Police Line Ups

Factual Questions
21

I saw a 7th Heaven rerun the other day where the mom was looking at a line-up for a guy who mugged her. She identified him by his tattoo, but I see on other shows where they put the same tat on all the people in the lineup to make it fair. What’s the dope?

22

Almost timely: my Staff Report on police lineups.

23

I took a university course where I read in a text book that up to 75% of witness physical identifications or explanations of a sequence of events are actually wrong. (Sorry not to site the text book–long ago sold at a terrible loss.) If the police don’t have a suspect they feel they can convict successfully, couldn’t they choose a person who “looks like the kind of person who would commit such a crime”? I recall other studies in memory with similar results, but can’t at the moment find them in my completely disordered library. I know from other studies that memory is “reconstructive.”

24

I have no doubt that cops and lawyers do commit crimes sometimes. But your scenario requires the following sequence of events:

  1. Cop commits a crime.
  2. Police investigate.
  3. suspicion falls on someone who is in fact totally innocent.
  4. Line up is arranged.
  5. Guilty cop is asked to be a stand-in for the line up.
  6. Guilty cop actually agrees to participate. He totally fails to have any prior engagements, or backlog of paperwork that needs to be done.
  7. Witness identifies guilty cop as the criminal, not the wrong suspect.
  8. Other cops are so impressed by the identification that they drop the original suspect and investigate their buddy.

How many times has that actually happened, in the history of the world? I’d bet somewhere close to none.

25

While living in Hong Kong, I somehow got contacted by an undercover cop that needed help with a lineup. He asked if I was able to help by attending the lineup, for which I would be compensated. I obliged. Got paid the equivalent of $40 US.
A few months later, they contacted me again and said that they needed help again, but they would need about 13 individuals to take part in the lineup. All of us would be paid $90 US for services rendered. Obviously I said yes. Getting 12 other people to agree wasn’t as easy, as it would take place on a sunday. But in the end everybody turned up.
And that’s the story of how I got enough cash together to buy my first minidisc =)
And No, I’m not bullshitting.