Even if the outcome is some truly guilty people go free, I really do hope they overturn every single case these cops were involved with. Right now there are close to no consequences to this kind...
Even if the outcome is some truly guilty people go free, I really do hope they overturn every single case these cops were involved with. Right now there are close to no consequences to this kind of behavior. We're so used to hearing about cops being placed on administrative leave doing racist or bigoted things. If we start overturning every case that the cops were involved with, people will start to realize the far-reaching consequences of a corrupt system and perhaps they will put more pressure on it to reform or be thrown out.
I really hate the idea of witness testimony being the crutch of a case. We've shown time and time again that testimony is just not a good piece of evidence... yet there are so many cases in which the entirety of a case rests upon two parties disagreeing about what happened and there being no hard evidence and the system ruling in favor of one testimony (or a group of them) over another. Our system should not work like this. Furthermore trusting certain individuals more than others based on their job description only sets the system up for problems like this to exist. Why is a cop more 'trustworthy' than anyone else when we have so many clear cases of when this just shouldn't be true? Humans will be human, regardless of the job they take on, and humans are biased.
To be clear, I think there's a difference between expert witnesses and testimony. Consulting with a world leader in statistics about whether a statistical method employed to evaluate evidence is correct is a perfectly valid reason to put someone on the stand and ask them questions. A cop or someone who is an expert on cops could and should be questioned about procedure, norms, technical aspects of policing and anything else relevant to the job at hand, but an account of what happened should simply not be weighed as evidence when determining if someone is guilty or not - people are far too fallible.
Even if the outcome is some truly guilty people go free, I really do hope they overturn every single case these cops were involved with. Right now there are close to no consequences to this kind of behavior. We're so used to hearing about cops being placed on administrative leave doing racist or bigoted things. If we start overturning every case that the cops were involved with, people will start to realize the far-reaching consequences of a corrupt system and perhaps they will put more pressure on it to reform or be thrown out.
I really hate the idea of witness testimony being the crutch of a case. We've shown time and time again that testimony is just not a good piece of evidence... yet there are so many cases in which the entirety of a case rests upon two parties disagreeing about what happened and there being no hard evidence and the system ruling in favor of one testimony (or a group of them) over another. Our system should not work like this. Furthermore trusting certain individuals more than others based on their job description only sets the system up for problems like this to exist. Why is a cop more 'trustworthy' than anyone else when we have so many clear cases of when this just shouldn't be true? Humans will be human, regardless of the job they take on, and humans are biased.
To be clear, I think there's a difference between expert witnesses and testimony. Consulting with a world leader in statistics about whether a statistical method employed to evaluate evidence is correct is a perfectly valid reason to put someone on the stand and ask them questions. A cop or someone who is an expert on cops could and should be questioned about procedure, norms, technical aspects of policing and anything else relevant to the job at hand, but an account of what happened should simply not be weighed as evidence when determining if someone is guilty or not - people are far too fallible.