WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT POLICE INTERROGATIONS ON TV
Lately it seems that we are in the midst of an epidemic. No, not the one triggered by the coronavirus. I’m talking about the rapidly spreading use of completely unbelievable police interrogation scenes in contemporary television. This has been going on since police dramas first began appearing on television, but lately it has become absolutely ubiquitous, and absolutely ridiculous. It might also become harmful to society by giving poorly informed TV viewers the belief that they have no right to refuse to talk to the police. As an American, you have an absolute right to refuse to answer any questions put to you by a police detective. In fact, whether you are guilty or innocent of the crime the police suspect you of, you are almost certainly better off saying nothing to the police, at least not until you have spoken to your lawyer. And I say this as a big fan of American police departments. I think, by and large, American police officers are good and decent people. My own family includes two members of the California Highway Patrol and they are among the most honorable people you could ever hope to meet. The District Attorney of Yolo County, California, is another relative of mine and a man of integrity. Nonetheless, I agree with the common wisdom among American defense attorneys that you should never speak to a police detective without a lawyer present. This is just plain common sense, and almost any reasonably sophisticated American adult understands this. Which is why it is especially silly to see so many apparently intelligent people blabbing to police detectives in hostile interrogations on countless TV dramas.
Two of the most egregious programs in this regard were The Mentalist (which ran from 2008 to 2015) and Castle (2009-2016). Again and again on these programs, the police detectives somehow managed to get highly reluctant citizens into a police interrogation room and then grill them in a very hostile manner about a recent murder. And, almost always, the reluctant citizen answers every question he is asked. This scenario is occasionally believable. For instance, if the citizen is very young, or is a vulnerable street person without a sophisticated knowledge of the law, or is simply very stupid. But much of the time, the people that Detectives Lisbon (on The Mentalist) and Beckett (Castle) are questioning are either wealthy and sophisticated or they are career criminals. And both of those categories of people know enough not to blab to the police without a lawyer present. It is completely ridiculous to watch as some New York City hedge fund manager squirms under intense questioning by Detective Beckett in an episode of Castle. Or to watch some Silicon Valley billionaire allow Detective Lisbon to put the screws to him in an interrogation room. These people have high-priced lawyers on retainer at all times. The companies they work for (or own) have their own legal departments. A fabulously wealthy corporate tycoon is not going to walk into a police interrogation room. And even if, for some reason, the tycoon was willing to answer questions for the police regarding a recent murder, he would do so through his lawyer. He would want the questions put into writing so that he could put a lot of thought into his answers – or non-answers.
The producers of Castle, The Mentalist, and other shows that frequently employ the interrogation-room trope know that these scenes are completely ludicrous. They know that no wealthy corporate executive would ever walk into an interrogation room under any circumstances. So how do these producers try to make the scenes more believable? By occasionally having the corporate executive walk into the interrogation room with his lawyer at his side. But, far from making the scene more believable, this only makes it more farcical. These high-priced lawyers, presumably educated at the finest law schools in the country, generally sit meekly beside their clients while the Becketts and Lisbons of TVland grill the client mercilessly. Every now and then a defense attorney may make a feeble attempt to object to a question but they are almost always cowed by the police detective on the other side of the table. Or, even more ludicrously, they are overruled by their wealthy clients who, for some reason, insist on answering a question over the objections of the very attorneys they have hired to protect their interests. This is just crazy. What makes it even crazier is that the person being interrogated usually hasn’t even been placed under arrest, meaning that he has absolutely no obligation to go to the police station, much less put up with an interrogation. And no defense attorney would ever allow his client to be interrogated by the police while he sat idly by and observed.
On TV, you frequently hear police detectives telling citizens, “You can answer questions here [at your workplace] or you can answer them down at police headquarters. You make the call.” Whereupon, the frightened citizen usually starts singing like a canary to the cop. This is another scenario that makes no sense. If the detective had enough evidence to arrest the citizen, he or she would simply do so and then haul him to the police station. If the detective doesn’t have the evidence necessary to make an arrest, he has no leverage. In that case, not only can the detective not force the citizen to come down to the police station, he cannot force the citizen to do a damn thing. The citizen has every right to order the officer to leave his place of business. If the officer fails to comply with the order, the citizen can file a complaint with the department.
