While it’s gone on forever, it really wasn’t official until the Supreme Court decided Whren*.  That’s where Justice Antonin Scalia concluded it was just too unwieldy for judges to ascertain truth, so instead held pretext stops lawful.  The word “pretext” makes it sound sanitary. What he meant was that police were officially entitled to lie in order to circumvent the Fourth Amendment.

It was just a hop, skip and jump to  knock and talk, where consent to enter and search a home could be obtained by lies.  Who needs a warrant when you can convince someone to willingly open the door?  So what if they did so because you lied about some fake emergency that was about to threaten their life, or some benign problem that needed an easy fix?  It could have been true, and that’s close enough for government work.  That “knowing, voluntary and intelligent” waiver stuff is for kids.

So this is our world, with the law held hostage to whatever means is most effective.  But we know this.

Have a few beers with a judge, or a prosecutor past his three year commitment, and they will tell you. They know it. They’re not stupid. This is not an epiphany. You haven’t discovered anything new. They know it.

Radley Balko posts a few paragraphs  from a decision by Volusia County, Florida Judge Joseph G. Will.  This was part of the underlying posts that gave rise  to my slice discussing the reasons why cops lie.  Judge Will includes some language that will cheer up the choir.

What are the costs of teaching the community that law enforcement officers, whom ideally deserve the trust of the citizen, cannot be trusted to tell the simple truth? That no one is wearing the white hat anymore? That the ends justify the means? That the virtue of honesty is essential in our families and individual lives, but that same virtue is optional for the executive branch of our government in the exercise of its police powers? A nation founded on the notions we find in our Constitution is surely better than this.

Great stuff, as is the rest of Judge Will’s opinion. Reading it will validate your anger and frustration, and force your anguished cries about what they have done to your beloved Nation.

Note that I say “your” and not “our.”  It’s not that I don’t applaud Judge Will’s decision. I most certainly do. And not merely the underlying concept, but the way in which he expressed it as well.  It is a great decision.  It’s just that it’s nothing new.

There is a putative line that the court pretends exists between the fully approved use of lies to circumvent constitutional rights and the truthfulness of police testimony on the witness stand.  In other words, cops lie to us but not to judges.  And, of course, it’s nonsense, as everybody knows.  Once the court enshrined lying as a valuable law enforcement tool, the game was over.

It isn’t a question of the public, or the courts, believing that lying is morally reprehensible.  Everybody is in agreement about that, at least in a vacuum.  But the countervailing need to use every effective means to investigate, prosecute and convict the guilty is more important. It’s a value judgment by our legal system, and lying has already won. 

The Supreme Court ascribes the ability to police,  long before the  New Professionalism canard became the excuse, to distinguish between those times when it was acceptable to lie and those times when police officers would recognize their duty to tell the whole truth. 

But no one seriously believed that police would adhere to the distinction. Lying is easy and effective. Truth screws things up, and besides, we can’t handle the truth.  It’s ugly and hard to catch the bad guys, and it’s their job to make it happen. Just close your eyes and let them do their job.

So the die has been cast: lying works. Judges are well aware that lying works.  Judges even tell it to the jury so that those too naive to realize that lying works will understand that it’s necessary to the functioning of our system. 

Judge Will agues that the police, who seek the trust of the public, cannot obtain it by lying to them.  Maybe nobody told Judge Will that the public doesn’t want to trust police to tell the truth, but to trust the cops to do whatever they have to do to convict the bad guy.  After all, “the truth shall set you free,” and as the Supreme Court made clear, we can’t have that. 

* Your mileage may vary, but I blame Whren.

Update: Via the Daytona Beach News Journal (H/T  Tom Fielding), Daytona Beach Police Chief Michael Chitwood responds to Judge Will’s decision:

In closing, do not confuse deception with lying during court proceedings, falsifying official documents and evidence or lying during internal investigations.

No police administrator would tolerate this behavior which destroys an officer’s ability to perform their official duties in a moral, ethical and just manner.

And to the judge directly (cc to the paper), Chitwood expresses his outrage at Will’s “bias,” invoking the words of John Adams: “Facts are stubborn things.”  And if his cops say they’re facts, then dammit, they’re facts.  So there you go. It could never happen. It just wouldn’t be tolerated. Sleep easy, folks.