Once again we have irrefutable evidence that the police, as a whole, are incompetent and concerned only with making the "facts" fit their preconceived notions. That they are incapable of even considering they could have gotten it wrong.
When faced with pretty damming evidence against their idea of this being a fraud the captain said:
> “We don’t know what the final outcome of this case is going to be,” Captain John Whitney told the Vallejo Times-Herald. “It’s important that we don’t jump to conclusions.
They have no issue at all jumping to conclusions when it makes their job easier or when it lets them bend the facts to their initial suspicion. It's disgusting that we allow the police to lie to and treat suspects like this. Hours and hours of questioning attempting to break them down and have them question their own sanity.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who hasn't already learned it: never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They are not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking for an easy way to wrap up the case. If the police are trying to talk to you then you are in their sights and they would much rather pin it all on you rather than do their actual jobs. Always ask for a lawyer and never think "Well if I just tell them X they will let me go".
I see no path forward for our current police in the US. It's not just bad apples, it's bad barrels and they will always choose to close ranks over rooting out the worst among them. Be sure, the cops who help cover up or know but stay silent are just as bad as the ones we would call "bad apples". The system is horribly broken.
I always found the "bad apples" argument very ironic. The whole expression is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". We are now left with a spoiled bunch.
Or in the case of most police departments, an apple goes bad (commits a crime) it gets put on suspension right next to the barrel while still being paid as the department 'investigates'. If it goes badly for the apple they get removed from the barrel, but then they either sue and get their job back and get put back into the barrel. Or move to next county and get put into their barrel.
And at this point, you need to remove all the other "apples" who have been tainted. That's the whole point, you need to act fast, or it will ruin the entire thing.
Police unions don't prevent police from being held accountable. They don't have that authority. Police unions are another problem, and an important one, but we need the state to press charges and judges to sentence police who commit crimes at least as harshly as they would the rest of us. No union has the power to take a bad cop out of prison. The police didn't get this way on their own, so it's important that we aren't ignoring what's enabled them to continue like this and start holding everyone involved accountable.
> never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They are not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking for an easy way to wrap up the case. If the police are trying to talk to you then you are in their sights and they would much rather pin it all on you rather than do their actual jobs. Always ask for a lawyer and never think "Well if I just tell them X they will let me go".
There are exceptions to this rule, and I think one is when your girlfriend has just been kidnapped. Sure, in this case the police did absolutely nothing to actually help save the girlfriend, but the chance they might help seems worth the risk of being deemed a suspect.
I mean we have seen multiple cases (this one included) where the cops make you the primary suspect and will do anything they can to discredit you or catch you in a lie (even an unrelated lie that they use to "prove" you are guilty).
I understand the desire to cooperate but with minor exceptions I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one present.
Cops are interested in really finding who is responsible, they are looking to close the file and you are right in front of them, a very tempting target.
> I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one present.
Yes, I think hiring a lawyer would also increase your chances if they can push the police towards continuing to investigate all possibilities (such as interviewing witnesses or testing all the samples as they failed to do in this case) or make them less likely to lie to you (as they did in this case about the lie detector test results).
I think a lot of people think "only guilty people/criminals ask for lawyers" (thanks largely TV shows and movies that show cops that never make mistakes and only criminals not cooperating) and/or think "If they just hear my side they will understand and agree with me".
In a really gross way I think that getting a lawyer might make you look less attractive to the cops (harder to pin it on you now) and force them to look elsewhere along with your other points of using your lawyer as way to push the investigation on their own. Remember, most cops are looking for the path of least resistance, not the truth.
Multiple cases out of...how many kidnapped girlfriend cases?
The cops behavior(and human behavior in general) makes a lot of sense if you view them as pattern matching machines. If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97 of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case.
And if merely "multiple cases" is enough to warrant cutting them out of your life, consider that you also need to cut out pizza delivery people (multiple cases of them robbing their clients), baristas(multiple cases of them raping people they meet on the job), mail men(multiple cases of them assaulting their clients), etc.
Not to sound cliche but with great power comes great responsibly. Police should be held to a higher standard. As far as pattern-matching goes, very simply, they need to do better. They are being lazy if they refuse to consider alternatives, these are people’s lives we are talking about here.
The couple in this story went through hell then the police make it even worse, that’s not ok. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they don’t jump to conclusions like this. The police ignored evidence at the scene that corroborated what the couple told them and continued to insist they were right even though they had no evidence backing up their charges. Just their gut feeling and “pattern-matching”.
When we here multiple stories about the other professions doing the things you mentioned and, this is key, them getting away with it, no repercussions, we can talk. The police are the only (aside from maybe very rich people/corporations who in some cases use the police to exercise their will) people who have this kind of impunity.
The police have the power to kill you with impunity. The police have the power to absolutely ruin your life even if you did nothing wrong. The have the power to take your belonging and require you prove their innocence. They should have to answer for the times they get it wrong.
