Why can’t law enforcement admit their mistakes?
Their refusal to do so leads to countless wrongful convictions, but psychology says few will cop to misconduct
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/21/why_cant_law_enforcement_admit_their_mistakes/
Another in the line of posts on the American InJustice system…
This one speaks to the psychology of the system in that there is a huge reluctance to being wrong. That reluctance is so strong, likely, and rather ironically, because the consequences of being wrong are so huge. If you are an honest member of the system wouldn’t it be hard to live with yourself if you had been instrumental in destroying an innocent person’s life because you wouldn’t consider another suspect?
I also found this little quote quite interesting:
“…People who suffer from depression have better memory than people who don’t, because part of our ability to survive and not to be depressed is to forget a lot of stuff.”
What I get out of this quote is that people in general are exceptional about lying to themselves by virtue of ‘forgetting’ past intransigence. Perhaps depressed people are depressed _because_ they can’t forget when they have fucked up? Anyway, it is rather telling, to me, that the default condition of the human psych (since we treat depression and not the alternative) is that we can’t remember.
Mentioned at the end of the article is how verbiage choices might make it more difficult to admit error when it comes along. I am sure that there is some element of truth to that, but in my mind the biggest cause for the railroading of innocents is that there is absolutely no consequences for doing so. I becha that if the people involved in the prosecution and conviction of an innocent had some tangible consequences that it would happen a lot less.
Right. And there are tangible consequences if prosecutors fail to convict: they get replaced. Rewards, whether for good or bad actions, have their intended effect.