It's legal for police to use deception in interrogations. Some want that to end
text.npr.org
text.npr.org
https://abc11.com/post/city-fontana-reaches-900k-settlement-...
Someone should be in prison. This will not end untill there are personal consequences.
> Months after the interrogation, Guthrie was named a 2019 Employee of the Year for the Fontana Police Department.
> Guthrie is now a sergeant. So is Janusz.
> And Michael Dorsey, the lieutenant who Guthrie says told him and Janusz that officers believed Perez Jr. had killed his father, has been promoted to captain and is now chief of police of Fontana, overseeing 188 sworn officers, according to its website.
This is the hierarchy of competence I keep hearing about.
Crime goes down, the poors don't riot and that's all that matters.
I mean technically Russia does have elections.
Threatening to kill the dog is just plain cruel.
Whatever happens shouldn’t be attributed to malice. I won’t hurt your pets. My superiors ought to award me for it. I was just being stupid.
This is not a valid activity. Either you have proof or you don’t.
A proper hardened criminal will never confess.
If you have a confession, it’s >70% chance for perversion of justice:
A terrorist will confess because they want fame
In Russia you pay someone to ‘confess’ for your crime and go to prison instead of you.
The naive, mentally infirm will confess, often to things they didn’t do.
Or you managed to torture a confession out of someone, like they did here.
Confessions lead straight to Spanish Inquisition type of justice
People do of course care about their pets, but John Wick used the death of a pet as its instigating event because it was different, not because it was a remotely usual way to respond to a pets death.
harm or kill a police dog however? youll do 45 years in prison because thats not property, its a "K-9 cop"
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/news/man-who-killed-police...
double standards like this are how Rome burned.
Water pipes made of lead? Rome burned.
Invasions by barbarian tribes that I’m going to liken to modern immigration to push my anti-immigration stance? Rome burned.
Adoption of Christianity by Theodosius in 395AD? Believe it or not, Rome burned in 410AD.
“Double standards”? Rome burned.
This only works on people who’ve never opened a history book in their lives. Why would you try it here, where people are much more likely to be familiar with Roman history?
This crosses from lie to threat. Totally unacceptable.
Less convincingly, when you separate a group of suspects and claim that Kyle gave you up when he did nothing of the sort.
Yes, it may lead to some bad guys getting caught who otherwise wouldn't have been. But that is not an excuse if it also compromises the rule of law for innocent people.
This isn’t a hypothetical, people have literally gone to prison for decades before some new DNA evidence exonerates them and the ‘accomplice’ admits they lied…
To be clear, the prosecutors should be held to a high standard, and they should be forced to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. But we should also be a little more cautious about proclaiming the “innocence” of people whose guilty convictions are found to be problematic. In case that evidence had been excluded on time, it is possible that the prosecutors could still have built a solid case that relied on different evidence.
That's literally how innocence works though. From the universal declaration of human rights: "Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a public trial ...". If they weren't proven guilty they are presumed innocent.
If the guy who done it was blonde, 6’2”, driving a red Mercedes, and he wrapped the body in a green rug, and it turns out that the bloodstains on green rug of the 6’2” blonde guy with the red Mercedes that you arrested for it are only actually 70% likely to be the victim’s rather than 99.5%, while LEGALLY the guy in prison now can benefit from the presumption of innocence, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable if he moved in downstairs.
Proven innocence would be “oh we have irrefutable video evidence that this guy was two states away at the time”.
Suggested reading on this topic: https://freakonomics.com/2008/08/are-the-fbis-probabilities-...
It unfortunately has a side effect, the reciprocating "my friend did it" defense works really well in those places - Scandinavia, I'm looking at you.
Given two murder suspects, but no witnesses, and no evidence of who actually delivered the final blow, it doesn't matter if both would be covered in the victims blood. As long as they point blame at each other and shut up, chances are they will get away with murder.
They would still very likely go to prison of course, but for some "lesser" crime like assault.
