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Lying cops...

Should cops be allowed to lie when interrogating someone?

  • Total voters
    46
It depends on what you are lying about. Police officers using their position to intimidate legally illiterate suspects into confessions by threatening them with severe punishments or coaxing them with the possibility of extremely easy treatment is at least to me a type of deception that egregiously taints the accuracy of what is confessed and should not be used. This is different from an officer saying "We have X evidence, you are going to go down its only a matter of how cooperative you want to be." or "Your partner Y confessed, are you going to take this alone?" While also potentially coercive I think they are more acceptable.
 
X Factor said:
There's a famous case where the police hooked some guy up to a "lie detector" which was actually just the copy machine and every time the guy the answered a question, they'd push the copy button and out would come a piece of paper saying he was lying. Lol.

Actually that went too far, while cops can engage in some lying, they cannot use props to manufacture fake "evidence". For example, they could tell a suspect that his buddy has given a statement saying that the suspect is completely guilty. They could not write up a fake statement and show that to the suspect.
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That was an episode of The Wire.
 
Objective-J said:
im going to answer yes, but admit it doesnt seem right

im answering yes because i dont see the harm in it, if im being interrogated and the cops lie to me and im innocent it doenst change anything.
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I think the justification for police lying during interrogation is that if you're guilty, then they might trip you up into confession but if you're innocent they'll have no chance. The problem arises from abuse of this process by police interrogating a suspect into a false admission. A confession is one of the strongest forms of evidence that can be brought into a court of law. And not all coerced or nonvoluntary confessions are false and not all false confessions are coerced.
Whether the suspect was of sound mind and whether the confession was voluntary or coerced must be considered by judges and juries. It is sometimes argued that police coercion, including deception and trickery, is necessary to make criminals confess, but such interrogation techniques also risk eliciting false confessions. The argument is whether without deception would there be any significant amount of confessions and does this rise to infringing on someones rights?
 
Other
Yes is a type of answer that will continue with some of the public mistrust of our police.
I think this depends on the quality of "lie", and the severity of the crime..
Where it come to the publics happiness and welfare, the police should able to do "shady things", extreme things to protect society from the criminal element...including torture...
Judgment is a key word here.
The police are a whole lot smarter/trained/educated than the thugs from yester-year.
even in the southern states..
 
hell no I don't think cops should be allowed to lie. It's already been mentioned here several times, but they lose credibility when they lie. Also, to me, lying to secure information or a confession would be the same as beating the hell out of a suspect to get a confession.

If the evidence is strong enough, improper procedures aren't necessary. If the evidence isn't strong enough, then find more evidence.
 
Superfly said:
hell no I don't think cops should be allowed to lie. It's already been mentioned here several times, but they lose credibility when they lie. Also, to me, lying to secure information or a confession would be the same as beating the hell out of a suspect to get a confession.

If the evidence is strong enough, improper procedures aren't necessary. If the evidence isn't strong enough, then find more evidence.
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I disagree. It is certainly NOT the same as beating the hell out of a suspect to get a confession. How effective is a lie on an innocent person? "We found your fingerprints on the knife." "No, no you didn't."
 
Tigger said:
Of course they should be allowed to lie. There is no need to be honorable to the dishonorable, and criminals are dishonorable by definition.
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When government prosecutors suppress evidence that indicates a suspect's innocence, or even manufactures evidence implicating the suspect, they aren't quite the paragon of honor themselves.
 
Cardinal said:
X Factor said:
There's a famous case where the police hooked some guy up to a "lie detector" which was actually just the copy machine and every time the guy the answered a question, they'd push the copy button and out would come a piece of paper saying he was lying. Lol.

Actually that went too far, while cops can engage in some lying, they cannot use props to manufacture fake "evidence". For example, they could tell a suspect that his buddy has given a statement saying that the suspect is completely guilty. They could not write up a fake statement and show that to the suspect.
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That was an episode of The Wire.
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The point the legislators believe is that police need some leeway in interrogating suspects or there would never be any confessions to amount. Deception and some forms of coercion are considered effective against the guilty, not the innocent.
 
MaggieD said:
I disagree. It is certainly NOT the same as beating the hell out of a suspect to get a confession. How effective is a lie on an innocent person? "We found your fingerprints on the knife." "No, no you didn't."
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Right, but criminals lie. It's what they do. You can ask the same question to a suspect, and he's going to say "no you didn't." If you did, of course, then he's up sh1t creek. But if you didn't, it's not right to lie and make him think you have something that you don't have. I have a big problem with liars. If a cop lied, it would make him just as untrustworthy as the lying criminal. I know that my answer isn't the popular one, but I've worked with so many crooked cops that I have a hard time giving them a pass for anything.
 
