The Police Are Lying Liars Who Lie To You

Thomas Perez, Jr., tears his clothing several hours into the interrogation for a murder
he not only did not commit, but it did not even happen. (San Bernardino Sun)

The mathematical subdiscipline called Game Theory uses an influential thought experiment called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this exercise, police question you and your friend separately for some crime. Interrogators claim to have substantive proof of your guilt. If neither of you confesses, you’ll receive moderate sentences. But if one confesses and implicates the other, the confessor walks free, while the other does hard time. Using subjective measures of likelihood, should you stand fast or confess?

I’ve seen this exercise repeated in popular science and mathematics books, and in introductory undergraduate textbooks. But the narration always focuses on the likelihood of you or your friend confessing. It consistently omits one other subjective likelihood: how likely we consider it that interrogators are lying. Under the Supreme Court standard in Frazier v. Cupp (1969), police have qualified immunity for what jurists call “deceptive interrogation tactics.” That is, they’re permitted to lie with impunity.

According to the San Bernardino Sun, police in Fontana, California, arrested Thomas Perez, Jr., in August 2018 on suspicion of murdering his father. Thomas Perez, Sr., wasn’t dead; he hadn’t even been missing particularly long. Four officers grilled Perez Jr. so long and hard that, per the Sun, he struck himself, screamed, and tore his clothes. According to the Guardian, the interrogation lasted seventeen hours, long enough for Perez to become “sleep-deprived” and possibly delusional.

According to both sources, the police response looks wildly slipshod. Though Perez Jr. commenced the investigation for his putatively missing father, the dispatch officer who took his call deemed him suspicious for being insufficiently attentive. Therefore they brought Perez in for questioning, having deemed him the prime suspect, before commencing the investigation or gathering any evidence. In other words, police unilaterally decided not only that a crime had occurred, but who was responsible for it.

Worse, though, were the primary tactics employed. Police told Perez they had overwhelming evidence that didn’t exist. They insisted they had Perez Sr.’s body in the building, although as noted, he wasn’t dead; he’d simply gone on an unannounced wander. They withheld Perez Jr’s depression and hypertension medications, claiming he didn’t really need them. There was no crime, no evidence, and trivially little investigation. Police simply fabricated everything, then used their lurid fantasies as “proof.”

After coercing a confession out of Thomas Perez Jr., police left him alone with his
dog. Moments after this still was taken, he used the drawstring from his shorts to attempt
to hang himself. (San Bernardino Sun)

Since the 1950s, police interrogators have mostly used the Reid Technique, an approach based on the most up-to-date psychological assessments of the Eisenhower era. Rather than physical force, the preferred prior technique, Reid Technique interrogators apply psychological pressure to achieve what courts still consider the gold standard of evidence, a confession. One problem: according to informed critics, the Reid Technique produces false confessions over fifty percent of the time. Its outcomes simply are not reliable.

The Reid Technique actively aims to leave suspects desperate, isolated, and dependent on police. Lies and leading questions are totally permissible. If you’ve ever watched cop dramas and heard an interrogator say “Here’s what I think happened,” that’s the Reid Technique. The technique also permits threatening suspects. Many commentators have expressed greatest outrage at interrogators’ threat to euthanize Perez Jr.’s dog, though that too was probably a lie; they probably lacked authority to do that.

All these tools are completely impermissible when interrogating foreign combatants under the Geneva Convention. If you remember the transnational outrage surrounding the Abu-Ghraib prison scandal, you know this. Attempts to psychologically degrade prisoners are crimes against humanity. But these same techniques—lying, torture, threats, withholding medical care, and more—are perfectly acceptable when applied by American police to American citizens. Legality doesn’t matter, as any crimes get swept together under the rubric of “qualified immunity.”

Beyond the legal and moral implications, the Reid Technique just doesn’t work. Fontana police coerced a confession from Perez Jr. and continued holding him for psychiatric evaluation for several days after they knew Perez Sr. was alive. As noted, around half of Reid Technique confessions are demonstrably false, but juries often don’t know that, and consider confessions binding. In my adopted home state, the Beatrice Six demonstrates how powerful and destructive false confessions can be.

Qualified immunity bakes dishonesty into police procedure. Evaluating police work by case closures rather than accuracy, creates perverse incentives to produce confessions by any available means. Even police who mean well and work honestly are evaluated by the same yardstick, forcing them to adopt specious methods if they work. We can argue whether the police can be reformed, but one thing is clear: abuses like the Fontana police will always squeak through on qualified immunity.