Everything I've read of yours has been consistently evenhanded and fair-minded while also passionate and willing to go where reason and the evidence takes you. Many thanks for your excellent and essential work.
I've always been kinda conflicted on it because it skirts entrapment so closely and still has the capacity to elicit false confessions, but for cold cases where the obvious suspect is known, it's a clever way of obtaining a confession with arguably less coercion than the Reid technique.
I'm against it. It was right at the end of my time in law school when the Hart & Mack decisions were handed down. I agree that it provides closure in some cold cases, but it's still coercive. Indeed the SCC found it so and requires the Crown to show that the extent of the coercion was limited to a level that does not violate the s7 rights of defendants under the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms. (Think something like the Bill of Rights in the USA, if you're not Canadian yourself.)
But while the Hart test provides protection against s7 violations in theory, I don't trust the cops enough to use cold case resolution as a reason to justify using Mr. Big.
Think about it this way: If this is really a cold case in which the perp got away with it at the time and is still out in the community despite a significant amount of investigative attention, then likely they aren't committing other crimes. In other words, as horrible as it is to have a past crime go unsolved, the perp does not appear a threat to commit future crimes. Thus public safety is less of an issue than it might at first seem if you don't factor in "the perp already was investigated quite a bit and came up clean".
I'm not one to dismiss all undercover operations as investigative tools. Nor am I one to say that the police cannot lie under any circumstances. But we have a lot of reasons to believe that cops are corrupted by their own practices of deception, so until we have better law enforcement institutions that are dramatically more resistant to corrupting themselves than our current forces seem, my best, educated guess is that institutionalizing deception harms public safety more than it protects it -- at least in the particular context of the Mr. Big anti-cold case scheme.
I could be wrong, and I'm open to data, but at this point I oppose Mr. Big operations.
Yeah, I read up on the Hart decision and agree with its findings (I am guilty of the crime of being a dirty Canuck). One aspect of Mr. Big that I found surprising is the way they use the "Kingpin" character. I always got the impression that they were using him to screen the applicant/suspect for past crimes that could "bring the heat down on the organization", but if Mr. Big is offering a promotion based on past crimes, then the suspect could easily cop to fake crimes. I guess they could lie either way.
Now that there's a Law and Order show set in my hometown of Toronto, I've been flipping through clips of the original just to get a feel for the copaganda it entails. It always strikes me just how much work these cop shows do in staking "public safety" to the police. Every kind of dispute, every kind of rescue, always involves the same close-knit group of specifically Homicide Detectives, while the beat cops who are the ones doing most of the harassing are just kind of background extras.
You're absolutely right that the primary impediment to any kind of reform is untangling this tight knot of "cops" and "public safety" and it definitely can't be done by a catchy slogan. It requires combating the narratives so ingrained in the popular imagination that these copaganda shows have lasted a whole generation. It's going to take a lot of public support and organization, but I hold out hope that it can be done.
I wish this were something that we could get the people in charge to get behind! There's no denying that the current system is untenable and that it leads to far more injustice than actual justice in the world.
I want to ask you what you think about the STAR program in Denver. Do you think this is the direction whither defunding/abolition of the police needs to go? I'd say it should…
I've followed some of the news around STAR (though not as much as I would likely have done if I lived in or near Denver) and it's exactly the type of thing that proves that we can offload a huge amount of what is now handled by police. This allows law enforcement to shrink AND to specialize.
One of the things that people don't appreciate when they have police handle all these non-emergency calls is that there is value in specialization. I can look up tax statutes, but I'm no substitute for a tax lawyer.
If cops spend most of their time handling homelessness, then they aren't getting any more skilled at handling actual threats to public safety. And there seem to me to be two common responses. One is to become actually good at interacting with homeless folks. They learn the names of the people who live unhoused, they learn their personalities, they become skilled at coaxing them to do what the community wants (which should be "provide housing" but isn't, and both the cops and unhoused folks adapt to the solutions that the people allow), and they develop a reputation as a person who can help when help is needed. This is all great stuff. But it's not learning about public safety threats and how to handle them. The second common response is for cops to treat the existence of homeless people as a threat to public safety. Unhoused folks become excuses to practice your latest judo move or experiment with how tasers affect people who are drunk. While I don't mind cops learning quite a lot about how weapons work and what to expect when they are used, using unhoused folks as targets for your practice attacks is fucking horrible.
