| > I must assume you're retracting your earlier statements, then No. The reason it is reasonable to be wary of law enforcement is because the police don't care if you're guilty. Let me be more precise about what I mean by that. It may well be that most individual police officers really do care if you're innocent. But on a systemic level they do not care. They are trained not to care. Their job (they are told) is not to determine guilt or innocence. That (they are told) is the prosecutor's job. (And the prosecutors usually pass the buck to the jury.) The police are not rewarded for letting innocent people go, they are rewarded for making arrests on probable cause. (And prosecutors are not rewarded for letting innocent people go either, they are rewarded for securing convictions.) I did not mean to cast aspersions on individual law enforcement officers. I'm sure most of them are fine upstanding people. They work hard. They put their lives on the line. They deal with the scumbags of the world so the rest of us don't have to. I respect them and I'm grateful that they are there. But the police (and prosecutors) work within a system that actively discourages them from thinking about whether you are actually innocent (except insofar as your actual innocence might prevent them from convicting you) and encourages them to think instead only in terms of whether they can collect enough evidence to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the mind of a jury, or to present to you a sufficiently credible threat of being able to convince a jury so that you'll accept a plea bargain. Your actual guilt is (and by their training ought to be) irrelevant to them. BTW, there's a defensible argument that the system ought to be this way, which is that determining actual guilt or innocence is really, really hard, and individuals are easily swayed by emotions and other irrational factors (in both directions BTW) and this system is designed so that no one individual's irrationality can affect the outcome too much. Flawed as it is, it is arguable that it's the best we can do given human nature. Postscript (since I just saw your edit): a 0.5% false conviction rate is very high. There are about 8 million convicts in the U.S. At 0.5%, that would be 40,000 wrongly convicted. That's about 500 years worth of lightning strike casualties. > the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime Clearly. But a conspiracy is not the only way to produce bad outcomes. |