Celebrating Police Misconduct

It is not only US movies and televesion that show the good guys ignoring the fundamental rights of suspects.

If you watch a typical detective movie or series, you will have witnessed one or more of the following: Police smashing open an apartment door, crawling through a window, or picking a lock. The police have no warrant. It may be just a raw, lawless intrusion or perhaps an “exigent circumstance” is invented. “Didn’t you hear a cry for help?”. Crucial evidence turns up, perhaps hidden well away but reported as being on the kitchen table, satisfying the “plain view” exception.

Alternatively, entrance may be gained by an outright lie that secured consent or a warrant may be obtained with an affidavit that stretched the truth beyond all recognition. Then again, the warrant application may have been unexceptionable but the search may have far exceeded the warrant’s scope.

Quick wits may substitute for a warrant altogether as the officer gains a surreptitious look at records of business, hospital, or government agency.

The evildoer is punished. Good triumphs. The cop is a hero. The head of the bureau might preach against the abuses, but he is just a bureaucrat of the old school, and not too bright at that. Sometimes a judge does worse than sermonizing, actually throwing out the crucial evidence. Evil triumphs despite the dedicated police work.

At the Dirty Harry franchise extreme, confessions are beaten out of suspects, evildoers who could have been arrested are shot or blown up, and murders get pinned upon another to protect a vigilante. Your conscience may experience a pang or two. Still, it was really bad guys who got what was coming to them and Clint Eastwood’s characters are maybe flawed heroes, but heroes, nonetheless.

I thought it might be only in the US that these abuses were so central to police shows. The long-running British series “A Touch of Frost,” (1996 to 2010), shows that I was wrong. (A large part of the series is currently on YouTube with brief, if annoying, commercial intrusions.) The hero, Detective Inspector William Edward “Jack” Frost, takes pride in breaking the rules, those of his station chief Superintendent "Horn-rimmed Harry" Mullet, and also, and particularly, those of the Police and Evidence Act (PACE) designed to protect the rights of suspects and the community. Frost rarely, if ever, hesitates when the opportunity to make an illegal search or seizure presents itself.

Before questioning a suspect Frost gives the required “caution” (similar to US Miranda warnings) hurriedly, incorrectly, or not at all. He sometimes lies during interrogations. (This documented cause of many false confessions is, I hope you are astonished to learn, permitted in the US. It is, however, prohibited in Britain.) Frequently his interrogation technique also makes use of bullying or intimidation. In the most extreme scenes we see no recording device, which has been required by British law for custodial interrogations since 1984. (British interrogations now are very often video recorded.)

Perhaps Frost’s analytical abilities are more important in his nailing the evildoer than his unlawful conduct, but PACE violations do turn up in many, if not most, of the episodes. Superintendent Mullet is constantly riding Frost because the detective is always behind on his paperwork but not because he is violating the rights of citizens.

So, the fictional celebration of police work that succeeds by breaking the rules is not an exclusively US phenomenon.