And, what does the quoted officer say in the story about lying under oath?
"Behind closed doors, we call it testilying," a New York City police officer, Pedro Serrano, said in a recent interview, echoing a word that officers coined at least 25 years ago. "You take the truth and stretch it out a little bit."
An officer lying under oath in order to sway a verdict calls into question every single police report or court testimony from that officer.
You're absolutely correct. This is extremely serious.
I assume such a list would have rows consisting of, at minimum:
a. link to case's public testimony (CPT)
b. text in CPT to officer's statement.
c. text in CPT that contradicts the statement.
(I'd love to see an example row!)
2. Innocent until proven guilty? I'd say best to start with the clear lies first to build the list's credibility. However enough borderline cases surrounding an individual or department can also be interesting.
3. Defamation requires that the statements about the person be false. Referencing court docs about what they said should obviate that concern. Maybe the trick is to bill the db as a "list of inconsistencies" rather than outright lies.
4. I'd be more concerned about DoS attack rather than spam.
Hmm I like how your idea helps with both (3) as you said, and also with what I called "spam".
I had in mind a service where people were allowed to write in their claims of testilying -- how do you prevent it being "spammed" by every criminal with a grudge against a cop.
By asking them to cut and paste text from CPT -- which can then be electronically verified, you can cut down on the casual attempts. Of course a real attacker can get around that trivially.
Another question is where to host it. While truth is a libel defence in the US -- I am not sure that is true in other countries.
Unfortunately, I am unaware of any of those. It stands to reason that police officers speaking openly in this manner about lying under oath don't face repercussions and consequently don't get tracked much.
It's not perjury unless it's willful. I have no doubt that some of these inconsistencies (most?) are deliberate, but human memory is often pretty terrible. Good luck proving that the officer was deliberately not telling the truth.
Well, usually this comes from written statements right after the event right? It's not like there's a several week gap between the event and the report.... right?
How about making it a crime to misremember? Sure would make you think twice before you testified something as fact. Human memory is _very_ fallible. Time we started treating it that way.
