Police fixation on initially adopted viewpoints.
A retired Detective Superintendent of the Fife Constabulary has been indicted for Perverting the Course of Justice, a rather serious charge in the UK, for actions that resulted in two defendants each spending ten years in prison.
Quite obviously a murder of an alcoholic in Scotland has no factual relationship to the Jonbenet Ramsey murder in Colorado, but I took particular note of it solely because the officers involved, although guilty of multiple wrongdoings, embarked on their course of illegal suppression of exculpatory evidence solely because it was contrary to the then-accepted theory of the case which had been prematurely adopted by the police.
This is yet another example of how people become fixated on an early interpretation of the evidence and will go to great lengths to make certain that all later developments are in accord with the prior view. It is quite obvious that the first few witnesses to give evidence that was contrary to the accepted viewpoint may have been given short shrift for a variety of reasons but once the number of contrary witnesses mushroomed the police clung to their prematurely adopted viewpoint despite the utter reliability of the contrary witnesses and the clearly verifiable circumstances of their observations. Police computer records were knowingly altered so that all statements indicating the contrary point of view were suppressed. Witnesses were apparently threatened by a police official who later was appointed to a position wherein he was inspecting other police forces.
This incident might be of some interest to those who feel that it is improper for innocent persons to promptly “lawyer-up” or that meeting with senior officials will clear up early misunderstandings created by initial investigators.
Note: Although the significant point is the fixation on an early-adopted viewpoint, those who care to follow some of the underlying facts of the case should be aware of certain unique terminology. Bent is a term that is often used in the UK to refer to a homosexual but in relation to a police officer the term bent refers to one that is corrupt and the word then carries no connotation of sexual orientation. The word tip in the UK can indeed refer to information provided by a member of the public to the police in order to aid the solution of a crime but it can also refer to what in the United States would be called a garbage dump. The word grass refers to an act that in the United States would be perhaps termed snitching or informing. The term Procurator Fiscal in Scottish law is the rough equivalent to coroner in the United States, meaning an official who makes a preliminary inquiry into the circumstances of a death and who issues a formal report of allegations relating to deaths, violent crimes or police corruption.
Excerpted from the Daily Record:
Scots cop accused of corruption
Mar 24 2008 Exclusive by Mark Mcgivern.
A BENT detective who fled Britain when he was accused of corruption is facing a new police probe after being tracked to Devon. Police want to quiz former chief superintendent Richard Munro over claims he framed two innocent men for murder. Munro who served 26 years in Fife Constabulary, left the force in disgrace in 2004.
The corruption investigation was launched after the appeal judges branded Munro a liar and said he and his colleagues were guilty of grave misconduct. Munro quit Britain and lived in various countries in a camper van and finally slipped back into the UK to a bolthole in Devon. Before Munro left the force, he was on secondment to HM Inspectorate of Constabulary – which inspects police forces and advises ministers.
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