[Peace-discuss] Fw: [police oversight] NY Times: Why Police Lie Under Oath and Letters

[LAURIE SOLOMON]

From: Barbara Attard 
Sent: February 13, 2013 11:37 AM
To: policeoversight at yahoogroups.com 
Subject: [police oversight] NY Times: Why Police Lie Under Oath and Letters

  

OPINION Why Police Lie Under Oath

By MICHELLE ALEXANDER

Published: February 2, 2013 New York Times

THOUSANDS of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States
because they know that the odds of a jury’s believing their word over a
police officer’s are slim to none. As a juror, whom are you likely to
believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed
police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth,
the whole truth and nothing but? As one of my colleagues recently put it,
“Everyone knows you have to be crazy to accuse the police of lying.” 

But are police officers necessarily more trustworthy than alleged criminals?
I think not. Not just because the police have a special inclination toward
confabulation, but because, disturbingly, they have an incentive to lie. In
this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more
than any other witness, perhaps less so. 

That may sound harsh, but numerous law enforcement officials have put the
matter more bluntly. Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police
commissioner, wrote an article in The San Francisco Chronicle decrying a
police culture that treats lying as the norm: “Police officer perjury in
court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty
little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover
narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the
American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is
the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.” 

The New York City Police Department is not exempt from this critique. In
2011, hundreds of drug cases were dismissed after several police officers
were accused of mishandling evidence. That year, Justice Gustin L. Reichbach
of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn condemned a widespread culture of
lying and corruption in the department’s drug enforcement units. “I thought
I was not naïve,” he said when announcing a guilty verdict involving a
police detective who had planted crack cocaine on a pair of suspects. “But
even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of
misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which
such conduct is employed.” 

Remarkably, New York City officers have been found to engage in patterns of
deceit in cases involving charges as minor as trespass. In September it was
reported that the Bronx district attorney’s office was so alarmed by police
lying that it decided to stop prosecuting people who were stopped and
arrested for trespassing at public housing projects, unless prosecutors
first interviewed the arresting officer to ensure the arrest was actually
warranted. Jeannette Rucker, the chief of arraignments for the Bronx
district attorney, explained in a letter that it had become apparent that
the police were arresting people even when there was convincing evidence
that they were innocent. To justify the arrests, Ms. Rucker claimed, police
officers provided false written statements, and in depositions, the
arresting officers gave false testimony. 

Mr. Keane, in his Chronicle article, offered two major reasons the police
lie so much. First, because they can. Police officers “know that in a
swearing match between a drug defendant and a police officer, the judge
always rules in favor of the officer.” At worst, the case will be dismissed,
but the officer is free to continue business as usual. Second, criminal
defendants are typically poor and uneducated, often belong to a racial
minority, and often have a criminal record. “Police know that no one cares
about these people,” Mr. Keane explained. 

All true, but there is more to the story than that. 

Police departments have been rewarded in recent years for the sheer numbers
of stops, searches and arrests. In the war on drugs, federal grant programs
like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program have
encouraged state and local law enforcement agencies to boost drug arrests in
order to compete for millions of dollars in funding. Agencies receive cash
rewards for arresting high numbers of people for drug offenses, no matter
how minor the offenses or how weak the evidence. Law enforcement has
increasingly become a numbers game. And as it has, police officers’ tendency
to regard procedural rules as optional and to lie and distort the facts has
grown as well. Numerous scandals involving police officers lying or planting
drugs — in Tulia, Tex. and Oakland, Calif., for example — have been linked
to federally funded drug task forces eager to keep the cash rolling in. 

THE pressure to boost arrest numbers is not limited to drug law enforcement.
Even where no clear financial incentives exist, the “get tough” movement has
warped police culture to such a degree that police chiefs and individual
officers feel pressured to meet stop-and-frisk or arrest quotas in order to
prove their “productivity.” 

For the record, the New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly,
denies that his department has arrest quotas. Such denials are mandatory,
given that quotas are illegal under state law. But as the Urban Justice
Center’s Police Reform Organizing Project has documented, numerous officers
have contradicted Mr. Kelly. In 2010, a New York City police officer named
Adil Polanco told a local ABC News reporter that “our primary job is not to
help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is
to get those numbers and come back with them.” He continued: “At the end of
the night you have to come back with something. You have to write somebody,
you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the
number’s there. So our choice is to come up with the number.” 

Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police
to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This
reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police
practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is
structured to reward dishonesty. But it’s also because police officers are
human. 

Research shows that ordinary human beings lie a lot — multiple times a day —
even when there’s no clear benefit to lying. Generally, humans lie about
relatively minor things like “I lost your phone number; that’s why I didn’t
call” or “No, really, you don’t look fat.” But humans can also be persuaded
to lie about far more important matters, especially if the lie will enhance
or protect their reputation or standing in a group. 

The natural tendency to lie makes quota systems and financial incentives
that reward the police for the sheer numbers of people stopped, frisked or
arrested especially dangerous. One lie can destroy a life, resulting in the
loss of employment, a prison term and relegation to permanent second-class
status. The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police
lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by
declarations of war, “get tough” mantras, and a seemingly insatiable
appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us. 

