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My search as a cop for justice in a flawed criminal system

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1028/p09s02-coop.html

Opinion
My search as a cop for justice in a flawed criminal system
A faulty reliance on eyewitnesses and shoddy science at police
departments across the states, from the LAPD to the NYPD, can have tragic
consequences.
By Sunil Dutta
from the October 28, 2009 edition




Los Angeles - Thirteen years ago, in a fit of idealism, I left my
comfortable career as a scientist and joined the Los Angeles Police
Department.

Like most of the academics, I believed that the police were corrupt. I
wanted to learn the reality of policing and to serve as a model for positive
change. When I started, major scandals in the LAPD were breaking out.
Officers were allegedly involved in the murder of rapper Notorious B.I.G.,
providing protection to criminal rap artists, and the Rampart scandal had
tarnished the image of the world-famous police agency once again.

The LAPD was in transformation. Chief Bernard Parks had terrified the entire
LAPD with his heavy-handed disciplinary system; cops were leaving the
department in droves.

Though suspicious, I found that the majority of officers were professional
and honorable. True criminal cops, like Rafael Perez and David Mack, were
the rarity. More prevalent was misconduct that was based on laziness and
cutting corners, not with a criminal intent, but with a "the ends justify
the means" mentality.

The major shortcoming in policing was something far more dangerous and
something that has not been addressed seriously by our criminal justice
system. Major harm could result from our reliance on two very fallible
tools: eyewitnesses and shoddy forensic science.

Consider a recent example: On Feb. 17, 2004, Texas executed Cameron Todd
Willingham for the arson deaths of his three daughters. In September, an
investigative article in The New Yorker revealed that Mr. Willingham was
innocent. It sparked a series of investigations that found he was the victim
of shoddy crime scene investigation and outdated theories.

The tragic miscarriage of justice in Willingham's case is not isolated. Many
harrowing tales exist: Frank Lee Smith spent 14 years on Florida's death row
and was exonerated as a result of DNA testing 10 months after he died
awaiting execution.

The number of postconviction DNA exonerations in the US is more than 200.
Since 1973, the US has released 135 people from death row due to DNA
exonerations. Some were convicted due to mistaken eyewitnesses, others due
to police and prosecutorial zeal and misconduct.

People, especially in law enforcement, have a hard time comprehending such
stories. Don't we live in a free society where criminals have too many
rights and the police's hands are tied up by too many regulations? Every cop
knows at least a few criminals who walk around free because we can't charge
or convict them.

Yet innocent people are railroaded through our "justice" system, all the way
to lethal injections and the electric chair. Why?

The answer lies both in our human and institutional natures. As humans, we
tend to believe whatever fits our self-interest, discarding facts that tend
to challenge our hypotheses. The errors of deduction can therefore multiply
in an investigation when shoddy science is applied or where we rely solely
on eyewitnesses. As Willingham's case demonstrates, the combination can be
fatal.

Early in my career, my training officer and I responded to an attempted
murder investigation. The victim was shot from close range. Thankfully the
shooter missed the intended target's vitals and only managed to hit the
victim's biceps.

Within moments, my partner had stopped three kids who he believed had shot
the victim. Our victim emphatically stated that these suspects were not the
shooters. The victim's cousin, who was present during the shooting, insisted
that the three were the shooters. Whom could we believe? Absent a video or
other clinching evidence, how could we be certain that we were making the
right decision?

Another example: A victim of an assault with a deadly weapon in my division
identified the criminal. When my officers and sergeants went to arrest the
suspect, he, in common with almost everyone, proclaimed his innocence. My
officers spent considerable time checking the alibi of the suspect and
finally determined that a video at his work established that he was indeed
innocent. What if there had been no video to confirm his alibi?

Our criminal justice system would fail without eyewitness assistance to try
and convict criminals. Yet numerous scientific studies have shown that even
the most well-intentioned eyewitnesses can identify the wrong person or fail
to identify the perpetrator of a crime.

Aside from the fallibility of eyewitnesses, our political model of control
over the police can lead to inadvertent mistakes. Municipal police
departments dance to the tune of their political masters who thrive on the
constant drumbeat of "tough on crime" rhetoric. The only evidence that
police can measure to tout our tough-on-crime rhetoric is increasing the
number of arrests and reducing crime rates.

This pressure to be productive, the lack of personnel and time, and the
desire to wrap up an incident, combined with the unreliability of
eyewitnesses, increases the odds that an innocent person may be arrested, or
worse, convicted. Add to this our system that rates prosecutorial
performance on conviction rates and we are on a slippery slope. And when
corrupt prosecutors who present false evidence, even in death penalty cases,
such as the now disbarred Arizona prosecutor Kenneth Peasley, enter the mix,
only God can save the innocent.

As the Texas father's case proves, sometimes what amounts to voodoo passes
for scientific analysis of crime scenes. That the agencies which take part
in prosecution and conviction (police, fire, district attorneys) consider
anything less than scientific analysis should be considered malpractice.

Police departments across the country need to establish standardized tough,
scientifically accurate procedures for evidence collection and analysis.
Without that, innocent individuals will continue to be wrongly jailed
because of an unwitting and erroneous eyewitness or an overzealous but
scientifically illiterate investigator. As error-prone humans, we can't
guarantee a fail-safe criminal justice system; therefore, to be truly just
we must abolish capital punishment.

We need to move away from number-based evaluation of police departments'
productivity and increasing reliance on crime statistics to measure police
success.

It should also be mandated that all police contacts be recorded on video.
And when a case for prosecution is built solely on eyewitnesses or
informants, it should go through enhanced scrutiny by the judicial branch.
The benchmark should be a nationwide standardization of policies on evidence
collection and analysis.

The success of police agencies should be evaluated based upon satisfaction
of the communities they serve. Such satisfaction surveys should be conducted
by independent external entities. As procedures for police training and
evidence collection and analysis already exist and only need to be
streamlined and improved, none of the proposed solutions entail major
financial expenditure or rely on political process, ensuring a quicker
implementation. This will help create a truly just criminal justice system
in our country.

Sunil Dutta, PhD, is a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department. The
views expressed here are his own.

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