i’m watching THE YOGURT SHOP MURDERS on hbo and it is yet another reminder that police are very bad at solving crimes where there isn’t an immediate and obvious suspect, and even then! (also, watching these detectives coerce an innocent person into a false confession…)
All the police procedurals, Top Gun, Dirty Harry, Escape From New York style disaster movies, etc have created fertile proto-fascist ground in the US.
This fact pattern is jaw dropping. The cops had basically everything they needed to get the almost-certainly-actual killers within a week. Instead, a year later they arrested the mentally handicapped brother of one, and a totally innocent guy who literally couldnt have done it
On the eve of trial they gave the mentally handicapped brother a sweet plea deal (no murder, no weapons charge, 3 years minus >1 year already served) to testify against his codefendant. He takes it. Testifies incoherently.
The remaining defendant’s appointed counsel tells the judge ahead of time that he’s conflicted because he defended one of the probably-real-killers over possession of the probably-murder-weapon. Judge says nah it’s fine. Lawyer doesn’t (can’t!) call his old client. Convicted. Serves 14 years
Finally state Supreme Court, informed for the first time of the conflict of interest by the defense counsel, vacates the conviction (the opinion is >120 pages). Purnell was held a further 10 months while prosecutors pretended they were going to retry him
In those ten months Purnell’s defense team (now an army of Milbank lawyers doing God’s work) press discovery and reveal cops had a videotaped witness interview of a guy saying (the older brother of the mentally handicapped kid) had bragged about doing it THE ENTIRE TIME
But it gets worse!
The Milbank team moves to dismiss for the grievous Brady violation. While that motion is pending Purnell’s mother gets sick and is on her deathbed. They ask for a one day furlough so he can see her (remember he’s legally innocent! Being held “pretrial”)
State: no. State: but we’ll let you out to see her if you agree to plead guilty to time served Purnell refuses to admit guilt when he’s innocent. His mom dies without ever seeing him walk free. They won’t let him go to the funeral either.
On the deadline to respond to the MTD, state drops charges instead of responding A few years later the civil rights lawsuit is settled for $3M
The worst liars I encountered in nearly 30 years of politics & government were prosecutors
"We don't want to reverse guilty verdicts because people need to have faith in the system."
#ACAB
I noticed a sign on an interview room said "Quite please," a good sign of their general sloppiness
There was one where a guy in Alaska (I think) was murdering sex workers and one escaped, went to the police, identified him, his hanger, and his airplane and the police were like “nah, he seems cool.”
This makes me laugh every single time this comes on screen. smh
It also struck me how outraged we get and how hard we work to find killers of white people but not so much people of color. (And in no way do I mean to take away from the horror of this incident.)
Let’s talk about the bowling alley massacre in las cruces.
Man it’s almost like cops just fucking suck, and are generally pretty shitty and incompetent people 👀
Try asking them sometime if "solving crimes" reduces crime.
📌
Detectives "solve" crimes by picking a suspect quickly and then putting the suspect in a room to be interrogated until they are coerced to confess. If they don't get a confession then they don't know what to do other than plow straight ahead.
Every true crime doc shows police are either involved with the crime or inept.
same with the amanda knox story on hulu as well!!!
That one detective who had a supposed 100% solve rate is suspicious as hell. How many of THOSE cases were false coerced confessions??
Parts of what happened to him are maddening, just FYI www.kvue.com/article/news...
One of the more confounding things about the lack of serious public resistance to the overfunding of police is the abundant evidence in very popular true crime shows that they are nearly worthless in so many instances, and they make no attempt to hide it. Why do people still have such faith in them?
I had a detective friend who told me, "Honestly, if it weren't for dumb people, we would never catch anyone."
Police are just bad. I mean really unless you're in a big city, you can forget about it… And even in the big city they are abusive.
Same! I can’t believe it’s still legal for police to lie (and use other nefarious tactics) when interrogating suspects. It’s not fair to anyone involved. Great listen if you’ve ever wondered, “why would someone confess to something they didn’t do?” And great podcast in general 10/10.