And, no, I’m not crazy for thinking so. 

Michelle Alexander is the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-un
der-oath.html?pagewanted=1>
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-und
er-oath.html?pagewanted=1

Police Dishonesty in the Courtroom

Published: February 10, 2013 

To the Editor: 

For Op-Ed, follow https://twitter.com/#%21/nytopinion> @nytopinion and to
hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow
https://twitter.com/#%21/andyrNYT> @andyrNYT.

Re “
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-un
der-oath.html> Why Police Lie Under Oath,” by Michelle Alexander (Sunday
Review, Feb. 3): 

Police lie under oath because they’re cynical. To posit that the average
police officer is motivated by some system of “rewards,” or to give credence
to the argument by a former San Francisco police commissioner, Peter Keane,
that police lie because they can, is simplistic at best. Police officers
also lie because they believe, albeit often wrongly, that they’re performing
a public service by ensuring that defendants are convicted. 

Ms. Alexander is correct that this is a problem. But to ignore the cynicism
created by a legal system, a government and a larger society (think of the
Wall Street scandals) where bad behavior is commonplace and very often goes
unpunished is to miss the point. And excoriating the police while ignoring
the rest is tantamount to treating the symptoms of a disease while
overlooking root causes. 

ANDY ROSENZWEIG
Newport, R.I., Feb. 3, 2013 

The writer is a retired New York Police Department lieutenant and a former
chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney. 

To the Editor: 

The tone of Michelle Alexander’s essay offers yet another example of how
American law enforcement and its academic critics keep talking past each
other, to their and society’s detriment. While there are far too many police
officers who are arrogantly convinced they can do no wrong, there are also
far too many pundits who believe the police can do no right. 

To give Professor Alexander her due, the enduring problem of police
corruption demands urgent attention through improved standards for hiring,
training, leadership and accountability. With that said, to argue as she
does that police witnesses might deserve less trust than others is not only
to impugn the integrity of the vast majority of officers, but also to be
blind to the uncomfortable reality that most people arrested for conspicuous
street crimes are so manifestly guilty that their actions need hardly be
embellished by police lies. 

JONATHAN M. WENDER
Seattle, Feb. 4, 2013 

The writer is a former police officer and a professor of sociology at the
University of Washington. 

To the Editor: 

Michelle Alexander suggests two explanations for why officers lie: because
they can, and to increase arrests. I would like to suggest a third. 

Our system openly embraces certain police lies, such as undercover lies and
lies to induce confessions. Given that officers also lie under oath, one has
to wonder: Does the acceptance of lying in the field have a spillover effect
into the courtroom? Can an officer who is trained to live an undercover lie
fairly be expected to turn off the duplicity spigot upon crossing the
threshold into the courtroom? 

While ending all investigative lies is probably an unrealistic goal, it may
be time to question our reflexive assumption that these lies are “good”
lies. If we can nudge the police toward a stronger culture of honesty in the
field, then perhaps we can better rely on them to maintain honesty in the
courtroom. 

DANIEL E. MONNAT
Wichita, Kan., Feb. 5, 2013 

The writer is a lawyer. 

To the Editor: 

For poor people of color trapped in the criminal justice system, the fact
that police lie is a self-evident truth. They do so routinely and with
impunity. 

Last fall, the criminal defense clinic at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
represented a young black man charged with possession of a knife (recovered
from his pants pocket) after he was searched by a police officer who swore —
under penalty of perjury — that the client was blocking the entrance to a
building in violation of a disorderly conduct statute. A video obtained from
an adjacent store revealed a very different reality — just a young kid
talking with friends, never blocking anyone’s way. 

Too often, though, without a video, our clients’ accounts of the lies told
by police fall on deaf ears. Prosecutors and judges engage in cognitive
dissonance — on the one hand understanding that police lie; on the other,
failing to address the issue in any meaningful way. 

Perhaps this is because our criminal justice system relies so heavily on the
assumption of police as truth tellers. Acknowledging the problem threatens
the very foundation of an already dysfunctional system. 

For those who have experienced the corrupting effect of police lies,
however, the question remains: what will it take to break a police practice
that leads to so much injustice? 

JENNIFER BLASSER
New York, Feb. 4, 2013 

The writer is a clinical assistant professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School
of Law. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/opinion/police-dishonesty-in-the-courtroo
m.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y>
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/opinion/police-dishonesty-in-the-courtroom
.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y 

Pictures deleted.

Barbara Attard
www.accountabilityassociates.org http://www.accountabilityassociates.org/> 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



__._,_.___Reply via web post  Reply to sender  Reply to group  Start a New Topic  Messages in this topic (1)  

Recent Activity: a.. New Members 1 
Visit Your Group 
NACOLE (National Association for Civilian Oversight of Police) 
 Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use • Send us Feedback .
 
__,_._,___
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20130213/ed8f7704/attachment-0001.html>