[1] One of them is that there was a tiger set free in a dense forest somewhere and police from Germany, Japan, and India were tasked to track it down each time as a challenge. Japan found the tiger in 4 hours, Germany in 12 hours. Indian police party was nowhere to be seen. Hours passed, days passed. Finally after the end of the 12th day the Japanese and German police banded together and went to find/rescue the Indian police party. They saw the police party had set camp deep inside the forest and they had a monkey hung upside down from a tree that they were taking turns beating and telling it to confess that it was the tiger.
Only statements in front of Judges are applicable. So it makes no sense for police to interrogate to get answers.
Only statements in front of Judges are applicable. So it makes no sense for police to interrogate to get answers.
If you want to prevent these sorts of things from happening in the future, adding another ban on this behavior isn’t going to do it. There needs to be consequences for the officers that do this. It’s not the officers paying $900K, it’s the city. And they aren’t getting fired, the officers that did that to Tom Perez even got promoted! The system of accountability needs to be reformed. Maybe that means reforming qualified immunity, maybe demoting and firing officers for misconduct, maybe prosecutors need to start indicting officers when their behavior gets to the point of criminality.
Personally, I think if you could sue, say, the police union rather than the city when there is misconduct, things would turn around fast.
Ex: "If you confess, it will just be just a week in jail, and if you don't, you'll be executed. And your agedmother will have to pay the fines, making her homeless."
Some states forbid filing charges if the federal government already did.
"[A]ny evidence that the accused was threatened, tricked, or cajoled into a waiver will, of course, show that the Defendant did not voluntarily waive his privilege." -Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 477 (1966).
If the detectives make any kind of promises or threats then your lawyer will be able to suppress the entire interview.
Here is the waiver sheet used by the US Treasury, and this is similar to the waiver sheets used by police departments all over the USA, it reads "I understand the statement of my rights above as they have been read and explained to me and I waive them freely and voluntarily, without threat or intimidation, and without any promise of reward or immunity."
https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/publications/2022-...
It's awful hard to say they threatened you when you just signed a paper that said they didn't.
Good luck proving it's not yours.
There will be witnesses. Maybe even video of you signing something.
And that's if the judge is even acting in good faith, which is not common.
For prison or something, I'd hope the forged signature would be contestable for the average person, but I'm not optimistic.
If you can prove it. This is often the tricky part.
On top of that, they could add some sort of chain of custody for the accused. For instance gaps in the recording between arrest and trial (solo bathroom breaks and conferring with defense attorneys excepted) could mean the charges are dropped.
* Lower the standard for proof
* Make it harder to to avoid public scrutiny for covered interactions
If you say “I want to talk to a lawyer” - anything after that is not admissible. Full stop. This is generally enforced.
Same with Miranda warnings.
The problem is clear rules tend to be a bit arbitrary.
Can you change the wording on a Miranda warning a bit? Why that specific wording?
So instead we have very unclear, but more constitutionally rigorous rules.
It's a significant difference when those acts become impractical, because you can't spout all the other smaller lies which are needed to shock and scare the victim into a state where they'll fall for the big ones.
1. provide evidence of those lies.
2. create consequences for spouting the lies
They are recorded - a lot of countries outside the US actually require it be recorded and if it is not, the interview and anything said in it are simply inadmissible.
Even in the US, recording is standard practice for any meaningful felony. Unlike body worn cameras, it does not get magically lost, and when it does, the interview is generally not admitted, or a defense lawyer tears it to shreds if the detective tries to use his notes. While there are always cases of recordings "being lost" or whatever, the rate here is very low, compared to body worn cameras or anything else.
The case where they don't do recording is usually resource related.
There are around 20,000 law enforcement agencies in the US. 80% of them have less than 25 full time employees 15% of those have 1 full time employee.
While most still do recording, it might only be for major felonies or whatever because they don't have the manpower to have handle recording 24/7.
Given that, you won't achieve 100% compliance without something drastic (for example, funding and paying for 24/7 video recording in every department). Even there, at best you'll just end up with only the cases where software/hardware went wrong.
Note that i have no love for police (actually, much the opposite), but i'm also realistic - i'm not sure it's easy to solve the problem of having tons of small, low-budget police departments, be required to record.
