When a police officer tortures a detainee into a false confession, it isn’t just one injustice that occurs:
- Someone is punished, often sent to death row, for a crime he or she didn’t commit;
- The actual perpetrator of the crime is off the hook;
- Another criminal – the officer who committed this atrocity – gets by with flouting the law and violating human rights;
- If the wrongful conviction is eventually corrected, perhaps after someone has spent half a lifetime behind bars, a well-deserved civil suit award comes out of taxpayers’ pockets.
The word “Chicago” may come to mind because of recent events. Richard M. Daley has rightfully received praise for much of what he has done as mayor, but he’s done a disservice to the city, his party, and America, by ignoring the police torture issue for so long and for accepting the “conviction at any cost” credo when he was State’s Attorney of Cook County. Unfortunately, he has a lot of company. Many other municipalities, large and small, have borne the same guilt.
Police torture is a crime that typically has numerous eye witnesses. The well-known police “code of silence” makes acquiescent accessories to a felony of the other officers. It’s not unlike the deadly rule against “snitching” in prisons and organized crime families. That’s not good company for our law enforcement agencies to keep.
In America, you have a right to expect that you will not be stopped for a burnt-out taillight and wind up on trial for murder because your requests for a lawyer were ignored and you couldn’t tolerate any more beating, burning, and electric shock. You have a right to know that the person who committed a crime isn’t laughing while someone else gets punished for it.
What’s the solution? There’s no one simple answer. Congressman Danny Davis and others are on the right track in pushing for a federal law against police torture with no statute of limitations. It should also be treated as a serious crime when one officer fails to report criminal acts by a fellow officer. I don’t mean taking an extra ten minutes for lunch or pocketing some paper clips from Midnight Office Supply. I mean felonies, like rape, beatings and torture, extortion, and payoffs from criminals, as some examples.
There’s one more suggestion that may surprise you initially: Malpractice insurance for law-enforcement officers. As a psychologist I couldn’t get on the staff of a hospital without it, and the only armaments in my arsenal were psych tests, listening, talking, and writing reports. How much more sensible is it for someone who carries a deadly weapon and arrest power in your name? In the event of a proven ethical violation or illegal act, the rates go up and it’s the guilty party’s pocketbook that takes the hit. Any substantial award is paid by the insurance, up to policy limits. When the individual becomes uninsurable, he or she also becomes unemployable, except possibly in a desk job with no weapon, no power of arrest, no uniform or badge, and no unsupervised contact with people in custody.
It isn’t just Chicago’s problem when it happens in Chicago, or New York’s when that’s the venue, or town X’s when officers of X commit the crime. Just as Americans know of injustices in Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, people around the world hear what happens in the USA. Accepting violations of human rights within our borders is a betrayal of our allies, and a gift to those who foment hatred against us.
Paul Karsten Fauteck, Psy.D.