A perpetual wonderment is that a cop can take the witness stand at trial and remember minute, often inconsequential details of an incident that happened a year or two earlier.  In the interim, he may have confronted hundreds, maybe thousands of people in similar circumstances, but in the witness chair, his memory is razor sharp.  The wonderment isn’t that the cop has superhuman memory. No, it’s that juries believe the testimony.

Before testifying, you see, the cop reads over his reports, that contain the important details. He’s prepped and prodded by the prosecutor, much like testing a school boy to make sure he’s studied.  As for the minor details, the ones that blur with the hundreds of other things he’s done since the arrest, well, those he can just make up, as long as he makes it look like he knows. 

After all, there’s no one to contradict him, one of the foremost reasons the prosecution only calls one of the two cops on the scene.  If they have to call both, then they have to work harder to get their stories straight.  Even so, there are so basic answers to erroneous detail testimony (“I was focused on the gun in the defendant’s hand, so I didn’t pay attention to what type of sneakers he was wearing”) that can cover the goof. 

And juries believe it. It’s hard to blame them, as they don’t know that police officers are practiced at the art of testifying, have a pocket full of pat answers.  They haven’t heard the prosecutor’s carefully crafted responses to routine failings, the “why would he lie” argument that ordinary people find so very persuasive. Sure, criminal defense lawyers are jaded, as they’ve heard it a hundred times, but to a juror hearing it for the first time, it makes enormous sense.

And so people are convinced that, for better or worse, the testifying cop is telling the truth.

Which makes the fact that no officer remembered anything about what happened to Matthew Olson all the more ridiculous.  From the Daytona Beach News-Journal :

“It was a pretty egregious set of facts,” said Olson’s Orlando-area attorney, Howard Marks. “He was in his house sleeping. He just opened the door a crack and two officers barged in and beat the hell out of him. … Then they did an illegal search without probable cause.”

It’s sufficiently outside the norm that it’s the sort of thing a cop remembers, right?  Well, not in Daytona Beach.

Police Chief Mike Chitwood said some aspects of the case don’t add up, such as Olson not complaining of any medical issues when he was booked into the jail. But it would have been a tough case to take to trial because there was no internal affairs report, no 911 recordings and officers couldn’t remember much of anything, the chief said.

It was as if it never happened. Except it did. No paper work. No memory. There were six cops involved, Craig Buth and Scott Goss were the ones who pushed their way in, Robert Atkins and Scott Barnes tossed the place for fun, and Elizabeth Morgan and Kenneth Dier were there for no particular reason. Yet nobody can remember a thing.

To the extent we believe we know what the police are up to, such as how many innocent people minding their own business are thrown against a wall and searched in New York City’s stop and frisk fiasco, we rely on police reports. We rely on their existence. We rely on their accuracy. We rely on the police to tell us the bad, as well as the good, of what they do to people. 

Or, as happened in Daytona Beach, they just don’t write any reports when something bad happens and, poof, it never happened.  They don’t let the guy whose head they smashed on the ground complete the forms for them, or even read them over and approve of their accuracy, so it’s entirely in the hands of the police to create the foundational reporting of an incident. Of course, we can trust their recitation of events because they have no reason to lie.

The City of Daytona Beach settled the action by Matthew Olson for $250,000 because it would be awfully hard to defend when no one remembered anything about the case. Why this amount isn’t exactly clear, since Olson’s out-of-pocket damages were calculated to be a bit higher.

The settlement ended both that federal case and claims that had been pending in state court, allowing the city to avoid what could have been a much larger award for pain and suffering as well as $642,370 the man, Matthew Olson, claimed he was owed for past and future medical expenses, lost wages and attorney’s fees.

Perhaps he wanted to get the case over with. Perhaps he feared reversal on appeal a decade from now based on some qualified immunity ruling, because police officers may not be aware that they can’t burst into a house, beat the crap out of a guy, search the place, all without a warrant. You never know.

Or maybe the whole thing just never happened?  Nah.  If there’s one thing you can bet on, if the police didn’t do what Olson said they did, that they would remember.

H/T FritzMuffKnuckle