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A "testilying" story misses its target

By Mark Obbie

Benjamin Weiser's piece today in the Times goes off half-cocked. Weiser examined more than 1,000 cases in which a convicted felon was caught with a gun and whose case was transferred to federal court. He found 20 cases where judges distrusted cops' testimony enough to toss the evidence. Rather than make that the story -- despite past scandals over "testilying" and overly aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics, judges deemed most searches legal and believed New York cops' testimony in the vast majority of cases -- Weiser and the Times take the opposite tack. Their angle is too wobbly to make sense. The trouble starts with the hed: "Police in Gun Searches Face Disbelief in Court." No, they don't. Twenty out of 1,000 cases doesn't come close to justifying that headline.But don't blame the headline writer alone. Weiser and his editors twist their findings into a negative question from the start. The first key question the story asks is: What happens to cops who lie to justify a search? That's a great question. But, as Weiser acknowledges, we're only talking about 20 cases over a six-year period. So, rather than peg the story to the answer of that question (which is, vaguely, that police officials follow up on "few" such findings), and rather than ask whether the search tactics are legally justified (the answer would appear to be yes, almost always), we readers must wade through several anecdotes about cops whom judges deemed to be "testiliars" and where police officials seemingly did nothing about the problem. Perhaps Weiser, et al., were justified in refusing to paint a happy face on their findings. They could have found experts to say that 20 cases is actually alarming. Or they could have argued that themselves. And then the story would have a transparent point: Though the problem is small in numbers, it's still a problem worth addressing. And yet the police hierarchy hasn't addressed it. Instead, the story mumbles its justification, and thus comes off as disingenuous.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on May 12, 2008 (boomark / email).