House passes bill to require recording police interrogations

This was actually several weeks ago and we somehow missed it, but the Michigan House of Representatives passed a bill on July 1 to require police in this state to record all interrogations. The Senate has yet to vote on the bill and some police officers and agencies hope that they won’t. The Detroit Free Press reports:

But some police officials have raised concerns criminal cases could be damaged if an equipment malfunction or other issue were to prevent the recording of an interrogation. Under the bill, jurors would have to be told about the recording requirement.

“The fly in the ointment is these are electronic devices,” said Northville Police Chief Gary Goss, who is also the president of the Wayne County Chiefs of Police Association. “Has your cell phone ever dropped a call?”

This is a very weak argument. Should we really undermine the fairness of the criminal justice system on the grounds that the equipment might hypothetically fail on rare occasions?

Recording interrogations is important for many reasons, both for the accused and for the police. Long and exhausting interrogations that lead to false confessions, sometimes coerced, are not exactly rare. Of the more than 250 times the Innocence Project has proven the innocence of someone convicted of a crime based on incontrovertible DNA evidence, a full 25 percent of the time the innocent man had actually confessed to the crime under such conditions.

But this also protects the police against false charges of abuse and coercion, which is equally important. It’s no different than the dashboard cameras that have become so common today. Sometimes those cameras reveal police officers violating the rights of someone they’ve stopped and faking police reports; other times those cameras reveal police officers being falsely accused of doing so when they behaved professionally and appropriately. In either case, justice is served in a way that is not possible without video evidence.