't have a good record.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I remember doing something rather stupid in grade school, to the
| extent that the police were brought in to question me about it.
| The "crime" itself was really nothing more than unauthorized
| access to the district's private FTP server, but the officers
| questioning me started saying some really odd stuff: they were
| trying to get me to admit culpability to things that I didn't
| understand, some of which I was very skeptical of. As scared as I
| was, I recalled my mom telling me to ask for a lawyer when I was
| younger, so I did. This seemed to disgruntle everyone in the
| room, but it also ended the whole ordeal pretty quickly.
|
| I later learned that these cops had our school's security company
| on the line, who was _flabbergasted_ by the idea that unsecured
| FTP could be accessed by wisecracking students. Suffice to say, I
| 'm all for legislation like this.
| erdo wrote:
| I just realised that the police are able to lie to you during an
| interrogation. I feel incredibly naive
|
| (and yes, this probably is related to my white privilege - when I
| compared my experience of the police growing up with the
| experiences of my friends it seriously opened my eyes)
| GhostVII wrote:
| I think it is fine for police to lie in interrogations to get
| information. If them telling lies leads them to hard evidence of
| the crime that's great But lying to get a confession doesn't seem
| fair, if you confess to a crime you should have full knowledge of
| the case against you just like you would in a trial.
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