Thread by @SecDetective

@VictimsComm Baroness Newlove is wrong in this debate for a number of reasons, both in principle and in practice.

There should never be a policy prohibiting officers from believing or disbelieving anything, least of all in allegations of sex crimes.

(A thread...)

https://twitter.com/VictimsComm/status/1034360818324914176

The article begins with an error as frequently made as it is shameful.

The conflation between “victims” and complainants leads to all sorts of absurdities, not least that the former’s premature usage loads any subsequent questions with an ungrounded presupposition.

Allegations are made to police by complainants, in that they are making a complaint about an alleged offence.

To call complainants “victims” at this stage is to axiomatically call suspects “perpetrators” at the same time.

This looseness with language has consequences.

A (policy-mandated) predisposition to believe complainants primes investigators to more readily acknowledge and secure evidence which supports the complaint, and more easily miss or undervalue evidence which undermines it.

This is a lose-lose situation.

A suspect loses because potentially exonerating evidence has not been secured.

A complainant loses because opportunities to investigate and potentially refute such evidence have been overlooked and lost.

An investigator’s objective must always be the truth.

A stronger prosecution case—all else being equal—is one where such evidence potentially undermining the allegation has been promptly identified, investigated and effectively refuted.

Such things cannot happen when policy-affirmed biases dispose investigators to miss it.

Then there is of course the plight of the innocent defendant, who is interviewed by an officer who has likely already interviewed the complainant, and has been cognitively effected by virtue of merely having heard that account first.

There exists psychological evidence suggesting that we readily recall false statements as true, by dint of having merely heard them early, even when presented with contradictory statements later.

(I read this in @sapinker’s ‘Enlightenment Now’, & I’ll find the reference later.)

This loads the dice in an unavoidable way in criminal investigations, but it makes no sense whatsoever to reaffirm these biases through policy.

A policy governing belief, no less.

In all seriousness, what other institutions, other than the religious, govern belief and doubt?

This argument, though I had never seen any evidence demonstrating it, despite how frequently it is advanced, may be true.

Let us accept that it is. The question then becomes one as to ends being justified by means.

I submit here that they are not.

An underlying theme in sexual offences is trust. As most such offences are committed by perpetrators known to their victims, a victim’s trust, in being raped or sexually assaulted, has been breached.

Complainants (and consequently victims among them) should not be lied to.

At bottom, it is (thankfully) largely impossible to dictate beliefs.

Thus, the policy is actually tantamount to dictating that officers lie to complainants by telling them they will be believed, regardless of whether they will be.

How condescending and utterly shameful.

Instead, a simple policy dictating professional interactions and thorough investigations should suffice, without pandering advocacy of cowardly mendacity.

To think victims should rather be told they would be believed, whether it’s true or not, is very patronising indeed.

The “great strides” taken by our criminal justice system can instead be measured in the rules introduced to stem the flow of a biased and irrational river.

Take Code D of PACE, for instance, stipulating that investigating officers do not conduct ID parades themselves.

Outsourcing this enquiry to an officer not directly-involved diminishes the likelihood that a witness—attending to identify the individual who may have assaulted them—will be influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by the investigating officer.

There is also a post hoc error at play in ascribing confidence among complainants to this policy, discounting the other measures that have made the process for them more bearable. (e.g. video interviews as evidence-in-chief, no cross-examination from defendants themselves etc.)

It is also worth considering the tangible effects of such a policy.

An officer who uncovers evidence undermining a complainant’s allegation should not worry about approaching their supervisor, lest their lack of institutional belief in the allegation’s veracity be revealed.

The “A-B-C” of investigative police work hold up as more than arbitrary. They are the core of what good detective work entails:

• Assume nothing
• Believe no one
• Check everything (twice)

The policy violates A and B directly, and C indirectly as a consequence of the others.

Dictating that officers believe complainants does nobody a good turn, while simultaneously undermining everything worth caring about: Impartiality, honesty, trust and justice.

Again, a conversation on police policy is being influenced and (I submit) subverted by politics.

It is these same politics which have influenced our discussion on “victim-blaming”, prosecuting perverters of justice, “Metoo”, trial-by-media and much else.

A principled stance is warranted here—one which defends the rights of everyone and uphold justice for all.

(End.)