To serve and protect, police are allowed to slander and destroy. Cops in many states and localities have acquired the right to lie about their shootings, searches, and practically anything else. Police have routinely planted drugs, guns, and other evidence to incriminate innocent people, while police labs have engaged in wholesale fraud blighting tens of thousands of lives.

Supreme Court rulings turned a trickle of police perjury into a torrent. In 1967, the Supreme Court, in the case of McCray v. Illinois, gave policemen the right to keep secret the name of their “reliable informant” they used to get search warrants or target people for arrest. Law professor Irving Younger observed at the time: “The McCray case almost guarantees wholesale police perjury. When his conduct is challenged as constituting an unreasonable search and seizure … every policeman will have a genie-like informer to legalize his master’s arrests.” The Supreme Court created a judicial playing field on which police were the only witnesses who can safely lie.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that government officials are immune from lawsuits even when their brazen lies in court testimony resulted in the conviction of innocent people. The court fretted that “the alternative of limiting the official’s immunity would disserve the broader public interest.” Honest government was not one of the “broader public interests” the court recognized that day.

In 1992, Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state representative and University of Minnesota law professor, conducted a confidential survey of Chicago judges, prosecutors, narcotics agents, and public defenders on Fourth Amendment issues. One Chicago prosecuting attorney observed that “in fifty percent of small drug cases [police] don’t accurately state what happens.” Twenty-two percent of Chicago judges surveyed reported that they believed that police are lying in court more than half of the time they testify in relation to Fourth Amendment issues; 92 percent of the judges said they believed that police lie at least “some of the time.” Thirty-eight percent of the Chicago judges said they believed that police superiors encourage policemen to lie in court. One judge did not even know how perjury was defined under the Illinois Criminal Code. After Orfield read him the technical definition, the judge replied: “Then there is sure a hell of a lot of perjury going on in this courtroom.”

In 1994, the Mollen Commission reported that “the practice of [NYPD] police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: ‘testilying.’” Federal appeals court chief judge Alex Kozinski observed in 1995: “It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers.” Former San Jose, California, police chief Joseph McNamara observed that “hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests.”

In Tulia, Texas, Tom Coleman, an undercover cop on the federally funded Panhandle Drug Task Force, carried out drug stings in 1999 that resulted in the arrests of 46 people — equal to 10 percent of the black population of the town. There were no independent witnesses to back up Coleman’s accusations of pervasive drug dealing in........

© Eurasia Review