A question I often get from clients about police is ‘can they do that?’ The simple answer is often ‘not legally’, which means there may be a legal remedy to take advantage of as a result of whatever the police have done wrong. This may help my accused client in fighting the case, but it rarely reduces police misconduct at a systemic level. As a criminal lawyer I often thus watch clients come to certain realizations about police powers which most people are never forced to confront. Many if not most get to live out their lives enjoying only a positive perspective on the nature and effects of police powers, which can be seen as a credit to our society’s political heritage as well as the great positive contributions of those dedicated men and women of law enforcement.

It is routinely the duty of my office to draw into question the conduct of police, as investigators of dubious competence and as witnesses of questionable credibility. Over the years this has involved exposing egregious and illegal police misconduct as well as ‘acceptable’ routine error, and just about everything in between. Whatever the misconduct, it is almost never simply a case of one ‘bad apple’ officer. Very little is done by one police officer that is not known to other officers within the uniquely powerful and impenetrable bureaucracies of the police services.

Police misconduct does not only occur outside of the courtroom. Like many colleagues I have had numerous cases over the years where the winning outcome at trial could only have resulted from the evidence of willful perjury and obstruction of justice by the police witnesses who testified. This conduct virtually always goes unpunished and can appear to be outright rewarded within police subcultures and hierarchies.

None of this is a secret within the justice system. Nor are these issues new to the world of public policy or political theory. In approximately 380 BC this was addressed directly in Plato’s Republic. Acknowledging that some commentators consider the Republic to be ‘a handbook for aspiring dictators’ it nonetheless shows how none of these problems are new or unique to any particular place or time. Around page 374 [e] Socrates and his student get to the nub of the issue thus:

…to select the man whose nature is most suited to guard the city…each of them must be quick to see things and swift in the pursuit of what he has seen and also strong if it is necessary to catch up with the enemy and fight…And he must be brave, if he is to fight well.

How then…being of such a nature, will they not be savage in their behaviour to each other and the rest of our citizens?

That will not be easy.

…certainly they must be gentle to their own people but hard for the [c] enemy to deal with. Else they will not wait for others to destroy the city but destroy it themselves first.

…surely if either of these qualities is missing, he cannot be a good guardian. The combination seems impossible, so it follows that a good guardian cannot exist. [d]

Thousand of years later, the only thing we know for sure is that this paradox extends into the courtroom too. Plato’s solution is not reassuring and may be the subject of future entries in the Blog on this site about both police profiling and what might be called an unspoken presumption of police credibility among judges and juries alike – both types of ‘common sense’ presumptions which make countervailing legal doctrines such as the presumption of innocence necessary cornerstones of democracy and the rule of law.