http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-trainum24-2008oct24,0,7918545.story

The point is that well-meaning cops can elicit false confessions. That is bad. You would probably agree that that is bad. You can detect these false confessions if you videotape the entire interrogation.

After all, could you possibly feel worse than if you put an innocent person to death or in prison by eliciting a false confession? Do you really want that on your conscience? Being able to detect false confessions by videotaping the entire interrogation protects against police error. Including innocent police error.

(And there is guilty police error too: around here we had the infamous State Police Troop C evidence-tampering scandal, in which dozens of innocent people were framed using false evidence by the state police. Videotaping wouldn’t help with that, obviously, but you have to realize that some police really do think that they deserve to decide who goes to prison, rather than the judges and juries who are actually supposed to)

You are correct police officers are human beings. They have the same flaws as we all do. Some are good and some are bad. It is the bad cops that can do a tremendous amount of harm.

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I will do whatever is legally and morally necessary to obtain a confession, if I truly believe the person I am interogating is guilty.
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conviction of a truly guilty person is not in question here. How that conviction is obtained is. How you interpret what is legally and morally necessary may not actually be legal nor moral. A major case in point would be the thought processes of the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and his reinterpretation of the use of torture and what torture is.

Gonzalez for whatever reason may truly feel that his interpretation is legal and moral. But, it is not.

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First, every one from the original author to everyone who posted, obviously has never had to physically deal with the trama of a real life blood and guts felony, where the officer on the scene first deals with the victim, then usually the victims’ relative and friends…meaning that no matter how professional, mature or experienced an officer is, the officer cannot divorce him/her self from being a human being. Do you get my drift here?
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And that is exactly why we have laws that protect people from over zealous cops. If you are a good cop that knows what they are doing and do not depend on bending or breaking the law to be successful at your job then you should want full video taping from start to stop. That way your good work is protected from false accusations.

Obviously, you have never worked with victims of police misconduct or their families. Police misconduct occurs all the time.

Pious you want to talk about pious. It is myopic, obtuse, and pious to think that people’s rights should not be protected at all points of contact with law enforcement. this should include video taping. it will protect you and your case as well. It is only incompetent, pious, myopic, obtuse cops that should be worried about mandatory video taping.

See, I’ve got it. I feel so grown up now.

You couch potato “expects” love to pontificate on how an officer should behave, but your degree of experience has been TV or cinema, or perhaps esoteric extrapolations in text books.

What am I getting at? Police officers are human beings. That means we are not automotans that function the clinical vaccum offered in the luxury of your myopic diatribes.

I will do whatever is legally and morally necessary to obtain a confession, if I truly believe the person I am interogating is guilty. Listen to me, you pious dorks…people will lie to save their asses. The Supeme Court has repeatedly ruled that I can lie or decieve a suspect to obtain a confession, as long as I do not cause the suspect physical or deliberate psychological injury.

If you video tape each and every word, nuance and action in police interogations, conviction rates (of the truly guilty) will plummet. But perhaps that is your true goal, all along…..why do I waste my breath?

Cops (translate – people who put pants on the same way you do) DO NOT (read my lips) do not want to convict the innocent of crimes they have not committed. period. get that? now grow up.

The obvious hurdle with that, as I mention, is how to define that start point. Do you start videotaping when a suspect is “in custody”? We all know how pointless that term is when it comes to interrogations and actually getting incriminating information. So something before that? Initial contact? A warning to not talk in a location where the contact cannot be recorded?

That’s the part that I’m least clear on, but if we put our heads together, I’m sure we can come up with a workable starting point that would eliminate – or reduce greatly – any concerns that there was prior inappropriate/coercive contact.

I think this pretty well sums it up. The psychological manipulation will happen well before any video is taken, and the video will show the statement without any of the prior manipulation that gave rise to the statement.

Edit: I edited it a bit. Perhaps that’s more accurate?

TexPD: That’s something that can be avoided only if the videotaping occurs from the outset. If the starting point is too late, then some of that coercion may occur prior to it. Certainly, if all contact is videotaped, it probably would eliminate false promises like that.