Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [68]
It’s easy to understand why you would do this, under the circumstances. It’s because you want to do your job. You know it’s illegal to plant evidence, but it seems so justifiable. The first time you do it, you tell yourself, “The guy is guilty!” This experience will make it easier for you to do the same thing again; in fact, you will be strongly motivated to repeat the behavior, because to do otherwise is to admit, if only to yourself, that it was wrong the first time you did it. Before long, you are breaking the rules in more ambiguous situations. Because police culture generally supports these justifications, it becomes even harder for an individual officer to resist breaking (or bending) the rules. Eventually, many cops will take the next steps, proselytizing other officers, persuading them to behave as they have, and shunning or sabotaging officers who do not go along. They are a reminder of the moral road not taken.
And, in fact, the 1992 Mollen Commission, reporting on patterns of corruption in the New York Police Department, concluded that the practice of police falsification of evidence is “so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: ‘testilying.’”21 In such police cultures, police routinely lie to justify searching anyone they suspect of having drugs or guns, swearing in court that they stopped a suspect because his car ran a red light, because they saw drugs changing hands, or because the suspect dropped the drugs as the officer approached, giving him probable cause to arrest and search the guy. Norm Stamper, a police officer for thirty-four years and former chief of the Seattle Police Department, has written that there isn’t a major police force in the country that has escaped the problem of officers who convert drugs to their own use, planting them on suspects or robbing and extorting pushers. 22 The most common justification for lying and planting evidence is that the end justifies the means. One officer told the Mollen Commission investigators that he was “doing God’s work.” Another said, “If we’re going to catch these guys, fuck the Constitution.” When one officer was arrested on charges of perjury, he asked in disbelief, “What’s wrong with that? They’re guilty.”23
What’s “wrong with that” is that there is nothing to prevent the police from planting evidence and committing perjury to convict someone they believe is guilty—someone who is innocent. Corrupt cops are certainly a danger to the public, but so are many of the well-intentioned ones who would never dream of railroading an innocent person into prison. In a sense, honest cops are even more dangerous than corrupt cops, because they are far more numerous and harder to detect. The problem is that once they have decided on a likely suspect, they don’t think it’s possible that he or she is innocent. And then they behave in ways to confirm that initial judgment, justifying the techniques they use in the belief that only guilty people will be vulnerable to them.
The Interrogators
The most powerful piece of evidence a detective can produce in an investigation is a confession, because it is the one thing most likely to convince a prosecutor, jury, and judge of a person’s guilt. Accordingly, police interrogators are trained to get it, even if that means lying to the suspect and using, as one detective proudly admitted to a reporter, “trickery and deceit.”24 Most people are surprised to learn that this is entirely legal. Detectives are proud of their ability to trick a suspect into confessing; it’s a mark of how well they have learned their trade. The greater their confidence, the greater the dissonance they will feel if confronted with evidence that they were wrong, and the greater the need to reject that evidence.
Inducing an innocent person to confess