On Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:36:32 +0100, andrel wrote:

> On 28-1-2010 1:29, Jim Henderson wrote:
> 
>> Once a month I meet with our local police liaison officer (in fact, I
>> meet with him tomorrow night) 

So I had a really interesting discussion with our liaison officer 
tonight; he's a detective who has worked several different parts of the 
department, and has friends in law enforcement agencies around the 
world.  Very interesting and enlightening discussion - and he announced 
at the meeting that the SLC Police Department was offering some "citizen 
academy" classes that I think I'm going to try to go to - the idea is to 
help the public understand what the job actually entails.

Though I won't be able to attend the first class since I'm going to be 
out of town; but it's 7 weeks long (I assume one evening a week) and 
should be interesting.

I asked him about the use of deception, and what he told me was that they 
are allowed to use it, but they usually don't have to.  His experience 
(both personal and anecdotal from talking to others around the country) 
is that usually you have enough evidence or you don't - and if you don't, 
it's clear they're not going to get more by running a long interrogation, 
which is usually what would lead to that kind of deception.

With regards to entrapment, he said it's pretty straightforward:  If an 
officer (identified or not) entices someone to commit a crime they would 
not be predisposed to commit and they do it anyways, then it's 
entrapment.  If they entice someone to commit a crime (again, identified 
or not) and they are predisposed to commit it (ie, have some sort of 
history that shows they would be likely to do it), then it's not 
entrapment.

So, thinking about this (on my own), I guess if someone were to say they 
were going to do something illegal (say as part of being argumentative 
with a cop) to a cop, and the cop said "go ahead if you think that's a 
good idea" - that's not entrapment.  The cop wouldn't be giving them 
permission to do so, wouldn't be promising they would look the other way, 
or anything like that.  Wouldn't matter if the cop identified himself as 
a cop or not.

But, what my contact told me would be likely if law enforcement used 
deception in some way is that if it went to court, the cop's deception 
would likely be brought up.  And on the stand, the cop would most likely 
say "yes, that is exactly what I said" - the truthfulness of the 
statement to the defendant would be irrelevant to the crime.  The 
prosecution would have to demonstrate the predisposition of the defendant 
to commit the crime (which would happen certainly if the defense were to 
claim entrapment) and the defense would have to provide evidence that the 
defendant was not predisposed to commit the crime.

It was a very interesting discussion. :-)

Jim

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