Also, the original detectives saw through the coercive interrogation tactics and had (still do) empathy for the families yet are being criticized. I was happy to see their humanity and objectivity. We need more of them. Though the whole not solving it thing is bad. But ya know what I mean.
those detectives really get off on the mind games it takes to get a false confession out of someone . They don't even seem to care that they're getting it wrong (they most certainly knew it was wrong)
My wife has been watching so many crime documentaries lately, and it's astonishing how many times either a) they hyper focus on one suspect and ignore other leads or b) keep letting the obvious suspect go
Copganda has successfully conned people into believing that like the TV show cops police are diligently solving crime. Police departments spend millions on PR campaigns to convince the public of whatever narrative suits them. The facts however don’t match the copganda.
Um yah, The system sucks.
“He’s never had an unsolved murder case”? 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
"The U.S. is among the worst at solving murders in the industrialized world" In 2020, "It reached close to 50% at that time nationwide, which was the lowest ever recorded by the FBI. And it hasn't come up that much since then."
They're all redacting the Epstein files.
I'm not sure what the expectations were/are. Trump is a crook, grifter misogynist, rapist, pedo ...historically....documented before he became president...twice. But "law and order"...??? 🫤
(Reuters) - A new report adds to a growing line of research showing that police departments don’t solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives.
Why do the people being called in for interrogation not say they want an attorney? Never, never, never, never, never, never talk to the detectives without a lawyer.
Yes, they don't actually investigate crimes. They decide who they think did it, then try to dig up evidence that incriminates that person.
In 1984, a friend and University of Texas student was closing the Pizza Hut on 34th Street when he was shot during a robbery and locked in the walk-in freezer. He bled to death and died. Just a Mexican American kid from Laredo working his way through school. No manhunt or TV special for him.
also watching Austin PD and FBI kicking in doors of random punk and goth houses in West Campus reminded me of just how much the Satanic Panic had a grip on their minds then (and in contemporary QAnon-influenced agencies, again)
More than one!
same sentiment. many police detectives are Det. Harris from South Park
Scientists trained in psychology, sociology, trauma-informed interviewing, community organizing, electronics, and forensics ought to be solving crimes, not cops. Defund the police.
Way too much confirmation bias at work in investigations like that. The fact that they were aware AT THE TIME of Polanco’s tactics generating false confessions makes it even worse.
Every time someone brings up how clearance rates on homicides were higher in the past, all I can think about how they were probably beating confessions out of guys and planting evidence.
Probably? Try literally. Almost every case overturned via DNA evidence involved a false confession.
Some bullshit isn’t it, I’m watching it too.
I am watching the yogurt episode of the original Iron Chef from Japan. I just love it!
Loved that show MAN-go and TO-mah-to! (said quickly) were basically english, “if memory serves”
And not just one suspect…
I'm a true crime whore and this case and the Maura Murray case are my two 'I hope these are solved before I die' cases.
Have you ever watched the one on Netflix about the woman who was abducted and the police decided her boyfriend had killed her and faked the kidnapping? And then she turned up alive, and then they decided they faked the kidnapping together? It is one of the most enraging things I’ve ever seen.
The one on Netflix where a nun was murdered in the 60s and the cops just didn't bother to investigate, and also the cops were implicated in what people think happened to the nun, really paved the way to ACAB for me.
Was she teaching in a girls school and disappeared and they found her body out in a field in the winter?
This was a horrific case. As a kid who grew up in Catholic schools it didn’t remotely surprise me though. Catholics can be hella devious.
And of course, the guy who indeed abducted and sexually assaulted her was eventually caught, and the cops responded by making the couple’s main tormentor … officer of the year.
I watched the one about the Green River killer and they had him in custody and let him go
Yeah. This one with the kidnapping was a lot like the Yogurt Shop one Jamelle is talking about, in that they decided early on what had happened, and then every new piece of evidence was wedged into that narrative no matter how much it didn’t fit.
“I didn’t kill my wife!” “I don’t care.”
Which was also the scenario with the real-life rape that the Netflix miniseries UNBELIEVABLE was based on. (Speaking of things that were enraging...)
My god, that show made me FURIOUS. Incredible performance by Caitlyn Dever, but that just served to make me cry multiple times and shout "What the fuck?" at my TV even more times than that.
Yes, exactly.
I've watched a lot of True Crime stuff the past few months and the aggressive incompetence of (very often white male) police officers is pretty telling. From serial killers to Unbelievable, the pattern was hard to miss.
This! So much of true crime (when it isn’t someone blindly regurgitating the cop’s story) shows just how incompetent police are. They’ll follow a bad lead for months or YEARS all because “their gut says so”, they’re also super racist/homophobic/transphobic and that colors how they view certain crime
Yes. It was a podcast, too.
Yes, there is an absolutely excellent two-part episode of Criminal.
It seems that ProPublica did a series of reports. May have won a Pulitzer.
I believe it.
Because I'm such a nice guy... www.propublica.org/article/fals...
That’s actually the basis for a *different* Netflix show, “Unbelievable”.
He was only caught because *he* felt bad so he reached out to the police!!
And the perpetrator went on to murder someone else! That was horrifying and enraging.
Reminds me of my city where the cops were sued by a teen mom who lost her baby and was coerced into confessing to his crib death. The officer that lied and coerced her was moved to our version of IA.
Same process at my college. Sold our information to credit bureaus in direct contradiction of Federal law, barred the student council from the discussion when it was revealed and gave themselves an award for "Technological excellence" the same year. To get chips in our student ID's
The Vallejo case right? There was something weird going on there. The abductor was connected to law enforcement somehow me thinks
Yes, exactly, Vallejo.
The worst Vallejo cop in that, Bidou— is the son (or maybe grandson) of the first cop to arrive at the scene of the first Zodiac murder
Omg I was so mad about everything that happened to that poor couple. Absolutely horrific work from the cops.
That one made me SO mad. The way they treated them both was just absolutely disgusting.
Oh is that the case the media claimed was a 'Gone Girl' copycat and they eventually caught a guy had been pulling similar stuff all around the area??
Yes, although I would stress the media was told that by the police.
Oh i believe it!
I think I need to watch these shows but as an innocence attorney I just know I will be enraged. But actually everyone should find these stories enraging
Oh watched this one too, and yeah what they put that couple through, I felt so bad for them.
Even fancy forensics often rely on the initial good old fashioned tip
Is it any good?
I like it
I’ll give it a try next time I need a distraction (which is of course all the time these days).
It’s actually really long and drawn out. It could have been 2 episodes.
Work to pass hate crimes bill in Texas, 1999, 2001. TX prosecutors: ‘if this bill passes, we will never be able to try another case. Bill passes. 2005-9 working to pass Free Flow of Information Act. TX prosecutors: we will never be able to try a case if passed. Bill passes. Guess what?
Wait until you see Amanda Knox’s story.
Watching shows like that made me tell my kids to never talk to the police. When they were five and ten and I kept repeating it thru the years.
And the cop who coerced the confession still stands behind it! "A coerced confession isn't necessarily a false confession". They don't actually care about solving a crime, simply about putting someone behind bards.
The Behind the Bastards on Texas’s Dr Death, phew. Especially that breathtaking example where a 16 year old kills a cop, they know he did it, and the killer helps the cops frame an adult because the cops/prosecutor want an execution for a cop killer and 16 year olds weren’t eligible at the time
💯
oh no. BARS not bards, cops aren’t violently pro backing bands.
I might even like cops if they did back bards up with violence lol those shady record labels could use some slappin around
Except on The Wire
I agree! I just started watching this. Also, wtf does that asshole mean when he says they were putting people under hypnosis while questioning them?!?!
Murder She Wrote is a more entertaining way to learn how inept the police are. Just sayin’.
Not Sheriff Tupper!
as soon as they introduced the detective with a “100% clearance rate” you could tell how it was gonna end
False confessions and unsolved cases are heartbreaking.
With Elizabeth Smart, the police's suspect died in prison of natural causes. They later refused to release the subsequent sketch of the man Smart's sister, id'd. John Walsh said, essentially, f*ck this, and put the sketch on America's Most Wanted, which directly lead to her rescue.
The number of times I led cops to evidence or pointed them to witnesses when I was a cop reporter was astounding
Too bad Black Mask magazine ceased publication. You could have centered those incidents around a fictional newspaper reporter who is pals with and frequently assists the local cops and, with a little embellishment, adapted them into hard-boiled detective stories.
I’ll never forget the cop that told me there were no dogs in the car on my property, I was like bro there’s 5 dogs in that car which means there’s people I don’t know in my woods, I want them gone. He told me there’s no dogs and we can’t tow the car. There in fact was dogs, meth heads and meth.
Cuz they don’t give a fuck! Could you imagine how great we could be if our police weren’t racist pigs and actually cared about you?! Holy shit!