(the UK, by comparison, has 43 regional law enforcement forces, and is down to 300 police stations or something like this)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, because the problem did not abruptly vanish in 1966.
For example, Marty Tankleff, a then-teenager wrongfully convicted in 1990 for the murder of his parents. Even thought a defense lawyer arrived before Police lied to him that his father had named him as the attacker before falling unconscious, and even though a defense lawyer arrived before he could be tricked into signing a confession, the unsigned confession was still core to the prosecutions' case.
There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, police use civil forfeiture to steal more stuff than all criminals combined.
That wasn’t true in the 1990s.
I'm betting the police.
This falls under the "voluntariness requirement" as part of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Specifically, Rule 11(b)(2) requires that the court "address the defendant personally in open court and determine that the plea is voluntary and did not result from force, threats, or promises (other than promises in a plea agreement)."
The threat of 40 years of your life (basically a death sentence, you will probably die in that time, many you know and love will die in that time, you will not be able to restart any sort of life if you don't die) because you chose to exercise your right to trial instead of pleading guilty is not considered a threat, coercion, or cajoling by the United State Federal Justice system.
This voluntariness inquiry is a key part of what's known as the "Rule 11 colloquy" - the series of questions and statements that must occur between the judge and defendant before a guilty plea can be accepted.
Plea deals/plea bargaining was not legal at the start of the United States and was actually considered unconstitutional. The practice wasn't officially recognized by the Supreme Court as legitimate until 1970 in Brady v. United States on the grounds that not EVERY plea is coercion.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_11
https://naacp.org/resources/eliminating-illegal-practice-tri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jackson
Someone who is innocent may (unfortunately) find it their best course of action to take a plea deal and they shouldn't have to falsely admit their guilt to accept it. It's not perfect but it removes a lot of the coercive elements from the transaction.
I don't see how it removes in any way that the threat of imposition of the trial tax is a threat. If you can receive a 5 or 50 year sentence for the exact same crime, with the exact same circumstances other than taking a plea, the extra 45 years can not be considered anything but an explicit threat to take the plea. Or that pleas were considered unconstitutional at the founding of the US and only made legal in the 1960s.
The government only allows pleas for businesses that include a non admission of guilt. Admission of guilt is required as part of the Federal plea process, otherwise defendants could retain too many appeal rights (when you admit guilt from that point on you must prove a much higher 'actual innocence' legal standard on appeal and none of the easier standards like tainted evidence, corrupt officials, improper procedures can be applied to your case).
Maybe it's just me, but if I were falsely accused, I'd take a jury trial in a heartbeat over making a false confession. Just on principle alone. I understand why a guilty defendant might take a plea bargain, but it blows my mind that this works on some people who are innocent.
I'll tell you this... the judge could tell the jury to ignore it, or declare a mistrial, but if someone had offered me a plea bargain for something I was innocent of, I would tell the jury that I'd refused it. Whether that was stricken from the record or not, at that point you're a political prisoner and you've done all you honestly can.
If we were talking about something where I had actually broken a law, I'd expect to lose. But if it were truly a case of mistaken identity? I'd almost certainly defend myself and be confident no jury would convict me.
It's possible that a lot of people don't have sufficient skills to pore through legal books and case histories the way we pore through examples of massive SQL queries, but I'm sure I'd be up to it. And thus I would never concede to a plea bargain for something I hadn't done. Moreover, the whole concept of doing so is so anathema that I wouldn't care if it was a choice between admitting false guilt or execution (as it was in the show trials of the Soviet Union)... I would tell em to execute me. There are things I'm not willing to live with, like making a false confession, so you had better fuckin kill me.
You realize people that represent themselves are fools? Court isn't about smarts, it's about knowing how to play the game, your relationship with the judge, all kinds of factors. Heck if you word things just slightly wrong, you are hit and your winning argument is ignored. And a judge won't help you get to the correct wording.
I spoke about jury trials, not about court procedure.
Or you can explain that as 'this can sometimes happen'.
No. Not even close.
