“Why Police Lie Under Oath” and deeper challenges involving criminal justice metrics

February 3, 2013

The title of this post is the partially drawn from the headline of this opinion piece in today’s New York Times, which was authored by my Ohio State College of Law colleague Michelle Alexander. Here is how it starts:

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.”

Though focused on police practices, this piece goes on to touch upon the broader systemic problems that can result from “get tough” metrics (much too?) often being used by police and prosecutors and rewarded by legislatures:

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 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.

As regular readers likely realize, I am a big fan of data and metrics in the operation of modern criminal justice systems (which is, surely, a by-product of the fact that I am much more drawn to consequentialist rather than retributivist theories of punishment). Thus, as a general matter, I am not opposed to the reality that law enforcement, as well as other parts of our modern criminal justice system, “has increasingly become a numbers game.” But, as this opinion piece highlights, we need to be conscious and cautious about whether the metrics were are using are the right ones and about whether these metrics may be harmfully distorting the ways in which various criminal justice actors go about doing their jobs.

I have been giving extra thought to these issues lately in part because of this recent post noting a prosecutor taking with pride about extra long federal sentences and this recent post about the US Sentencing Commission’s new Booker report noting that the number of federal offenders has substantially increased in recent years. But all sort of other major criminal justice issues and debates can (and should) turn on debates over metrics. For example, does more guns, as some contend, really result in less crime? And what will and should be the metrics used to judge the success or failings of modern marijuana reform efforts?

Staying focused on sentencing issues, the nationwide movement toward so-called “evidence-based” reforms also has, hiding deep within, really hard questions concerning what kinds of “evidence” are most valid and most important in the continuing evolution of sentencing systems. Is saving a lot of taxpayer money a marker of sentencing reform success if crime ticks up a bit? How about simply having fewer persons with liberty restricted by being in prison or subject to criminal justice control? (Maybe now that Nate Silver has some free time until the next election cycle gets into full swing, perhaps he can focus his impressive data-crunching skill on these issues and all the challenges they present.)

Some recent and older related posts implicating metric challenges: