Hardly anything seems to draw more conservative ire than badmouthing the police. When progressive activists demand police accountability and cite the plethora of police violence against unarmed citizens, they are called disrespectful, unpatriotic, and in the case of Black Lives Matter activists, actual terrorists.
Of course, it’s a message that you learned since childhood, right? Cops are there to serve and protect the citizenry and deserve to be supported. And if you can’t trust the police, who can you trust?
It turns out that while it’s questionable if they are actually protecting the citizens they serve, they are doing a whole lot of protecting and serving—themselves. And (in case you needed actual proof) demands for accountability and reform are well founded. Buzzfeed News reviewed 62 examples of video footage in which a cop’s statement in a police record or testimony directly contradicted the video evidence. They found definitive proof that cops lie. Often.
Lying is “something that has been endemic in the history of the American police system for the last three or four generations,” said Peter Keane, a former San Francisco police commissioner who now teaches law at Golden Gate University. “And why do they do it? The main reason they do it, historically and now, is they can get away with it.”
Of the 62 incidents BuzzFeed News reviewed, only 22 led to charges being filed against an officer, and of those, only nine have resulted in convictions.
So now we know that not only is lying a serious problem in the profession, it is a well-used tactic in a corrupt system that rewards those who do so.
And the rabbit hole goes even deeper. While we might have guessed that cops lie when they kill people, apparently, lying isn’t limited to one specific type of incident.
They lie when they think no cameras are watching, like Reading, Pennsylvania, officer Jesus Santiago-DeJesus did when he smashed Marcelina Cintron-Garcia’s cell phone and arrested her on a false charge of assault after she filmed him during a traffic stop. They lie when they should know for certain that cameras are watching, like officers in Seabrook, New Hampshire, in Skokie, Illinois, and in Sweetwater, Florida, did when they slammed and injured suspects getting booked into their police stations, then falsely claimed the suspects had acted aggressively. [...]
They lie in groups, like the six cops in San Francisco, four in Chicago, and three in Kissimmee, Florida, who lied about having probable cause to arrest a suspect for drug possession.
They lie when no other cops are on the scene. Bullitt County, Kentucky, sheriff’s deputy Matthew Corder arrested Deric Baize for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, claiming that he “caused alarm to neighbors,” but video showed that Corder entered Baize’s house and tased him only after Baize had cursed at him for blocking his driveway. “Next time you tell a police officer to fuck off,” Corder said, “you might want to think about it.”
These are just a handful of incidents that have been caught on camera. Imagine how many more are out there, never seeing the light of day.
Our justice system, under the guise of impartiality, privileges the word of police officers over anyone else. Some police are free to lie all day without consequence while countless innocent people end up in prison. And as we already know, these lies disproportionately impact people of color.
A cop’s word is often the difference between a person’s freedom and imprisonment. In many cases, an officer and a defendant tell diametrically opposed versions of the same incident — a “swearing contest,” lawyers call it — and a judge or jury is left to decide whom to believe: the professional law enforcement agent who has testified in dozens of trials or the undereducated, underemployed, probably black or Latino guy from an “area known for narcotics trafficking” accused of breaking the law? The scale is even more unbalanced when the word of the defendant is lined up against the words of not one but two, three, four, five professional law enforcement agents. “The words of the police officers would always prevail over the words of poor black and brown folks,” said Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago law school.
So the next time you think about who you can trust, think twice before trusting the police. As it turns out, your neighbor, butcher, mail carrier, or bus driver may be more trustworthy.