Perhaps the stupidest interrogation-related cliché you see in TV dramas is the scenario wherein the police arrest a suspect, haul him into an interrogation room, grill him mercilessly, discover that he has an air-tight alibi for the time of the murder, and then release him. In real life, if the police didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest, they wouldn’t arrest a suspect and then just hope that, during questioning, he would somehow manage to incriminate himself. If they were stupid enough to make an arrest without a scrap of evidence, they’d be opening themselves up to lawsuit for wrongful arrest. This exact scenario occurs in the recent Amazon Prime crime drama Wilderness (warning: spoilers ahead). Detective Rawlings and her partner, Detective Wiseman, arrest a man named Garth on suspicion of murder. Garth is a successful New York City carpenter and his arrest is made in a very public fashion. He is led out of his classy brownstone apartment in handcuffs and in broad daylight, with plenty of witnesses around. He is brought to the police station where he is interrogated in a nearly pitch-black interrogation room (another cliché of contemporary crime dramas – consistently bad lighting). He is interrogated over several days, sometimes in the presence of his attorney and sometimes not (it hardly matters because his attorney is practically a mime). Over and over again, Rawlings and Wiseman try to get Garth to confess to the murder of his girlfriend. Over and over again, Garth insists that he didn’t do it. Eventually Rawlings and Wiseman release Garth from custody. This doesn’t sit well with Wiseman, who tells Rawlings, “We’re letting a killer walk.” To which Rawlings responds, “Without a confession, the rest is circumstantial at best. Everyone wants it to be him [but] it’s not the same thing as it being him.”
There is just so much wrong with that scene. Apparently Rawlings and Wiseman arrested Garth and perp-walked him in front of his whole neighborhood only in the hope that they could force a confession out of him in the interrogation room. This is nuts. Even if Garth were guilty of killing his girlfriend (which he isn’t), the detectives can see that he is no rube or babe-in-the-woods. He is a middle-aged business owner with what appears to be a very expensive New York home. There’s no way this guy will be unaware of his right to remain silent and his right to an attorney, even if the detectives weren’t required by law to inform him of these rights. And the minute Rawlings and Wiseman cut him loose, Garth would have been sure to file a wrongful arrest complaint against them. But also silly is Rawlings dismissing the evidence against him as circumstantial. I’m not a lawyer, but I know that circumstantial evidence is as valid as direct evidence. I once served on the jury at a murder trial and the judge (as well as the prosecutor) made certain to emphasize this fact. Plenty of people have been convicted of crimes based on nothing but circumstantial evidence. If there is enough of it, it can be as persuasive as direct evidence. So it seems odd that Rawlings is so dismissive of it. Of course, it seems even odder that two Brooklyn detectives are investigating a homicide that took place three thousand miles away in California’s Yosemite National Park, but hey that’s television for you.
I lost track of how many times Rawlings and Wiseman managed to get some citizen into their interrogation room and then begin grilling him or her. This happens over and over again, despite the fact that, except for Garth, none of these people have actually been arrested. The two main characters of Wilderness are Will and Olivia Taylor, a couple of British citizens who now live in New York City. Olivia was a journalist in London but gave up her career to follow Will to New York where he has a prestigious and high-paying job with a firm whose actual function was never clear to me (something, something, real-estate, something). Several times during the course of Wilderness’s six episodes, Rawlings and Wiseman manage to haul either Will or Olivia into their interrogation room. At one point, Rawlings tells Olivia, “If you want your lawyer present, we can wait for him.” And Olivia tells Rawlings that she doesn’t a have a lawyer, that Will takes care of all that stuff. Olivia is a thirtysomething professional journalist who is apparently too inept to request a lawyer for herself without the aid of her husband. The Taylors are portrayed as being wealthier and more sophisticated than Garth, but they too seem completely oblivious to the fact that they do not have to submit to the sarcastic and hostile interrogations that Rawlings and Wiseman repeatedly submit them to.
I understand that contemporary American TV is hardly a bastion of believability. The cases on Castle frequently involve extremely far out scenarios – i.e., killers who are ninjas, or who LARP as vampires, zombies, and steampunks. Likewise, the title character of The Mentalist has powers of observation that border on the supernatural. Wilderness, though it purports to be a serious drama, is nevertheless as lurid and silly as an old-fashioned dime novel. But the preponderance of bogus interrogation-room scenes in contemporary crime dramas often renders the programs increasingly more unwatchable. Imagine if most contemporary crime dramas relied upon some silly supernatural convention – a Ouija board or a séance – to provide vital information to the detectives trying to solve a murder. Such silliness isn’t that much different than expecting us to believe that all sorts of educated and sophisticated characters are somehow dumb enough to voluntarily enter a police department interrogation room and simply start spilling their guts, without having been legally required to do so and without so much as consulting an attorney first. Today’s television writers are making things too easy on themselves. By giving their fictional cops an almost supernatural ability to force citizens to endure hostile interrogations and cough up answers they would rather not provide, these writers spare their detectives the hard work of actually looking for clues and evidence and motives and other elements that might help them solve a murder. These writers may think they are being clever but they are not. They are embracing a cliché.