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Comment by tripleee | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see a problem with this assuming the deception is used to uncover crimes.

There is a general wisdom: if you invoke "the ends justify the means" you have crossed the border to the Dark Side.

I'm not going to explain my full understanding of this piece of wisdom, it would be a wall of text, I want just mention that this behavior is addictive: it is much easier to start justifying your means than to stop it. And over time those justifications become more and more flexible.

I'm ready to agree that there are situations in which ends justify the means, but if you are not aware of downsides in your particular case, and if it doesn't seem controversial to you, you are most likely mistaken and the ends do not justify the means.

Sometimes it's used to uncover crimes, but very often it's used to invent crimes that never actually happened, or used to deceive a courtroom when they don't actually have evidence.

It’s also a fairly traumatic thing to people through and I can imagine it does a lot of damage to people’s faith in law enforcement. Personal anecdote: when I was a teenager some cops gave me a list of fabricated evidence that I’d committed a crime, not intending to ever show a court; just trying to get me to confess. They said they’d go easy on me if I confessed but if I held out then they would petition the court to have me tried as an adult and sent to “big boy” prison. They also told me my parents were cooperating in the investigation and didn’t tell me. The whole ordeal basically made sure no one in my previously quite pro-cop family would ever trust an LEO again.

My first experience with the police was just as bad. A friend and I were waiting on the porch of another friend (all like 14 years old). We were waiting for him to come home. He knew we were there waiting for him.

His neighbors yelled something to us out of their window. We went to see what they wanted, but they didn't say anything when we got near.

We went back to the porch and waited for maybe 10-15 minutes, but decided to leave as we felt really weird about those neighbors. As we started walking, a police officer pulled up screaming at us, telling us we were under arrest for throwing rocks at the windows of those neighbors. The police officer took us to the police station, put handcuffs on us, as well as shackled our feet to the floor, where we remained for like 2 hours. He made us write a statement, and then told our parents to come get us.

It was truly the most confusing thing I ever experienced. Angers me a bit today thinking about it.

Feels like there needs to be some nuance here

Fabricating evidence in an interrogation to try to get a confession out of someone versus "I'm not a cop" when infiltrating a drug ring, or lying to hide important information

Lying about evidence specifically is illegal in a lot of countries (not the US)

So government officials can lie but citizens must tell the truth all the time? That is insane to me and I don't see how that does anything other than force people into perpetual criminality so that they could be arrested at any time. The average US citizen already commits 3 crimes a day because our justice system is so messed up.

> citizens must tell the truth all the time

That only applies to federal agents, at least. You can lie to local cops all you want. Though in both cases I think just keeping your trap shut is the better option.

> You can lie to local cops all you want.

The legality of that varies.

Yes, in Texas or Washington you can be charged with a misdemeanor for lying to a cop in an investigation. In Georgia, that could be a felony. That's the closest equivalent to the federal statute (also a felony).

But in general, lying to a local cop is significantly less likely to get you in trouble. The risks are so much higher with a federal agent that I'd strongly consider just staying silent rather than risk talking myself into a problem. The feds are fond of using it as their charge of choice when nothing else will stick.

The government can throw people in jail too but if you kidnap someone and lock them in your basement that's a crime. This is no different.

If that is the case, it should still be prosecuted to find out whether the deception was used to "uncover crime" or a crime in itself. Just because we're okay with cops carrying guns and assume they'll only shoot the "bad guys", that still doesn't mean they can escape accountability and should not be held to objective standards. It would ridiculous to just use a "trust me bro" framework for this and hope for the best.

Will the problem is that we’ve seen it’s not only used to uncover crimes.

There’s plenty of empirical evidence of cops lying to lock up innocent people.

One truly absurd case was lying to convince a man he killed his father, and extracted a murder confession for a victim who they knew wasn’t dead.

https://people.com/thomas-perez-jr-murder-interrogation-1186...

> There’s plenty of empirical evidence of cops lying to lock up innocent people.

And the solution is to correctly prosecute and punish them. A cop is sworn, and we should hold them to a higher standard not a lower one. But changing the underlying rules just because some cops are bad isn't necessarily an improvement.

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