7 - Police-Induced Errors

Summary

If the police do not (develop and refine standards), legislators, judges, and jurors, who know far less about policing, will do it for them, often at great expense and after great pain.

— James J. Fyfe et al.

Introduction

Criminal justice errors typically begin with a police response to a call for service. What the responding officers and investigators do (or fail to do) and how well they do it can have a profound impact on the ability of the police both to solve crimes and reduce mistaken detentions and arrests. What are the key factors that distinguish effective from ineffective police responses to crimes, and accurate assessments of the identity of offenders from inaccurate ones that lead to arrests of innocent persons? Under what circumstances are police-initiated contacts appropriate and inappropriate, especially those involving profiling? What, in short, is the nature of justice errors attributable to the police and what are their sources? How do we find out about them, and how might we discover them more quickly? Can accountability systems be established to induce the police to substantially reduce the combined social costs associated with the two basic types of justice errors identified in Chapters 2 and 3? How might the goal of error management be balanced with other policing goals? These are the central questions of this chapter.