The upshot is that we train the people who choose to specialize in public safety to be ethically horrifying, and the people who choose to specialize in homelessness to miss out on expertise that could benefit them and the community when we have to send them in to address a true threat. Neither of these is a great outcome (although since true threats to public safety are more rare than homelessness, being good to the unhoused and a morally great human being who is less expert than they could be is definitely the less bad outcome).
STAR means that people who are suited to help the homeless, learn about their communities and challenges, and take the time to build a positive reputation can do all those things without worrying that they're going to be ordered into a situation where they have to confront a mass shooter without having practiced their pistol shooting lately.
It also means that people who are trained for the terrifying and difficult job of confronting true threats have more time to specialize at it, and become better at it (hopefully even expert at it) so that come a true threat, their lives are less at risk b/c they're better trained, and in the meantime they aren't given incentive to corrupt their own humanity by beating on people just because they're unhoused.
One of the problems with STAR is that they're not drawing down the police force nearly as much as they should. Each STAR employee should reduce law enforcement by more than one employee, because providing housing is less work than jailing people. With the law enforcement approach to homelessness you're not only paying the responder, but also the officers providing security during the booking process and the officers doing the booking and the guards on the prisoners and the cooks who provide food for the prisoners.
If you provide housing and food stamps, you still cover the cost of a roof and food, but the person housed provides their own labor to buy, transport, and cook the food, while you don't need anyone to stand guard over them. It's not just a matter of "we're not jailing them, so we aren't guarding even though they're a risk". We know that putting people in jails, taking away their freedom, creates desperation, and that desperation is linked to increased hostility, while providing housing is linked to hope, which is linked to decreased hostility.
Communities become more peaceful and safer the more we provide hope instead of inflict desperation. STAR is moving in the right direction. I'd just like the people in charge of the cops to take more seriously the implications of what we're seeing with STAR and what we know from many decades of research in many countries.
Regarding the Homeless, John Oliver did this excellent story a couple years ago, and it's not as simple as "housing the homeless", there would have to be political will, and Liberals are just as bad as MAGATs in terms of NIMBYism. As for me, I'm totally fine replacing the thugs and criminals (i.e. venture capitalists and hedge-fund managers) in my neighborhood with houses to house the unhoused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liptMbjF3EE
I want to see dedicated, licensed mental health professionals, Disability Advocates, Rape Counselors,Social Workers, trained Family Violence Negotiators, LGBTQ+ Advocates, and LCDCs in place of the majority of LEOs. I want the Reid Technique outlawed. Every LEO should have their body cam on nonstop unless they are using the restroom and even then they should only be paused for a set time like 2 minutes. Police unions need to be limited to negotiating salaries and benefits, not to cover up misdeeds.
I did not know that the method shown in US cop shows was called the Reid Technique, but holy crap. The first time it was used, by the guy for whom it was named, resulted in a provably false confession and yet police are *still allowed to use it*. That is depraved.
The problems we have in the police in the UK are not as severe as yours, because few guns (although tasers are more widely used and causing the problems you would expect) and certainly no sold off cheap or free military surplus. But they are bad, the racism and misogyny are ingrained and it is difficult to see how with the best will possible they can change.
We've just had the Angiolini Report into the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer who arrested her then raped and murdered her during one of the limited lockdowns we had for COVID. Yet again it says he should never have been employed by the police, there were multiple opportunities to act including reports of sexual assault etc etc etc. And of course the actions recommended by previous reports have not been taken again. I haven't even got to the high percentage of female officers who have been harassed or assaulted by their fellow officers. It is honestly impossible to believe that the police here can adequately reform within their existing structures, but I don't think that reform of the kind you mean is on anyone's agenda here. I am so angry about it I don't know what to do with myself.
I'm so sorry. I have intermittently followed the story of Everard. I agree that guy should never have been part of the Met, much less in the specific positions he occupied. (Oy, vey!) Wholesale overturning of policing & public safety strategies is not on the agenda here in the USA either, though I like to think that if I just raise it -- in a sane way -- that the taboo against even **talking about** major changes (that include a priority on safety and appropriate and functional mechanisms for accountability) can be eroded in some small way.
Not well, so if you have questions, I'll get to them tomorrow.
Feel better, CD ❤️
Rest well.
Oh no! Get well soon!