Good Lord, that was on high frequency my last half of college 30 miles away from Austin, and was later fodder in my UT Law years for many Austin cable access TV shows adjacent to a young Alex Jones talking about Ruby Ridge and Waco. One guy had a show devoted to it (saw it as an insurance cash-in).
imagine growing up as a girl watching some version of yourself get murdered every Friday and Saturday night on hit cable TV shows dateline and 20/20; watching the unsuccessful pathetic updates as a teen and young adult; and still finding there’s been no justice as you’re entering midlife. 👍🏻
More than one confession
Netflix?
HBO
To be fair, the criminals burned the scene. But, it wasn't until 2011 that the defense experts put together a plausible sequence of acts. The failure was accusing a few stoners of a crime of extreme violence. I've read and listened to so much about this one. I want it solved.
I live in Austin and remember when this happened. Austin lost its innocence that day. I watched the first one but having trouble continuing. Just so horrible and painful.
Independent watch dogs are a must.
It's frustrsting that the police: A: Do not even bother with "lesser" crimes B: Don't do a good job solving cases of "worthy" crimes C: Do very little to prevent crimes Why do we keep throwing money at them? It feels like we're paying "protection money," like for organized crime.
Oh My God. I don't even have to ask for clarification. My ex and I used to GO IN THERE in the late 80's, as her apt. was probably a mile away. We moved out of state just a month or two before that horrible thing happened. I don't remember exactly, but didn't they all get off on technicalities(?)
Criminology as a major is insane to me. It’s basically a degree in bias confirmation. The Idaho college murderer was a grad student in Criminology and thought he was turning himself into Moriarty by taking a TED talk ass classes.
Academic criminology based in sociology departments sometimes does good work, but there are a ton of crim departments that primarily exist to give cops joke degrees, and the output there is… well, it’s what the customers want
R I g h t?!? Been watching a lot of Dateline too and if there weren’t lucky breaks 99.99% of cases wouldn’t be solved! The police don’t prevent crimes and they can’t solve them either! It does make you wonder…
They’re just not very bright people and full of prejudices, often picked up on the job.
Oh, God, did you ever watch the one on there about Charles and Carol Stuart? I seem to recall they could only get one Boston cop to show up for an interview, and he absolutely would NOT admit that any of the racist bullshit they did in that investigation was wrong.
I think I started that documentary but turned it off because I was so offended by how the police handled everything.
But the firefighters at the beginning…I am always team fire fighter…but hearing how big the fire was at discovery (not big), they went HAM on tearing down the ceiling which damage the pipes and then flooded the place…destroying basically any and all Evidence…the cops royally suck too…Texas is 🤮
The aspect of inducing false confessions, actually convincing the suspect they did the crime. Damn…..
There was a case a few years ago where police convinced a man he'd murdered his father, who was not actually dead.
The human mind is more malleable than I would have thought…
When that one pig was crying about how his “hard work” on the case gave him PTSD, I just had to laugh. You fucked it up big time! You should feel horrible!
I’m watching it too, but I don’t know why. It’s going downhill & degrading as a documentary. It started out having a strong sense of where it was going, but it hasn’t gotten anywhere near there. You’re right. It shows the ineptitude of detectives & how they use stereotyping in choosing suspects.
I get the same ick feeling from car salesmen that I get from police during questioning: they ask questions that seem direct but are full of ulterior motives to get you to say or do a thing you never intended.
Watching these shows and seeing all the false confessions is terrifying.
😢
That series was so painful to watch. They just dragged it out unnecessarily for so long.
I feel for the two original two detectives. Their hearts seem to be in the right place and tried to keep the investigation both tight lipped and by the book. No sympathy for the new one who coerced the confessions and still believes then despite a lack of DNA evidence implicating the confessors
My sole positive experience is that police are very good at solving a crime when they have an eyewitness who competently describes a person that the police are already familiar with and looking for an excuse to arrest.
For all the faults of True Crime (there are many) it has taught me 2 things about how most crimes are solved - 1) It’s either by the most BASIC police work 2) OR the police just get lucky 🤷🏻♂️
Also watching the show, the whole thing is so unreal!!
I’m pretty certain we’ve got more than a few municipalities that have never solved a murder. I believe I know of one.
