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Comment by deweywsu | Hacker News Reader

How about expanding the law such that the police can't lie to ANYONE?

If people understood how the legal system worked this would largely be irrelevant.

People think police are judges or prosecutors and (falsely) trust what they say accordingly. The police are evidence collectors for the prosecution, who presents evidence to a judge. Police are the lowest men on the legal totem pole and have little power in deciding the outcome of your case.

That alone should be enough to make you never trust whatever they promise, because really they cannot promise anything.

A criminal investigation certainly requires at least lies of omission.

I think they shouldn’t be allowed to lie about the law, but anything else is needlessly handicapping them.

"Better for 10 criminals to go free than 1 innocent man suffer."

For better or worse we're heading into a world with cameras everywhere. We can do better than 1:10.

to be more precise, we're heading into a world where the radio signals blanketing our planet will be leveraged as a realtime omniscient surveillance field. [1][2]

i sound like a conspiracy nut every time i bring this up, but wireless-networks-as-a-sensor seems unavoidable. there simply is no way to keep improving wireless transmitters without also increasing their environmental awareness and therefore leaking data about physical spaces. even simpler networks like wifi will dynamically adapt channels, frequencies to optimize speeds and it turns out you can extrapolate a lot from that [3]. advanced networks with features like beamforming are even more responsive to their environment and therefore more leaky. we're making accidental cameras, and they can see through walls.

it seems like this is going to be a "feature" of 6G mobile networks. read up on "joint communications and sensing" to find research in this area. (it's not just nokia.)

[1] https://www.nokia.com/blog/building-a-network-with-a-sixth-s...

[2] https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-visi...

[3] https://news.ucsb.edu/2023/021198/wifi-can-read-through-wall...

Yeah we abandoned that a long time ago. Now we're at the corner of "Hide behind civilians, shoot the kidnappers, the hostage and a couple innocent bystanders then suppress the report about the incident for 5 years." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Miramar_shootout) and "order the victim to approach you, shoot her, lie to the media to say that she was wearing combat fatigues and had a gun, then suppress video of the incident for two years" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Savannah_Graziano).

Lying police do more harm than good.

False confessions don’t just send innocent people to prison, they also close cases without finding the actual culprits.

Remember the police are incentivized to catch people, not catch guilty people. So the easiest way for them to game the system isn’t in society’s best interest.

why?

Why not?

If I were at risk of being murdered, and only a cop lying could stop it, I'd want the cop to lie. Even to kids!

Let's say you’re being held hostage by a dangerous armed criminal who has already harmed others and is threatening to kill you. The police arrive, and the criminal demands to know if there are snipers positioned outside. If the cop truthfully says “Yes,” the criminal might panic and shoot you immediately. Instead, the cop lies and says, “No, it’s just us talking, let’s work this out,” buying time for a sniper to take the criminal down and save your life.

I'm sure we can make a framework around when they can lie. They can not lie to obtain facts or information while investigating. Doing so should poison what they gain and anything found afterwards.

Why?

There are lies that don‘t poison anything.

For instance police lies in an online chat to be a 12 year old girl to catch a child predator.

That's an easy situation to deal with. Have someone who isn't an officer sit at the computer and pretend they are a 12 year old girl to catch a child predator and turn the evidence over to the non-lying police.

The same trick can than be used in an interrogation.

That’s still lying police just with extra steps.

> should poison what they gain and anything found afterwards.

That's a more expansive proposal than the law being discussed. The law is narrower than "investigating" and is focused only on interrogating a suspect, so presumably post-Miranda warning. And in this context being a "suspect" is a specific category elevated from being a witness or person of interest. And then the only penalty in the law is making a confession obtained as the result of a lie to a suspect during an interrogation inadmissable.

Those differences address the concerns mentioned downthread with lying in the context of undercover work.

Frankly the nickle-and-diming of when Miranda does and does not apply is itself an issue: "Oh, no, you're not under arrest, you're just being detained indefinitely," "Hahaha a dog practicing law? What an idiot, continue the interrogation," and "Your honor, the suspect failed to verbally affirm his right to remain silent; instead simply not speaking, so we were under no obligation to cease attempting to interrogate him" are all arguments that the Supreme Court has, in its infinite wisdom, seen fit to uphold as not violating Miranda.

That's not what anyone means when they talk about cops lying though.

Cops can lie to suspects during questioning. They can say "your friend already confessed" or "we just got a call from the lab, your DNA matches" or "you're getting the death penalty unless you confess right now". As well as bullshit like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Big_(police_procedure) (in some jurisdictions).

I'm fine with undercover cops lying about whether or not they're wearing a wire, or your scenario. I'm not so keen on uniformed cops lying to elicit confessions.

I agree lying to get a confession is like torture to get information. In most cases, the information you get (and the confession) is bullshit.

If you prohibit all lies you also prohibit the good lies

How about not actively providing false information, but being allowed to respond with wrong information?

It's interesting to see who immediately jumps to a hypothetical involving the police protecting them from a crime, versus those who immediately jump to a hypothetical where they're being protected from police.

This may be irrational, but I'm more worried about being falsely imprisoned by legal means than I am about being murdered by illegal means.

So what you're saying is "If you want to make an omelette, you've gotta break some eggs"?

>If I were at risk of being murdered,

That's called "exigent circumstances", and a lot of rights are normally thrown out the window if that's the case - police don't need a warrant if threat of bodily harm to themselves or others is on the table.

And that isn't what most lying cops do is about - most of the time it is bad for the public.

So pretending to be a 12 year old girl to catch a child predator is illegal then?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment

>Contrary to popular belief, the United States does not require police officers to identify themselves as police in the case of a sting or other undercover work, and police officers may lie when engaged in such work. The law of entrapment instead focuses on whether people were enticed to commit crimes they would not have otherwise considered in the normal course of events.

--your source

Not as straightforward as you're implying.

Now tell my how pretending to be a 12 year old girl forces somebody to commit a crime?

Forcing somebody isn’t entrapment. Entrapment is providing opportunity to encourage someone to commit a crime that they might otherwise have not committed.

Then tell my how pretending to be a 12 year old girl encourages somebody to commit a crime?

This law is about lying during interrogation. When a police officer is wearing the uniform, asking questions, acting in their capacity as a protector of the public, I think directly lying to your face should be a crime. Their authority as an officer is the very thing they are using to get you to believe their lie. That is a critical piece.

A detective doing undercover work may require a degree of duplicity to achieve their aim, their authority as an officer is not what gets you to believe their lie, they almost always conceal that fact from you.

I think these are clearly distinct arenas of law enforcement.

Parents comment says to anyone that includes people outside an interrogation

Do you think that a person wearing a police uniform (that every person has an obligation to obey so long as they make a lawful order), can also, in the performance on that same duty, lie directly to a member of the public?

Depends on the reason

As the law stands, they are allowed to lie as much as they want when in uniform, in public, and anything you say or do in response can be held against you in court. The proposed Virginia law forbids that in the case of children who are interrogated.

Fun fact, that is already illegal. Perverted justice was an entirely civilian organization.

reading some of the criticisms of their former behavior does highlight pretty strongly why exactly that kinda thing is problematic.

there was a dude who the police told they had footage of him committing CSA. It was a lie but he trusted them, so he genuinely believed he was losing his mind as he never contemplated that law enforcement would lie. They arrested, charged and sentenced him, despite the fact he never did.

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