The police are under immense pressure to put somebody away or else they're basically telling the public "we have no idea who did this crime". They need to find and convict a suspect to instill confidence from the public that they're doing a good job, in order to keep their jobs and their funding. This doesn't mean they need to find the actual criminal, only that they need to appear that they did.
The more information you have about a person, the more you can present to a jury selective facts about them that make them look guilty. And with enough circumstantial evidence you could make quite a lot of innocent people look guilty, despite having no causal evidence whatsoever. Google is providing circumstantial evidence, not causal.
> The police are under immense pressure to put somebody away or else they're basically telling the public "we have no idea who did this crime". They need to find and convict a suspect to instill confidence from the public that they're doing a good job, in order to keep their jobs and their funding. This doesn't mean they need to find the actual criminal, only that they need to appear that they did.
they don't even have to put the person away necessarily. an important metric used to evaluate police departments is the clearance rate, which is just the fraction of crimes where they found someone to charge. whether or not the charges stick or get thrown out entirely does not affect this number, and would more typically be used to evaluate the state/district attorney's office.
so really all the police need to look good is to collect the bare minimum amount of evidence to charge someone in a case and then move on. if the conviction rate ends up being low or a bunch of charges get thrown out, they can just say the prosecutors are lazy/incompetent. at the same time, the prosecutors can point the finger back at the police and say they throw out so many charges because the police don't collect evidence properly. as long as they drop the weak cases, plea out the middling ones, and take a few slam-dunk cases to court, their numbers will look okay too. all the links in the chain only get examined together in the few high-profile cases that linger in the news.
>They need to find and convict a suspect to instill confidence from the public that they're doing a good job, in order to keep their jobs and their funding. This doesn't mean they need to find the actual criminal, only that they need to appear that they did.
There are always instances of bad process and bad outcomes, but in general that's not how the justice system works. I'm sorry for your cynicism.
The justice system is run by humans, it will make mistakes ... so I'm not sure what you're proving by pointing out the tragic stories of individuals who were failed by the system. You will never design a system to 100% prevent innocent people from being punished, or guilty from being acquitted.
The big picture is this: America is a huge country of 320 million with thousands of people per day moving through the justice system. The vast majority are sentenced/acquitted based on the crimes they did or did not (respectively) commit.
It's not cynicism, it's Goodhart's law applied to actual law enforcement.
There are good police units who have it in their culture of not bringing a suspect to trial unless they have substantial evidence, and presuming innocence until guilt is proven. There are also bad ones who will take a person to court because it fits a description and allows them to close a case. Whichever path they choose, police won't be held accountable for taking shortcuts except in egregious, high profile cases.
>It's not cynicism, it's Goodhart's law applied to actual law enforcement.
What OP pointed out was a potential problem that could be rectified. I don't get a sense of the scale of this problem and I don't see any evidence that what OP specified is an intrinsically large-scale structural problem that leads to innocent people being incarcerated in significant numbers.
>There are also bad ones who will take a person to court because it fits a description and allows them to close a case.
America is a big country of 320 million, with 700,000 police officers, and thousands of people moving through the justice system every single day. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of the process breaking down. That says nothing about whether or not this is a systemic, structural problem. And even if it was, it could be adjusted by policy and regulatory changes.
>Whichever path they choose, police won't be held accountable for taking shortcuts except in egregious, high profile cases.
This kind of argumentation is so annoying. You're clearly talking out of ignorance based on your own interpretation of how policing is done (which stems from movies and twitter). What do you mean police is not held accountable? Police departments are highly regulated. Every single aspect of policing has a process and regulation attached to it, and is coupled with enforcement and oversight from independent bodies.
> You're clearly talking out of ignorance based on your own interpretation of how policing is done
I am someone who knows someone who was convicted over purely circumstantial evidence, and I am only making the claim that we've built a system that leads to wrongful convictions in the face of incomplete evidence. The sibling comment gave 60 cases that would back this claim up, and you responded with "well that's just going to happen by law of large numbers." It's very easy to say it just happens when it hasn't happened to you.
The police are under immense pressure to put somebody away or else they're basically telling the public "we have no idea who did this crime". They need to find and convict a suspect to instill confidence from the public that they're doing a good job, in order to keep their jobs and their funding. This doesn't mean they need to find the actual criminal, only that they need to appear that they did.
The more information you have about a person, the more you can present to a jury selective facts about them that make them look guilty. And with enough circumstantial evidence you could make quite a lot of innocent people look guilty, despite having no causal evidence whatsoever. Google is providing circumstantial evidence, not causal.