Instead, plea deals need to be made illegal. Prosecutors who use plea deals in more than 2% of their cases in a given calendar year should face loss of law license for life, and 10 years in prison. It should be aggressively enforced and a strict liability crime (no "I lost track" excuses).
DAs would no longer be able to prosecute as many cases if most had to be taken to trial, and they would be much less permissive of cops who were filing borderline horseshit, who were refusing to use their discretion. Legislators would be less able to keep bad laws on the books, were it not for pervasive plea bargaining.
In my own county, I heard with my own ears the DA bragging about how they do about 4000 cases per year, but take fewer than 30 to trial. Changing the ritual words that need to be spoken isn't a solution to anything.
That's the whole reason that the entire plea system is in place. Trials are so expensive and justice system is so inefficiently organized that everything would go to a standstill without the pleas. You'd have to first modernize justice system to work in more European way before you can abolish pleas.
Real bastion of freedom, the United States.
Plea deals hold their extortive power through the fact that it's often the only way people can get out of jail pre-trial when they can't afford excessive bail. But rather than doing bail reform which would fix that problem, we have the left getting rid of bail entirely in situations where it is inappropriate to do so. This means violent criminals can wreak more mayhem while released awaiting trial so that the right can complain about it and we'll swing right back to excessive bail.
The bail bondsman industry is basically this gigantic leach sucking bail money out of our country, but it has lobbyists and can't be banned outright. Bail is not supposed to be a pre-conviction fine, but when you have to go to a bail bondsman you don't get your bail money back even if you show for trial. If you could pony up the cash in its entirety, it's just "held", and you get it if you show for trial. Even if convicted, you get it back (it's not a fine).
Making bail bonding illegal would be a good start to fixing the problem, but it's politically unviable. Attack plea bargains first, DAs and prosecutors can't put up the same kind of political fight that the bonding industry can.
Your dumb rhetoric makes the problem worse, because everyone can tell it's made up horseshit and if you're lying about the details they figure you're lying about the problem too.
But trials are the point. If you're not doing trials, what the fuck are you even doing? If you can only afford so many trials, then only make that many indictments, and make sure you're only indicting the ones that matter. If somehow, you still need to do more, well then this will force the public and the government to spend the money to scale up the justice system so you can do more trials.
They don't want that to happen though, because if most of these plea deals went to trial, the public would discover just how much horseshit the charges were in the first place. They don't want it, because if they went to trial we'd see so much jury nullification it would all be for nought.
> ou'd have to first modernize justice system to work in more European way
There's nothing about the European way that much impresses me. One wonders what you see in it... is it that you see the results and mistake those for a product of the system, when they're just in large part a product of a different people/culture that can't be transferred to the US no matter how much you wish it so?
It's more about what I don't see. Plea deals, bail bonds industry, treating extorted confession as a solid proof, prison sentences to add up to more than a reasonable expected lifespan, discovering truth not being a goal of the trial, electability of judges, being judged by unprepared impressionable idiots aka jury. The whole thing is a sinister theatre that tries to keep the form of wild times when people didn't know any better while introducing so many ways for the parties to suck money out of the process at expense of the accuser, accused and the taxpayer. No justice system is perfect but US (and UK) one is so far that it's grotesque.
If a company representative lies and tells me the product comes with a ten year warranty when in fact it's only five years, that's fraud. You'd figure a lie with bigger consequences (jail, etc.) would be considered worse than fraud, but surprisingly not.
Identify yourself when asked, ask for a lawyer, then shut up.
If communicating something to the police might be helpful for you, do that through your lawyer.
"You can beat the charges but you can't beat the ride"
There's a whole host of new potential investigative technology that may be right around the corner:
- memory extraction
- DNA to photograph / phenotype
- photograph to DNA
- environmental DNA recovery from exhalation, etc.
it's not even clear why you would want to anyways. Human recall is notoriously terrible.
That said, directly reading memories is unlikely to be necessary. In Daniel Suarez's Daemon/Freedom™, he proposes using fMRI and increasingly narrow questions to extract truthful information. The blood flow in our brains changes when we lie, and is much easier and faster to detect.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216184729/http://newscenter...
