Being married to a criminal defense attorney makes me extremely biased on this subject. I have seen far too much evidence of police misconduct to grant them the privilege of lying ethically.
Do not participate in a custodial interrogation by police in the United States unless you are accompanied by a competent criminal defense attorney. The police are in no way your friend or interested in your well-being. They are doing whatever they can to incriminate you. You have the right to refuse interrogation outside the presence of counsel.
I believe police themselves are completely responsible for the general lack of trust in them. They purposely act dishonestly, recklessly, and maliciously. They do not hold themselves accountable for misconduct. They do not allow others to hold them accountable for misconduct.
Undercover work. Yes, if police are acting under cover they should be authorized to use deception insofar as it is necessary to obtain the confidence of the targets of the investigation. But I have a separate problem with undercover work. Police rely heavily on undercover work and stings because they suck at solving actual crimes. Reported crimes generally go solved. To create the illusion of competence, police therefore
generate crime, skirting the boundaries of entrapment with great skill.
Fake attraction. I'm okay with this as long as the targets are people with outstanding judicial warrants.
Lying during interrogation and
false promises to obtain cooperation.
Strongly disagree. Most police interrogators today are trained in the Reid Method, which relies heavily on deception and manipulation to gaslight subjects and obtain confessions. Any actual evidence in the case is never tested because the defendant pleads guilty on the falsely purported strength of falsely purported evidence. The goal among police is to intimidate a defendant into pleading guilty so that evidence is never an issue.
I am adamant on this point.
The normalization of the Reid Method spills over into testifying and reporting. A vast number of sworn police reports contain manifest falsehoods. Police so routinely lie on the witness stand that there is even a term for it: "testilying." There is a substantial amount of social science in support of this.
www.ojp.gov
Unless a defendant is financially able to buy a sufficient defense, these lies generally go undetected and unpunished. Because the Reid Method justifies lying in the pursuit of justice, this philosophy spills over into other facets of policing. If you are permitted to lie to get a defendant to confess, why not lie in the police report to get a defendant to believe he is in so much more trouble than the evidence suggests? Is that any different?
My spouse usually gets defendants only after police have lied their way to a nearly airtight case against them. Police lie and say they have a ton of evidence and that if they confess then things will go much better for them. Even innocent clients come to believe they are going to be convicted anyway, have little or no chance of a successful legal defense, and so confess under the impression that it's the least painful way out.
I support laws that forbid police to lie to someone in the course of a custodial interrogation. I believe such laws should include felony penalties for the officer who commits the offense.
Drug sniffing dogs. Controlled trials promise a high success rate, but field trials reveal an abysmal success rate. As noted by others, drug sniffing dogs are one of several methods employed during traffic stops to cobble up probable cause to search a vehicle in ostensible violation of the Fourth Amendment. However, it is nearly impossible for a defense attorney to challenge this. The attorney has an affirmative-defense burden of proof to show that the dog alerted for some reason other than having smelled drugs.
Dunno how this qualifies as police deception, though.
