Archive for the 'Police Professionalism' Category
Morning Links
Monday, November 24th, 2008Sunday Links
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008Cop’s Kid May Get Sweet Christmas Gift
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008Apparently in the asset forfeiture world, video game consoles are the new “large amount of unexplained cash.”
Morning Links
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008More Aftermath Bumbling in the Cheye Calvo Case
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008Cheye Calvo, you’ll remember, is the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor whose home was mistakenly raided by Prince George’s County, Maryland police. Calvo’s two black labs were shot and killed, and he and his mother-in-law were bound at gunpoint for hours, even after it was clear that the police had made a mistake. The raid came after police intercepted a package of marijuana sent to Calvo’s address through a delivery service. Police conducted no additional investigation before sweeping in with the SWAT team.
When asked about Calvo’s case in an interview a local newspaper last month, Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson offered up a truly bewildering response:
Johnson said he didn’t think an apology was necessary and said he has not spoken with Calvo about the incident.
“Well, I think in America that is the apology, when we’re cleared,” he said. “The authorities have to be able to follow evidence. Sometimes we realize that people are victimized. … At the end of the day, the investigation showed he was not involved. And that’s, you know, a pat on the back for everybody involved, I think.”
He expressed condolences for Calvo’s pets but said he understood the actions of law enforcement.
“I try putting myself in the situation of the sheriff who entered the house,” he said. “They had one set of information at the time. … The thing we have to do is make sure those incidents don’t happen again.”
I’m having a hard time comprehending what sort of mindset you’d need to have to come to the conclusion that Calvo’s innocence equates to “a pat on the back for everybody involved.” As for making sure incidents like what happened to Calvo “don’t happen again,” the utter cluelessness of politicians like Jack Johnson is precisely why they do keep happening. Over and over. It also likely factors into why Johnson presides over the county with one of the worst police misconduct records in the country.
I last wrote about Calvo’s case in response to a Milwaukee police detective who had defended the raid in a letter to the editor of National Review.
Saturday Morning Links
Saturday, November 1st, 2008Morning Links
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008Morning Links
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
The Case for Videotaping Police Interrogations
Monday, October 27th, 2008Last week in the L.A. Times, Washington, D.C. police Detective Jim Trainum wrote an op-ed explaining how he never believed someone could confess to a crime they didn’t commit—until a suspect he was interrogating did exactly that:
Even the suspect’s attorney later told me that she believed her client was guilty, based on the confession. Confident in our evidence and the confession, we charged her with first-degree murder.
Then we discovered that the suspect had an ironclad alibi. We subpoenaed sign-in/sign-out logs from the homeless shelter where she lived, and the records proved that she could not have committed the crime. The case was dismissed, but all of us still believed she was involved in the murder. After all, she had confessed.
Even though it wasn’t our standard operating procedure in the mid-1990s, when the crime occurred, we had videotaped the interrogation in its entirety. Reviewing the tapes years later, I saw that we had fallen into a classic trap. We ignored evidence that our suspect might not have been guilty, and during the interrogation we inadvertently fed her details of the crime that she repeated back to us in her confession.
If we hadn’t discovered and verified the suspect’s alibi — or if we hadn’t recorded the interrogation — she probably would have been convicted of first-degree murder and would be in prison today. The true perpetrator of the crime was never identified, partly because the investigation was derailed when we focused on an innocent person.
If by-the-books interrogations like Trainum’s can elicit a false confession, it isn’t difficult to see how more coercive questioning could as well. California’s legislature has twice passed a bill requiring the police to videotape interrogations. Both bills were vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger after lobbying from the state’s police and prosecutors. A third attempt to pass a bill died in committee this year.
Last year, I criticized Schwarzenegger for vetoing a bill that included the videotape requirement and two other sensible criminal justice reforms.