By MICHELLE ALEXANDER
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.”
Wesley Allsbrook
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.