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samtheflamingomain · 4 years

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false crime

This has been bothering me ever since I got into the True Crime genre and I think I just understood why. I’m very, very much of the mindset that “if there are 10 bad cops and 1000 good cops, there are 1010 bad cops.”

But then I watch a 4 hour interrogation of a child rapist and I see what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, “good, honest police work”. Obviously I know that these exact same techniques are, daily, used to corner vulnerable people into giving false confessions.

So, knowing that lying is an inherent part of the job of nailing the really sick fucks, I’ve realized that every time a cop lies, I automatically try to categorize the lie.

Omitting the illegal (denying a right to silence or attorney), I’ve found a few different types of lies: “Totally fine” (something like “I don’t think you’re a monster” to a child rapist to get them to talk), “Iffy but I’ll give it a pass”, “too far”, and “only in this exact scenario and with perfect hindsight” - and it’s really only this last category that I have trouble with. Let’s quickly go through the others. “Iffy” can be something as simple as “another witness said X happened” when they didn’t, or as complex as the simple-SOUNDING, “I can help you if you talk” - that’s illegal in the States, but not in Canada.

I was watching a documentary yesterday that was interrogation-focused. I knew at one point the officer was straight up lying, and in a way I deemed, in my mind, “too far”. He lied about jurisprudence and how court proceedings work.

I’ve seen them lie to a guy about “well your hair was at the scene” and it wasn’t, but I tend to see that as actually LESS morally ambiguous, because either the guy’s guilty and the REAL evidence will show that, or he’s innocent, and being told “your hair was in a place that it’s physically impossible to be” would stir a strong denial, not “Uhh I dunno what to tell you....”

See, when cops lie about things like procedure and what their rights are? That can, and absolutely does, lead to false convictions. Google “I think I want a lawyer, dawg”. A man said that and cops decided that was him saying that he literally “wants a lawyer DOG”. Technically not what I’m talking about, but along the same lines as lying.

But then, today I saw the documentary that made me pause and say to myself, “is my love for watching criminals get what they deserve (true crime) truly irreconcilable with the fact that I think cops are largely trash?” Here’s how it went.

“Jennifer’s Solution” - basically Jennifer Pan’s entire 11-hour police interview is played. She literally resides in the women’s prison in my hometown. I live closer to her than to my best friend - but I’d never heard of the case at the time.

At one point, the interrogating officer informs Pan that there exists something I’ll call “thermal spying”. This is what he says, almost verbatim: “Y’know, we... we have the ability, y’know, from an aerial satellite (?), to scan for heat, for human bodies, in a house. And we can... go back to that night (??) and see, y’know, if the bodies are in, y’know, certain positions, at, at certain times.” He basically says that, according to this “technology”, the story she told about how exactly a “home robbery gone wrong” wasn’t adding up.

This, to me, is in that last category. In my mind, to say something so blatantly ridiculous, something that can make or break their entire story, only works if the officer already knows with 100% certainty that Pan is guilty of murder.

Like, if you were a serial killer writing to the cops asking if floppy disks can be traced, they say “no”, and you’re a big enough idiot to believe that and send them one, that’s on you. And that exact scenario is on a man called Dennis Rader.

But after 11 hours, if I was a bit more naiive, I’d probably believe something along those lines. It doesn’t sound completely impossible. And if you believe that and it leads to a confession (which wasn’t entirely truly the case for Pan; she was already in it pretty deep by this point), that, I believe, is miscarriage of justice. Who knows how many times that exact cop told suspects of this magical technology and got confessions from innocent people who thought cops had cornered them somehow, when they actually didn’t know dick?

I eventually decided that, because there as a shitload of other evidence and there’s no way she wasn’t going to jail that day, honestly, no harm was done to the justice system in that exact scenario only. Basically, “this person is definitely guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, AND, the lie didn’t end up being the pivotal piece of evidence against her”.

And I called it a day, said I can live with that, and just like that, almost instantly, the nagging feeling of “ACAB, how dare you praise the man that single-handedly spent 8h in a room with this child rapist, knows they’re guilty, and sets them up for the inevitable consequences of their actions with raw intelligence, stamina and skill?” With some huge caveats, that’s how.

Honestly, it’s not a great answer, but like most aspects of the law, very rarely do we get black or white instead of grey. So, for now, it’s the one I’m going with.

Stay Greater.

#sam #cops #police #crime #true crime

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