Except when we're innocent and anxious, or sociopathic and calm. or misguided and/or dellusional and believe our lies as truth.
In other words, the same pseudoscience as good old "lie detectors".
USG still uses that pseudoscientific nonsense in its security clearance process. They could save a whole lot of money by buying e-meters from the Church of Scientology, and achieve the same result.
Perfect way for the powerful to completely control the population as slaves.
If they can have total access to your every thought, they might as well stop the charade of treating you like a free person.
And then police will stop you for a busted taillight and extract the memory of 76 counts of jaywalking.
But when Jeffrey Epstein v2.0 is caught, the scanner will mysteriously malfunction and he will also die in his cell, just like the V1.0 did.
Just like the current spying and tracking apparatus - great at finding blackmail and dirt on a random citizen, but it will never finding any evidence to convict a CEO, and never find who stole your bicycle in the hood.
The Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, has ruled that you cannot exercise your right to remain silent by merely remaining silent, and that the Prosecution can say things like "you didn't have an answer when asked questions".
To exercise your right to remain silent, the Court says, you must say "I am exercising my right to remain silent".
And don't say "I want a lawyer, dawg", or else the police will say they were unable to find you a canine who had passed the bar, and thus your request for counsel was not a serious one and that they are free to continue your interrogation... and the Court (in this case, the Louisiana Supreme Court) will say that that was a perfectly reasonable interpretation of your request.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for...
Better, maybe: never concede. And if it goes beyond the sundry, call counsel. (If you don’t have counsel, weigh being technically correct and massively inconvenienced against being pleasant but subordinate.)
TL; DR If they’re asking about felonies, shut up. If they’re telling you off for a tail light, ehhh!
Why? I say this as someone with personal counsel on retainer, and who has been pulled over but not gotten a ticket in a decade. I’m legally conservative but also practical.
Most people don’t have the time to be arraigned every time they might have gone five over. “Never talk to the police” means every random stop turns into interrogation. That simply isn’t the baseline risk for most of us.
I believe your advice is bad because it's being given to a wide audience that very likely doesn't know better.
But I would live through that everyday of my life if I knew I would never have to get to the sometimes next chapter of this kind of thing: jail in a small Texas town. There I learned about both physical and psychological torture. But its too much to get into.
And yes I tried to fight the most egregious event of torture, spent alot of time talking to lawyer, explaining what happened to me. My stop was unlawful even in that case. But I came in with a some fancy Austin lawyer to Brownwood, TX and they all but laughed us out of the courtroom.
And even after all that, don't even get me started on how they extract your money and sanity for years and years if your lucky like me to get probation for an eighth oz of mushrooms. I was a special case because I ended up going to grad school and it was easy for me to work the weekends to make the money I needed to pay them that wasnt covered by my stipend. I am also so grateful I kept a spreadsheet of my payments to them, it truly truly saved me from more years and money. They are really good with all their paperwork, except for anything to do with paying them money.
But very important to realize in all this: this is not at all exceptional, and I am a card-carrying privileged white man. This is just how it is.
Can you expand on this?
I was pulled over because I passed an officer going the speed limit of 65-70mph. He was stopped on the other side of the road, I passed at that speed, and he immediately started to pull me over because he said he "didn't think my seatbelt was on". My lawyer made a very good case that it would be somewhat impossible for him to see one way or another, using pictures of where I passed, as well the model of my car.
Because it wasn't a trial, there was no jury, it was just the judge's call. I remember feeling so hopeful after we went to court because our argument seemed good and we barely heard anything from the DA to counter it. But it was still denied. My lawyer really wanted to go to trial after that, but I was too scared at that point.
In the USA you might be able to get the statements thrown out afterwards, but as long as the police didn't actually commit any violence then they are likely to get promoted.
And you have to be pragmatic; you might be able to get the charges thrown out, but you could easily spend a decade or more in pretrial detention to do it.
Don’t do this. If the charges are serious, if the motivation is so serious they’ll use illegal violence, say nothing. Demand a lawyer.
Where I disagree with this is in super minor cases. I took a left without indicating, once, and got pulled over by the town pub. I figured they were looking for drunks, so I co-operated; the worst I was admitting to was a traffic ticket.
If they are threatening violence, you can be sure your demands for a lawyer are going to go unheard.
I've run into a lot of people who have heard that advice and take it very literally, to the point that when I've asked them what they would do if an officer responding to an explosion and fire at their workplace asked the people who got out if they knew of anyone still in the building said that they would not answer without getting a lawyer first.
Law enforcement has become more and more hostile towards citizens with time, not less. Wariness is the only way to navigate it, unfortunately.
In the case of the fire I wouldn't say anything except "Little Timmy is still inside, on the second floor". Do not discuss how the fire started or anything like that.
Imagine a prosecutor, or a juror during deliberations: "He lied to police about not owning a gun, and he lied with a fake alibi about being somewhere else at the time. Those aren't the actions of an innocent bystander."
In practice, police will gladly make your life hell by charging you with obstruction of justice or a vague charge like disturbing the peace and let you sit in jail for a weekend until they drop the charges. There are countless ways in which they can mess with you, and they are legally unaccountable 99% of the time.
Better advice is simply do not engage with police, and know your rights.
Lying to a suspect under explicit custody, e.g. “your buddy in the next room confessed” is fine. Policing stops working when we pedantically construct it, which leads to a predictable backlash that stifles civil liberties—hard to be free if you’re dead. (And I’m assuming we don’t provide paper rights. If a Harvey Weinstein can raise reasonable suspicion someone was untruthful, he’s off.)
I'm very confused by your statements.
Various legitimate interrogation techniques rely on bluffing, e.g. exploiting the prisoner’s dilemma. In other cases, the cop may say something they thought was true but isn’t. Disentangling this admits the Fifth Amendment heavily tilts the table for the suspect.
> Alternate reading is that the cops can kill you?
Murder, in general, is illegal. Lying, in general, is not.
It’s the difference between saying ‘I’ve got the best car ever, it’s amazing!’, and ‘my car has a V8’ when it does not.
Sure. They’re not. They’re lying to get coöperation from criminal suspects for no financial gain. Similar but categorically different.
Should our diplomats be required to divulge state secrets if asked nicely? Even acknowledge them? This is HN—we’ve been proximate to or even held power, corporate potentially state. Policing is adversarial. No lying outside arrest, sure, but once in custody, the cops should be allowed to lie but not materially mislead you in respect of your rights. Anything else doesn’t work to the point that it gets replaced with popular backing.
Why is that legitimate?
I’m all ears!
He's saying that if police doesn't have some flexibility (like using such tricks to get a suspect to confess), criminals end up getting to roam free, and this, all other things being equal, ends in a way worse society than one where police is allowed to cheat suspects.
It’s better to invoke the fifth to state you don’t answer questions without legal representation.
The power dynamic is not even.
Apparently police are allowed some threshold of deception (e.g. can outright lie but can't pretend to be your lawyer) but since 99% of people don't know this it really undermines the purpose.
Like if the police can lie, but tell you that you get an attorney, how is a client supposed to know that your lawyer can't lie to you too?
If not, you have to assume the public defender is at least friends with the police and therefore may not have your best interests in mind. That system is fucked, but I'm not sure I know a solution for folks who can't afford representation. Thoughts?
What? Police fucking hate public defenders as a general rule. Like sure, a police officer might be familiar with a public defender who frequently works cases brought by that officer’s precinct. But it’s perfectly clear to both of them that they work in opposition. Absent a few extremely rural and/or corrupt cases I do not believe this friendship is often the case.
I've known multiple attorneys in the public defenders office in three different courts. One rural, two very urban. They absolutely had relationships with both street officers and leadership in the precincts of the city and town.
Perhaps by educating themselves before they become a "client"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Riley_Fox
This is the Illinois statute that prevents deception of minors, but not yet adults: 725 ILCS 5/103-2.1. This provision, effective January 1, 2022, renders any confession from a minor inadmissible in court if obtained through deception by law enforcement.
I had the opposite experience. They kept promising me I wouldn’t be arrested if I answered the questions and approved their searches, I did everything they wanted, nothing suggested any guilt, and then they arrested me anyways for 5 days before putting an ankle bracelet on me. I’m sure my case wouldn’t be included but they shouldn’t be able to lie about things or the process.
Everything I read about the police in the US suggests to me that they are an array of paramilitary thugs that are supported by the courts, so not suprised they do this.
Curious if these tricks are allowed in the civilised world too?
[1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stpo/englisch_st...
Separately I think that it is ridiculous that LE is allowed to lie to you but that it is a crime to lie to federal investigators- they get people on that when they can’t get them on anything else, eg Martha Stewart.
You can’t cut that time down across the board, it produces results. (Obviously it has drawbacks and it’s often not the right results.)
And it puts sunshine all over police interrogation practices- if they are acting professionally then that will show through, but if they are abusing someone that will become visible as well.
So whether you're guilty or not doesn't even matter. But just out of curiosity, did you do it?
The only way these abuses of power end is if we hold these thugs accountable.
Sometimes - when there are tens of millions of people in the street - it starts to feel like it's within our lifetime. But even if it's not, we all recognize that, in like 10,000 years, there's no chance that society will remain sufficiently centralized that such a thing can persist... yeah?
So, can we just frontload this stuff right now? Make it simple:
* Everybody has the exact same responsibility to enforce the law, and the same (if any) protections attached to that responsibility * Everybody has the exact same rights to own and possess weapons
Then, sure, if the states still wants to pay some people to professionally engage with this responsibility, that's fine. But there's no reason on earth that they need to continue to be a special class of people with special rights. That part can end _today_ and literally nobody will suffer.
> we all recognize that
It isn't obvious to me; I don't recognize that.
Not nearly everyone can properly conduct an investigation. And if a loner, without family or close friends, is murdered, noone will even attempt investigating. If there's a feared gang in your town commiting crimes, everyone would be too afraid to try to convict them. We would quickly get crime-run cities and local warlords.
We need professionals who can properly investigate and who are willing to risk going up against a group of dangerous criminals.
The police is necessary.
Investigations have been happening for thousands of years in the western common-law tradition via constabularies and courts. These have been in the hands of police for only the past 200 or so.
So, just so I understand: you think that the police experiment is still going to be going on in 10,000 years?
English is not my first language; is a constabulary not a police?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but I consider any armed unit that works for the government and is paid to enforce law by arresting people (and other things), to be "police".
Such units have existed for much longer than 200 years. But perhaps you use a different definition for the term?
Anyway, my point is that if there is a building with 10 armed gang members, no normal person would go in there to arrest them. That'd be suicide.
You need some organized group with special training (and ideally superior weapons) to do anything about this gang.
And that group is the police.
If you were relying on random individuals voluntarily (and without pay) doing the enforcement, a gang would only need to be sufficiently feared, so that noone ever dares touch them.
You'd have gangs killing people as brutally as possible, to make others afraid to go against them.
You can see this exact thing happening in some countries today, and it's horrible.
Yes, I do think the police "experiment" will continue.
(For the next 10000 years? Probably not. I don't think real AGI will happen in our lifetime, but I do think it will hapen within the next 10000 years. And it will change society in ways I cannot predict.)
Totally understandable - English _is_ my first language, and the terminology is a clusterfuck to the point where nobody can clearly talk about it (which at times has seemed intentional, with terminology used in legislation on this topic, etc).
But I think when most people describe the different modalities of law enforcement, in terms of western common-law they mean:
* Watch is unranked, unarmed, discretionary, no special arrest power, volunteer, reporting to a public house or meeting of some kind
* Constabulary is unranked, sometimes armed, non-discretionary, no special arrest power, professional, reporting to the executive branch
* Police are ranked, discretionary, professional, armed, have special arrest power, reporting to the executive <=- in the USA, these began as, and were for a time called, "slave patrols"
* Sheriff are unranked, non-discretionary, professional, armed, have special arrest power (but relating only to court matters such as arresting a fugitive), directly elected but reporting to the judiciary
(when I saw "unarmed", I include what is sometimes called "privately armed", meaning that participants may carry privately-owned arms)
These terms have became all muddled, though. Particularly, police and sheriff have become nearly indistinguishable in terms of the function in US society.