I was a cop many years ago and there was this old uniform sergeant and we were talking about detectives and he said something that covered this entirely. He said “if criminals weren’t stupid they (police) would never catch anyone”
Whatever happened to that proposal for dual track cops, a different pipeline for detectives who were actually smart rather than just old
Great doc so far… the cops are cringe as hell though… feel really bad for those poor kids and their families.
If you want to be more upset watching American Nightmare on Netflix. Talk about god awful police work.
I'm shocked that the cop was like: Yeah, he forced a confession, happens all the time. You have no idea how easy it is.
They're not all Lester Freeman
Lester Freamon participated in the tampering of cadavers and fabrication of crimes to obtain police funding and he deserved to lose his badge for it. (This is why the fifth season is not very good, because I could buy it from McNulty but not Freamon)
Only Freamon is Freamon, ‘mon. ❤️
Tv police shows have a lot to answer for
Imagine his surprise today after he died.
They can't spell "Quiet" either.
When police detectives and prosecutors double down on people who’ve been exonerated 😬
I went to the same middle school as Amy Ayers. They planted a tree for her in the courtyard and I walked by it every day. Her mom came and talked to us a few years later, I think. I was scared to get a job as a teen because I thought it might happen to me. It made a huge impact on my teenage years.
Coerced confessions like Central Park 5 in real life.
On of my formative memories about police was when my home was robbed on Christmas Day. The cop came, investigated a few minutes, and then asked my mom if she wanted them them to arrest me since I was the only likely culprit. This despite the fact I’d been with her all day.
The cop said that there was really no other explanation for how she was robbed, but pointed out I probably had a drug addiction and that why I did it. My mom declined to press charges for obvious reasons and blamed herself for wasting time even calling the “pigs.”
Good lord. Sorry to hear that happened. It really does seem like they only show up to make things worse.
I don't think the police should be allowed to lie to suspects or anyone for that matter.
It takes brains to figure shit out and police forces aren't known for attracting the "best and the brightest."
Everyone needs to know not to talk to cops without a lawyer even if you did nothing wrong. They will want to pin it on someone and you might just be a pinnable person
There’s no way that case will ever be solved.
I've watched this case for decades since I moved to Austin. I can assure you nothing has changed.
I lived 4 blocks away from that yogurt shop the night of the crime. It was a complete shit show from the jump.
Can confirm, same neighborhood, a bit further away, perhaps a mile. I'd definitely been to that yogurt shop a few times. Complete shit show is an understatement. I remember telling my wife that the Austin cops would surely railroad the first poor SOBs they arrested, and...voila.
“No, you couldn’t have gone to the RHPS because it wasn’t playing that night” Fuck that guy.
I can’t remember what novel I read it in but ages ago I read about homicide detectives calling cases without an obvious suspect standing at the scene holding a bloody knife “a whodunnit” to indicate it would be impossibly hard work with small chance of success. It felt authentic even then.
m.imdb.com/title/tt2407...
That one cop shoveling horseshit: “oh yeah, if one “confession” doesn’t line up, gotta cross reference it with another one until it says what we want”
Tho here the fire and water damage would make it difficult to solve the crime by even the best cops.
I have only seen a handful of murder show episodes where there was good police work. I watch them every night for the past several decades.
It's always like 19 years later and the 41st detective gets assigned to the cold case, randomly gets a phone call from some lady who's like, "My ex-boyfriend did that murder, he told me every detail," & somehow they spin it to "the decades-long dogged pursuit by the detectives broke the case!"
I saw that it’s wild!
"Police are very bad at solving crimes where there isn't an immediate and obvious suspect, and even then!" See also: The Amanda Knox story (out now on Hulu)
See The Long Shadow about the Yorkshire Ripper. Those cops wouldn't even believe a female survivor bc they got it in their heads that the killer had a particular accent.
My husband, a former defense attorney, has been having a very hard time watching those police interviews.
like ~13 years ago, I attended a speech by a woman who wrote a book about the yogurt ship murders, and my big takeaway was "you better be damn sure you brought the actual guilty party to interrogation, because you *will* get a confession if given enough time"
Police don’t care about truth, innocence or human destruction. Law Enforcement cares about property, unrestrained power, ego and job security.
This reminded me of the recent documentary series I watched on Netflix about the Long Island serial killer. Police work was terrible. However, it’s tough to recommend the series in general, as the crimes are so awful, they will stay with you.