Superfly said:
Right, but criminals lie. It's what they do. You can ask the same question to a suspect, and he's going to say "no you didn't." If you did, of course, then he's up sh1t creek. But if you didn't, it's not right to lie and make him think you have something that you don't have. I have a big problem with liars. If a cop lied, it would make him just as untrustworthy as the lying criminal. I know that my answer isn't the popular one, but I've worked with so many crooked cops that I have a hard time giving them a pass for anything.
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One never knows. "We found your fingerprints on the knife." "No, no you didn't. I wore gloves."

I'm sure that sometimes it's just that easy.
 
MaggieD said:
One never knows. "We found your fingerprints on the knife." "No, no you didn't. I wore gloves."

I'm sure that sometimes it's just that easy.
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:lol: But then that opens up a whole new "America's Dumbest Criminals" discussion.
 
ThePlayDrive said:
When I think of a cop interrogating a guilty person, then I easily answer 'yes' to the question. But when I think of a cop interrogating an innocent person, I'm conflicted. An innocent person, particularly one without much confidence, could be easily manipulated into a false confession when confronted with lies and perhaps promises of a plea deal. Because of that, I'm not entirely sure how I stand on the issue. I will say that I would never so much as enter an interrogation room without a lawyer - innocent or not. It's crazy to me how many people talk to the police w/o representation.
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The "working poor" can be bankrupted by the lawyers extremely high cost.
One thing wrong in this post.
The man being interrogated is neither guilty nor innocent....He is supposed to be innocent until proven otherwise.
The man's guilt/innocence is in a state of flux...when accused and in custody.
And of course, the cops , the interrogators must not know this "state of flux".
 
Yes. But they still cannot lie in court testimony. Lying is fine to determine the truth, e.g. falsely claiming that suspect DNA was found at the scene to the suspect is fine, but saying that same thing in court is perjury. The danger of that, of course, is one is likely to get a suspect to immediately "lawyer up", rather than admit to simply being a witness that may help the investigation.
 
Tigger said:
That's why some of us prefer not to have very many friends, and to vete them quite thoroughly before letting them get very close to us in the first place.
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1. I said friends, family and acquaintances. Even if you don't have friends or family, you still have acquaintances - people who you work with, who you see frequently at a grocery store, who might be your landlord and so on.

2. "Vetting" potential friends, et al. does not predict the future. Every criminal has a "first time" - many of them without warnings. Some people snap. Some people get desperate.

3. If you're trying to imply that having many friends and not "vetting" them all is an example of "grand stupidity", you're being absolutely ridiculous.

You're stupid for staying late at work to begin with. You're even stupider for working at a company without proper security and surveilance measures in place.
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Who says the company doesn't have proper security or surveillance? There are many companies with the best of both that get things stolen from them - that's just how the world works. You're comment about staying late being stupid is dumb in and of itself.

You've frankly come up with arbitrary parameters for "grand stupidity" and thus, your argument is invalid.
 
ThePlayDrive said:
You've frankly come up with arbitrary parameters for "grand stupidity" and thus, your argument is invalid.
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Then we have no basis for discussion do we? Buh Bye.
 
Kal'Stang said:
Should cops be allowed to lie when interrogating someone for a crime?
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It doesn't seem right.

We're to assume that people are innocent until proven guilty.

You wouldn't want your doctor, your teacher, or your grocer lying to you, ether.
 
MaggieD said:
I disagree. It is certainly NOT the same as beating the hell out of a suspect to get a confession. How effective is a lie on an innocent person? "We found your fingerprints on the knife." "No, no you didn't."
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Pretty effective if the person is weak willed, ignorant, stupid. They're put in an area that is designed to be stressful with one-two people and keep you there for hours at a time trying every trick in the book to get you to confess to a crime.
 
Kal'Stang said:
Pretty effective if the person is weak willed, ignorant, stupid. They're put in an area that is designed to be stressful with one-two people and keep you there for hours at a time trying every trick in the book to get you to confess to a crime.
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That right there is an gross over-exaggeration. Cops talk to people. Gather information. To think they're trying to get everyone they talk to to confess to a crime is just silly.
 
Yes. If they don't have the tools to solve crimes and keep the peace, what's the point? Of all the places government has power of your individual life, lying during an interrogation is trivial at best. Ideally there is no crime. Once that ideal is busted, cops lying while not ideal, has benefits that probably outweight the cons.
It does likely hurt those without education/counsel the most though, so you could try and break this off into a class issues, as I'm sure some particular political lean would benefit from...
 
MaggieD said:
That right there is an gross over-exaggeration. Cops talk to people. Gather information. To think they're trying to get everyone they talk to to confess to a crime is just silly.
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Then perhaps you could explain to me why so many people gave confessions and later turned out to actually be innocent? But anywho, I'm not saying that they are out to get everyone. The majority of cops are just people trying to get the guilty behind bars. But sometimes they are overzealous.
 
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