Everything I've read of yours has been consistently evenhanded and fair-minded while also passionate and willing to go where reason and the evidence takes you. Many thanks for your excellent and essential work.
I have a question, if one that's a little specific. What are your thoughts on the "Mr. Big" technique? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Big_(police_procedure)
I've always been kinda conflicted on it because it skirts entrapment so closely and still has the capacity to elicit false confessions, but for cold cases where the obvious suspect is known, it's a clever way of obtaining a confession with arguably less coercion than the Reid technique.
I'm against it. It was right at the end of my time in law school when the Hart & Mack decisions were handed down. I agree that it provides closure in some cold cases, but it's still coercive. Indeed the SCC found it so and requires the Crown to show that the extent of the coercion was limited to a level that does not violate the s7 rights of defendants under the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms. (Think something like the Bill of Rights in the USA, if you're not Canadian yourself.)
But while the Hart test provides protection against s7 violations in theory, I don't trust the cops enough to use cold case resolution as a reason to justify using Mr. Big.
Think about it this way: If this is really a cold case in which the perp got away with it at the time and is still out in the community despite a significant amount of investigative attention, then likely they aren't committing other crimes. In other words, as horrible as it is to have a past crime go unsolved, the perp does not appear a threat to commit future crimes. Thus public safety is less of an issue than it might at first seem if you don't factor in "the perp already was investigated quite a bit and came up clean".
I'm not one to dismiss all undercover operations as investigative tools. Nor am I one to say that the police cannot lie under any circumstances. But we have a lot of reasons to believe that cops are corrupted by their own practices of deception, so until we have better law enforcement institutions that are dramatically more resistant to corrupting themselves than our current forces seem, my best, educated guess is that institutionalizing deception harms public safety more than it protects it -- at least in the particular context of the Mr. Big anti-cold case scheme.
I could be wrong, and I'm open to data, but at this point I oppose Mr. Big operations.
Yeah, I read up on the Hart decision and agree with its findings (I am guilty of the crime of being a dirty Canuck). One aspect of Mr. Big that I found surprising is the way they use the "Kingpin" character. I always got the impression that they were using him to screen the applicant/suspect for past crimes that could "bring the heat down on the organization", but if Mr. Big is offering a promotion based on past crimes, then the suspect could easily cop to fake crimes. I guess they could lie either way.
Thanks for the analysis! :)
Now that there's a Law and Order show set in my hometown of Toronto, I've been flipping through clips of the original just to get a feel for the copaganda it entails. It always strikes me just how much work these cop shows do in staking "public safety" to the police. Every kind of dispute, every kind of rescue, always involves the same close-knit group of specifically Homicide Detectives, while the beat cops who are the ones doing most of the harassing are just kind of background extras.
You're absolutely right that the primary impediment to any kind of reform is untangling this tight knot of "cops" and "public safety" and it definitely can't be done by a catchy slogan. It requires combating the narratives so ingrained in the popular imagination that these copaganda shows have lasted a whole generation. It's going to take a lot of public support and organization, but I hold out hope that it can be done.
I wish this were something that we could get the people in charge to get behind! There's no denying that the current system is untenable and that it leads to far more injustice than actual justice in the world.
I'm glad that you decided to revisit this topic, thank you.
I want to ask you what you think about the STAR program in Denver. Do you think this is the direction whither defunding/abolition of the police needs to go? I'd say it should…
https://www.wellpower.org/star-program/
Yes!
I've followed some of the news around STAR (though not as much as I would likely have done if I lived in or near Denver) and it's exactly the type of thing that proves that we can offload a huge amount of what is now handled by police. This allows law enforcement to shrink AND to specialize.
One of the things that people don't appreciate when they have police handle all these non-emergency calls is that there is value in specialization. I can look up tax statutes, but I'm no substitute for a tax lawyer.
If cops spend most of their time handling homelessness, then they aren't getting any more skilled at handling actual threats to public safety. And there seem to me to be two common responses. One is to become actually good at interacting with homeless folks. They learn the names of the people who live unhoused, they learn their personalities, they become skilled at coaxing them to do what the community wants (which should be "provide housing" but isn't, and both the cops and unhoused folks adapt to the solutions that the people allow), and they develop a reputation as a person who can help when help is needed. This is all great stuff. But it's not learning about public safety threats and how to handle them. The second common response is for cops to treat the existence of homeless people as a threat to public safety. Unhoused folks become excuses to practice your latest judo move or experiment with how tasers affect people who are drunk. While I don't mind cops learning quite a lot about how weapons work and what to expect when they are used, using unhoused folks as targets for your practice attacks is fucking horrible.
