Pubdate: Sun, 03 Feb 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Michelle Alexander
Note: Michelle Alexander is the author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass 
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

WHY POLICE LIE UNDER OATH

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 naive," 
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.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom