Why police lie under oath

On a historic note, Stalin's first, bloodiest purges were also governed by quotas and the heads of various departments of the secret police (NKVD) trying to one up each other, exerting pressure on their subordinates, and in the absence of judicial oversight. Stalin ended up replacing over-enthusiastic NKVD chiefs twice, and the last one, the one we remember the most and whose name, Beria, we come to associate with the oppressive force, was actually less brutal then the previous two (Yagoda and Ezhov).

Re: Why police lie under oath

#8

Post by wylie » Sun, Feb 03, 2013, 1:53 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #6

wylie wrote: post #3

There's a typo in the link, the one that works for me is: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-...

Bummer. Is there any way to go back and edit a submitted link? HN won't let me resubmit the corrected link.

I think only mods can edit submissions, maybe they'll notice if this stays on the homepage long enough

Re: Why police lie under oath

#9

Post by rdtsc » Sun, Feb 03, 2013, 1:57 AM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #7

On a historic note, Stalin's first, bloodiest purges were also governed by quotas and the heads of various departments of the secret police (NKVD) trying to one up each other, exerting pressure on their subordinates, and in the absence of judicial oversight. Stalin ended up replacing over-enthusiastic NKVD chiefs twice, and the last one, the one we remember the most and whose name, Beria, we come to associate with th…

Remember reading in a memoir of someone who had access to the NKVD (then KGB) archives from that era.

The log would go something like this:

-- Dec, 14 : Found and eliminated Ivan X.

-- Dec, 17 : Turns out that was the wrong Ivan X.

-- Dec, 20 : Found and eliminated the real Ivan X.

Re: Why police lie under oath

#10

Post by ObnoxiousJul » Sun, Feb 03, 2013, 1:57 AM UTC

Well it is a known QA practice: never base incentive on metrics or people will cheat one way or another with the metrics. If your dev have a prime based on SLA or tickets solved guess what? You are giving them an incentive to cheat. You will have nice figures to show your investors, ypur stock options' values will raise and coder will be better paid. Everyone is happy, who cares about the truth, the unfairness, the lie. This is just mis placed moral. Stats that can be tricked are the prozac of our society. It make the metrics describing a situation improve with mutual benefits for (almost) all the stakeholders.

Who cares about the customers or minorities anyway? I mean not on the paper but honestly?