The upshot is that we train the people who choose to specialize in public safety to be ethically horrifying, and the people who choose to specialize in homelessness to miss out on expertise that could benefit them and the community when we have to send them in to address a true threat. Neither of these is a great outcome (although since true threats to public safety are more rare than homelessness, being good to the unhoused and a morally great human being who is less expert than they could be is definitely the less bad outcome).
STAR means that people who are suited to help the homeless, learn about their communities and challenges, and take the time to build a positive reputation can do all those things without worrying that they're going to be ordered into a situation where they have to confront a mass shooter without having practiced their pistol shooting lately.
It also means that people who are trained for the terrifying and difficult job of confronting true threats have more time to specialize at it, and become better at it (hopefully even expert at it) so that come a true threat, their lives are less at risk b/c they're better trained, and in the meantime they aren't given incentive to corrupt their own humanity by beating on people just because they're unhoused.
One of the problems with STAR is that they're not drawing down the police force nearly as much as they should. Each STAR employee should reduce law enforcement by more than one employee, because providing housing is less work than jailing people. With the law enforcement approach to homelessness you're not only paying the responder, but also the officers providing security during the booking process and the officers doing the booking and the guards on the prisoners and the cooks who provide food for the prisoners.
If you provide housing and food stamps, you still cover the cost of a roof and food, but the person housed provides their own labor to buy, transport, and cook the food, while you don't need anyone to stand guard over them. It's not just a matter of "we're not jailing them, so we aren't guarding even though they're a risk". We know that putting people in jails, taking away their freedom, creates desperation, and that desperation is linked to increased hostility, while providing housing is linked to hope, which is linked to decreased hostility.
Communities become more peaceful and safer the more we provide hope instead of inflict desperation. STAR is moving in the right direction. I'd just like the people in charge of the cops to take more seriously the implications of what we're seeing with STAR and what we know from many decades of research in many countries.
Regarding the Homeless, John Oliver did this excellent story a couple years ago, and it's not as simple as "housing the homeless", there would have to be political will, and Liberals are just as bad as MAGATs in terms of NIMBYism. As for me, I'm totally fine replacing the thugs and criminals (i.e. venture capitalists and hedge-fund managers) in my neighborhood with houses to house the unhoused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liptMbjF3EE
I want to see dedicated, licensed mental health professionals, Disability Advocates, Rape Counselors,Social Workers, trained Family Violence Negotiators, LGBTQ+ Advocates, and LCDCs in place of the majority of LEOs. I want the Reid Technique outlawed. Every LEO should have their body cam on nonstop unless they are using the restroom and even then they should only be paused for a set time like 2 minutes. Police unions need to be limited to negotiating salaries and benefits, not to cover up misdeeds.
I did not know that the method shown in US cop shows was called the Reid Technique, but holy crap. The first time it was used, by the guy for whom it was named, resulted in a provably false confession and yet police are *still allowed to use it*. That is depraved.
The problems we have in the police in the UK are not as severe as yours, because few guns (although tasers are more widely used and causing the problems you would expect) and certainly no sold off cheap or free military surplus. But they are bad, the racism and misogyny are ingrained and it is difficult to see how with the best will possible they can change.
We've just had the Angiolini Report into the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer who arrested her then raped and murdered her during one of the limited lockdowns we had for COVID. Yet again it says he should never have been employed by the police, there were multiple opportunities to act including reports of sexual assault etc etc etc. And of course the actions recommended by previous reports have not been taken again. I haven't even got to the high percentage of female officers who have been harassed or assaulted by their fellow officers. It is honestly impossible to believe that the police here can adequately reform within their existing structures, but I don't think that reform of the kind you mean is on anyone's agenda here. I am so angry about it I don't know what to do with myself.
I'm so sorry. I have intermittently followed the story of Everard. I agree that guy should never have been part of the Met, much less in the specific positions he occupied. (Oy, vey!) Wholesale overturning of policing & public safety strategies is not on the agenda here in the USA either, though I like to think that if I just raise it -- in a sane way -- that the taboo against even **talking about** major changes (that include a priority on safety and appropriate and functional mechanisms for accountability) can be eroded in some small way.