> If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97 of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case.
Yet, that is the job. If it is difficult for police to keep an open mind, then they need systems and rules in place to force them to keep an investigation broad enough to correctly handle the 3% cases where their intuition/bias is wrong.
In reality, I would guess that the failure rate for "cop intuition" is much, much higher than 3%. Allowing cops to overly trust their intuition results in some very biased, racist and clasist policing.
One solution, is facing real consequences when you are wrong. I think it is absolutely incredible how few consequences the bad cops in this story faced (instead of consequences, they got promotions and the city paid for the settlement with the victims. The cops didn't even get around to apologizing for years.
Why? If you tell the public, the cops will find out. They won't find her for you.
They don't need you to help find her. Talking to them only helps them hurt you.
Everyone on HN already knows that you don't ever trust HR departments, despite how friendly they may seem, because their job is to protect the company from employees. By analogy, the police are the HR department of the state.
> When faced with pretty damming evidence against their idea of this being a fraud the captain said:
Police Unions often have an ethos of "we protect our own" -- essentially gang mentality. I like the idea of policing, think they can play a very positive role in society, but also think that the unions and that mentality are deeply undermining those positives coming true.
I've taken to saying that instead there are a few good apples. Misty Carausu is definitely a good apple, but she seems like a major exception to the rule :/
> Once again we have irrefutable evidence that the police, as a whole, are incompetent and concerned only with making the "facts" fit their preconceived notions.
I think your point is made stronger without the hyperbole.
> As she gripped her gun, she felt as if she’d stepped into one of the true-crime documentaries she binge-watched at night.
Seems like an incredibly bad idea for police officers to be binge-watching that stuff. They’ll get the worse cases drilled into their heads, right before going out on a (real) street the next morning.
Oh, just wait until your hear about the curricula in police training academies!
Whole days are spent watching dash- and body-worn-cam videos of officers getting ambushed, ostensibly to teach ways to mitigate harm, but in practice it just has the effect of deepening the chasm between "us" officers and "them" citizens by instilling a deep sense of fear bordering on what may be considered an anticipatory PTSD. I mean, talk about a garbage biased dataset...
(To any pedants in the audience, the trauma occurs when watching the videos, so "post-traumatic" is appropriate here :))
On the other hand, what do you expect them to do, not train officers on that stuff so they don't get an antagonistic view of the public? That's like not having pilots read accident reports so they don't get spooked about losing power on takeoff; it's a real threat, so they should be prepared.
I agree that antagonism between police and public is a big problem, but I'm not sure what the solution is to the particular problem you point out.
> Henry Lee was nearing the end of his shift in the newsroom when he got another strange email, this time from huskinskidnapping@hotmail.com. “Ms. Huskins was absolutely kidnapped,” the message said. “We did it.”
Reminds me of the movie Ruthless People with Danny DeVito and Bette Midler, about "a couple who kidnap their ex-boss's wife to get revenge and extort money from him [but] soon realize he does not want her back and was planning to kill her himself." Hilarious.
Feels like a lot of websites could do with switching their H1 and H2s around..
> A kidnapping deemed a hoax, the newbie detective who cracked the case, and the Harvard-trained lawyer whose mental unraveling set the whole story in motion.
Came here to mention this as well. Its about Paul Le Roux. From Wikipedia (contains potential SPOILERS):
> Paul Calder Le Roux is a former programmer, former criminal cartel boss, and informant to the US Drug Enforcement Administration. In 1999, he created E4M, a free and open-source disk encryption software program for Microsoft Windows, and is sometimes credited for open-source TrueCrypt, which is based on E4M's code, though he denies involvement with TrueCrypt.
Once again we have irrefutable evidence that the police, as a whole, are incompetent and concerned only with making the "facts" fit their preconceived notions. That they are incapable of even considering they could have gotten it wrong.
When faced with pretty damming evidence against their idea of this being a fraud the captain said:
> “We don’t know what the final outcome of this case is going to be,” Captain John Whitney told the Vallejo Times-Herald. “It’s important that we don’t jump to conclusions.
They have no issue at all jumping to conclusions when it makes their job easier or when it lets them bend the facts to their initial suspicion. It's disgusting that we allow the police to lie to and treat suspects like this. Hours and hours of questioning attempting to break them down and have them question their own sanity.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who hasn't already learned it: never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They are not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking for an easy way to wrap up the case. If the police are trying to talk to you then you are in their sights and they would much rather pin it all on you rather than do their actual jobs. Always ask for a lawyer and never think "Well if I just tell them X they will let me go".
I see no path forward for our current police in the US. It's not just bad apples, it's bad barrels and they will always choose to close ranks over rooting out the worst among them. Be sure, the cops who help cover up or know but stay silent are just as bad as the ones we would call "bad apples". The system is horribly broken.