“There’s No Fear of Being Caught”

The front page of Monday’s New York Times featured a story about a dirty little police practice colloquially known as “testilying.” Testilying is the name police officers coined to describe lying in official statements, such as sworn affidavits, about particular facts to make a criminal case appear stronger. It happens most often in officer assertions of probable cause to conduct a search of a person or their property without a warrant. For example, an officer could say that contraband was “in plain sight” after he pulled a driver over, giving him the probable cause to suspect a criminal act and thus bypass the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment.

The most generous rationalization for this behavior is something like, “The suspect was guilty of a crime, I knew he was guilty but I couldn’t legally prove it, so I found a way around the rules and discovered the criminal evidence I needed to make an arrest.” Put simply, the ends (an arrest for criminal behavior) justifies the means (an unconstitutional search). But, very often, what the officers “know” is wrong and they violate the rights of perfectly innocent people. Even when they are right, illegal searches and the lies to cover them up corrupt the law in order to enforce it. That’s not how policing is supposed to work. Police are supposed to protect our rights, not violate them to make an arrest.

And as the Times story explains, the lie is not only used against people who are breaking the law:

There had been a shooting, Officer Martinez testified, and he wanted to search a nearby apartment for evidence. A woman stood in the doorway, carrying a laundry bag. Officer Martinez said she set the bag down “in the middle of the doorway” — directly in his path. “I picked it up to move it out of the way so we could get in.” The laundry bag felt heavy.

When he put it down, he said, he heard a “clunk, a thud.”

Officer Martinez tapped the bag with his foot and felt something hard, he testified. He opened the bag, leading to the discovery of a Ruger 9-millimeter handgun and the arrest of the woman. But a hallway surveillance camera captured the true story: There’s no laundry bag or gun in sight as Officer Martinez and other investigators question the woman in the doorway and then stride into the apartment. Inside, they did find a gun, but little to link it to the woman.

It took over a year for the woman, Ms. Kimberly Thomas, to clear her name with the help of surveillance video. In a way, she was very fortunate to even get that chance.

“There’s no fear of being caught,” said one Brooklyn officer who has been on the force for roughly a decade. “You’re not going to go to trial and nobody is going to be cross-examined.” The percentage of cases that progress to the point where an officer is cross-examined is tiny. In 2016, for instance, there were slightly more than 185 guilty pleas, dismissals or other non-trial outcomes for each criminal case in New York City that went to trial and reached a verdict. There were 1,460 trial verdicts in criminal cases that year, while 270,304 criminal cases were resolved without a trial.

The presumption that an officer will be able to swear a false affidavit and never be challenged in court is a casualty of a criminal justice system that has grown absolutely dependent on plea bargains. The justice system's overreliance on plea bargains removes the safeguards and incentives that are supposed to hold the government and its officers accountable for lies and petty abuses.

You can read the whole piece here.