> If you were relying on random individuals voluntarily (and without pay) doing the enforcement, a gang would only need to be sufficiently feared, so that noone ever dares touch them.
It seems to me that every place in the world where this configuration exists, there _are_ police. And the police are either paid off, or they are themselves the gang that is universally feared.
And again, it's possible to have a constabulary that is paid, but which does not have special powers (ie, can only arrest people using ordinary citizens arrests) and which is privately armed.
> Such units have existed for much longer than 200 years. But perhaps you use a different definition for the term?
For the vast majority of documented history of common-law, law enforcement in the general civilian public has been the purview of private groups and not the state.
Police, as they are today, meaning:
* Ranked and compelled to follow orders from superior officers * Armed by the state * Paid by the state * Given lawful authority to make arrests in situations where other citizens aren't * Given protections or exemptions from criminal and/or civil laws for activities during the course of their duties * Staffed by civilians (eg, not subject to a code of military justice or to judgment by a court marshal)
...is not a long-standing institution in the western-common law tradition. Nor is the use of the word "politic" or "police" to describe such a force. The earliest police forces in the US today were slave patrols, which adopted different terminology after the 13th amendment, but whose mission and powers remained fairly consistent (be reminded that slavery did not end with the 13th amendment, as it was - and is - still a legal criminal sentence).
Many places in the world still don't have forces that meet all of these criteria, even though they may borrow the word "police".
Example: if I was caught drunk driving and blew a 0.15, my lawyer shouldn't be able to say "How do you know my client didn't just use mouthwash? Mouthwash has a level of alcohol in it." If they know that's not what happened, it shouldn't be legal to plant in the mind of a jury or judge. Rather they could say factually, "How accurate are these breath tests?" or "Are you sure you administered the test correctly?" to the officer being witnessed.
Of course, not all lawyers live up to their ethical obligations and if the only evidence of an ethical lapse is protected by attorney-client privilege, it's unlikely that they would ever get caught.
If the officer doesn't have a good answer to the question, then there exists reasonable doubt, whether or not the defense attorney knows that their client was, in fact, drunk.
The standard of proof isn't "beyond the doubt of my own lawyer", the standard of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt". The entire job of a defense attorney is to cast reasonable doubt on the prosecution's evidence. If there's a reasonable explanation for the prosecution's evidence that doesn't involve the defendant being guilty, that's a reasonable doubt. Whether the defense attorney knows the doubt isn't true in this case is irrelevant to the question of whether it's a reasonable doubt.
Our system is designed to try to avoid putting innocent people in jail even if that means failing to convict some guilty people. It's already imperfect at that goal. We already convict the innocent. OP's proposal would tie defense attorneys' hands in ways that would lead to even more innocent people in prison.
See the OJ criminal vs civil trial.
In the criminal trial the lawyers spent days bringing up every time the LA lab mishandled evidence. The LA police lab didn't handle the evidence in the OJ case. In the civil trial they weren't allowed to bring any of that up.
Seems like just applying honest common sense and intelligent reasoning solves this, and I thought that was the judge's job. Maybe judges are the problem for not seeing through the bullshit.
Some potential tips are to stay calm while asserting your rights and ask for a lawyer. Record anything you can, even leaving an open 911 call if you feel your safety is in jeopardy. Ask for a supervisor. If you're being forced and physically threatened to comply with something like an unlawful search, say you only consent under protest (recording needed).
Police aren't empowered to make plea deals and they shouldn't imply or outright say that they can.
Ironically, I would record phonecalls and it saved my butt when dealing with a scammy company.
You could do it on an old android phones but now neither Android nor iPhones allow this.
Recording police during official interactions with yourself has generally been upheld.
IANAL, but I think in CA, despite being 2-party consent, when the other party tells you they're recording the call you're allowed to also record without additional consent, but I do make sure to ask anyway, and everybody is always fine with it.