Police Deception and Dishonesty by Luke William Hunt;

Author:Luke William Hunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

To be sure, this is a dire warning with respect to law enforcement tactics. Police have immense power and discretion to use deception and dishonesty in a way that manipulates one’s liberty, as well as community trust.

Considering these worries, what sort of real-world scenarios does Bok have in mind? In the first two categories (avoiding harm and producing benefits), she considers “lies in crisis” cases such as when dishonesty may be necessary to address an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.42 Although such cases are justified (and, again, consistent with the emergency constraint of the prerogative power test), it is important to be wary of how such threats may be exaggerated by those in power.43 We are all familiar with so-called ticking time bomb scenarios, in which a government agent must torture a suspect in order to find the location of a ticking time bomb that will kill many (millions!) of people. However, these scenarios are largely fictional and do not reflect the decisions of actual government agents.44 Likewise, we must take care in our analysis of any “crisis” in which the state suggests that dishonesty and deception on par with fraud is necessary.

How about “fairness” scenarios in which we “lie to liars” because, presumably, that’s what they deserve—or when we lie to our “enemies”?45 This is surely relevant to the police, who deal with dishonest and deceptive criminal suspects routinely. Although Bok does not focus on the police specifically, she is generally wary of one justifying dishonesty based on another’s dishonesty because “we are likely to invite vast increases in actual deception and to escalate the seriousness of lies told in retaliation . . . [which] would not stand up well under the test of publicity.”46 More to the present point, if the state is to characterize criminal suspects as “enemies,” we must also consider how treating such persons with deception and dishonesty will affect the broader community (while keeping in mind the justification of dishonesty to prevent actual harm in an actual crisis). Bok writes: “Governments build up enormous, self-perpetuating machineries of deception in adversary contexts. And when a government is known to practice deception, the results are self-defeating and erosive.”47 It is difficult to find a better assessment of the current police institution given the pervasive (business as usual) use of deception and dishonesty—not to mention the erosion of community trust in the police.

Notwithstanding the above analysis, Bok suggests that it is more excusable to lie (if honesty is not a viable option) to persons who have been publicly declared to be enemies—such as criminals. Still, she is wary of such broad declarations given the potential for discrimination and the fact that “[w]ith the growing militarization of the world have come increased powers of brutal internal policing.”48 Here again, this is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today—which I have elsewhere described as a police “identity crisis” stemming in part from militarization steeped in a “warrior” ethos.49 We will thus need to keep in

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