This Wasn’t His First Time
magazine.atavist.com
magazine.atavist.com
Once again we have irrefutable evidence that the police, as a whole, are incompetent and concerned only with making the "facts" fit their preconceived notions. That they are incapable of even considering they could have gotten it wrong.
When faced with pretty damming evidence against their idea of this being a fraud the captain said:
> “We don’t know what the final outcome of this case is going to be,” Captain John Whitney told the Vallejo Times-Herald. “It’s important that we don’t jump to conclusions.
They have no issue at all jumping to conclusions when it makes their job easier or when it lets them bend the facts to their initial suspicion. It's disgusting that we allow the police to lie to and treat suspects like this. Hours and hours of questioning attempting to break them down and have them question their own sanity.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who hasn't already learned it: never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They are not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking for an easy way to wrap up the case. If the police are trying to talk to you then you are in their sights and they would much rather pin it all on you rather than do their actual jobs. Always ask for a lawyer and never think "Well if I just tell them X they will let me go".
I see no path forward for our current police in the US. It's not just bad apples, it's bad barrels and they will always choose to close ranks over rooting out the worst among them. Be sure, the cops who help cover up or know but stay silent are just as bad as the ones we would call "bad apples". The system is horribly broken.
Sure, except the people making the "bad apples" argument don't want to do this part, either.
There are exceptions to this rule, and I think one is when your girlfriend has just been kidnapped. Sure, in this case the police did absolutely nothing to actually help save the girlfriend, but the chance they might help seems worth the risk of being deemed a suspect.
I understand the desire to cooperate but with minor exceptions I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one present.
Cops are interested in really finding who is responsible, they are looking to close the file and you are right in front of them, a very tempting target.
Yes, I think hiring a lawyer would also increase your chances if they can push the police towards continuing to investigate all possibilities (such as interviewing witnesses or testing all the samples as they failed to do in this case) or make them less likely to lie to you (as they did in this case about the lie detector test results).
In a really gross way I think that getting a lawyer might make you look less attractive to the cops (harder to pin it on you now) and force them to look elsewhere along with your other points of using your lawyer as way to push the investigation on their own. Remember, most cops are looking for the path of least resistance, not the truth.
The cops behavior(and human behavior in general) makes a lot of sense if you view them as pattern matching machines. If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97 of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case.
And if merely "multiple cases" is enough to warrant cutting them out of your life, consider that you also need to cut out pizza delivery people (multiple cases of them robbing their clients), baristas(multiple cases of them raping people they meet on the job), mail men(multiple cases of them assaulting their clients), etc.
The couple in this story went through hell then the police make it even worse, that’s not ok. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they don’t jump to conclusions like this. The police ignored evidence at the scene that corroborated what the couple told them and continued to insist they were right even though they had no evidence backing up their charges. Just their gut feeling and “pattern-matching”.
When we here multiple stories about the other professions doing the things you mentioned and, this is key, them getting away with it, no repercussions, we can talk. The police are the only (aside from maybe very rich people/corporations who in some cases use the police to exercise their will) people who have this kind of impunity.
The police have the power to kill you with impunity. The police have the power to absolutely ruin your life even if you did nothing wrong. The have the power to take your belonging and require you prove their innocence. They should have to answer for the times they get it wrong.
Yet, that is the job. If it is difficult for police to keep an open mind, then they need systems and rules in place to force them to keep an investigation broad enough to correctly handle the 3% cases where their intuition/bias is wrong.
In reality, I would guess that the failure rate for "cop intuition" is much, much higher than 3%. Allowing cops to overly trust their intuition results in some very biased, racist and clasist policing.
One solution, is facing real consequences when you are wrong. I think it is absolutely incredible how few consequences the bad cops in this story faced (instead of consequences, they got promotions and the city paid for the settlement with the victims. The cops didn't even get around to apologizing for years.
In what way, in a case like this, is your eyewitness testimony not a crucial part of finding your girlfriend while she is still alive?
Police Unions often have an ethos of "we protect our own" -- essentially gang mentality. I like the idea of policing, think they can play a very positive role in society, but also think that the unions and that mentality are deeply undermining those positives coming true.
I think your point is made stronger without the hyperbole.
> As she gripped her gun, she felt as if she’d stepped into one of the true-crime documentaries she binge-watched at night.
Seems like an incredibly bad idea for police officers to be binge-watching that stuff. They’ll get the worse cases drilled into their heads, right before going out on a (real) street the next morning.
Whole days are spent watching dash- and body-worn-cam videos of officers getting ambushed, ostensibly to teach ways to mitigate harm, but in practice it just has the effect of deepening the chasm between "us" officers and "them" citizens by instilling a deep sense of fear bordering on what may be considered an anticipatory PTSD. I mean, talk about a garbage biased dataset...
(To any pedants in the audience, the trauma occurs when watching the videos, so "post-traumatic" is appropriate here :))
Here's an account from an ex-cop that made a splash following George Floyd's murder, but there are many, many more articles exactly like this scattered across the internet: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...
I agree that antagonism between police and public is a big problem, but I'm not sure what the solution is to the particular problem you point out.
Lmao.. omg such a good read.
> A kidnapping deemed a hoax, the newbie detective who cracked the case, and the Harvard-trained lawyer whose mental unraveling set the whole story in motion.
Much more intriguing.
> Paul Calder Le Roux is a former programmer, former criminal cartel boss, and informant to the US Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1999, he created E4M, a free and open-source disk encryption software program for Microsoft Windows, and is sometimes credited for open-source TrueCrypt, which is based on E4M's code, though he denies involvement with TrueCrypt.