> When they find a suspect, they want to believe he's guilty, and ignore or even destroy evidence suggesting otherwise...This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with the death penalty.
There's a more charitable way to reach the same conclusion. Experienced cops must see dozens or hundreds of cases over their careers, where guys who "obviously did it" get off on technicalities or random chance. (This is an official TV Trope for a reason.) Even if we grant that that instinct is actually unreliable and often wrong, that's still a huge number of real cases where the "system didn't work". From an outsider perspective, of course, we tolerate that as a tradeoff to avoid convicting innocent people. But from an insider perspective, it's natural to come to see The System as an adversary, and to see your job as working around and compensating for that Failed System.
This is a problem, and it absolutely ruins a lot of innocent people's lives, and there are clearly ways we could address it on the margins. But at the same time, it might not be a central problem that we solve directly and completely. Rather, we could acknowledge that, to some extent, it's an expected component of a deliberately adversarial system. A lot of legal mechanisms work this way. My defense attorney's job isn't to be a perfectly objective arbiter of whether I should be in jail. Rather, their job is to make the best (most overwhelmingly biased) argument possible that I shouldn't be, and we leave it to the prosecutor (and their presumably opposite biases) to argue that I should. There are reasonable limits to this, and you can get disbarred for violating them, but for the most part everyone's biases are acknowledged and expected. That's not entirely true of policing, but it's part of the truth. Juries of our peers exist because we know it's not realistic to make the police or the judiciary solely responsible for fairness and justice. We can understand this as a normal part of human nature and system design, without necessarily taking a position on whether it represents "incompetence" or "dishonesty".
So...why nitpick these words to death like this? Because there's a symmetry here. When one group is calling another incompetent, it's a sure bet that the second group is calling the first clueless. And it goes without saying that both groups consider the other dishonest. Each side retreats to its bubble, and progress is impossible. The rhetorical habits that break this cycle are super important.
There's a more charitable way to reach the same conclusion. Experienced cops must see dozens or hundreds of cases over their careers, where guys who "obviously did it" get off on technicalities or random chance. (This is an official TV Trope for a reason.) Even if we grant that that instinct is actually unreliable and often wrong, that's still a huge number of real cases where the "system didn't work". From an outsider perspective, of course, we tolerate that as a tradeoff to avoid convicting innocent people. But from an insider perspective, it's natural to come to see The System as an adversary, and to see your job as working around and compensating for that Failed System.
This is a problem, and it absolutely ruins a lot of innocent people's lives, and there are clearly ways we could address it on the margins. But at the same time, it might not be a central problem that we solve directly and completely. Rather, we could acknowledge that, to some extent, it's an expected component of a deliberately adversarial system. A lot of legal mechanisms work this way. My defense attorney's job isn't to be a perfectly objective arbiter of whether I should be in jail. Rather, their job is to make the best (most overwhelmingly biased) argument possible that I shouldn't be, and we leave it to the prosecutor (and their presumably opposite biases) to argue that I should. There are reasonable limits to this, and you can get disbarred for violating them, but for the most part everyone's biases are acknowledged and expected. That's not entirely true of policing, but it's part of the truth. Juries of our peers exist because we know it's not realistic to make the police or the judiciary solely responsible for fairness and justice. We can understand this as a normal part of human nature and system design, without necessarily taking a position on whether it represents "incompetence" or "dishonesty".
So...why nitpick these words to death like this? Because there's a symmetry here. When one group is calling another incompetent, it's a sure bet that the second group is calling the first clueless. And it goes without saying that both groups consider the other dishonest. Each side retreats to its bubble, and progress is impossible. The rhetorical habits that break this cycle are super important.