ILLUSTRATION BY TRASK BEDORTHA
‘ARE
YOU A
COP?’
CRIMINALS LIE, BUT
SO DO POLICE OFFICERS
By Camilla Mortensen
E
ver smoke pot? Obama has. So has Bill Clinton.
Most everybody has at least tried it. But before you smoke it,
somebody usually has to buy it. And buying it, like smoking it, is
illegal. Ever bought pot?
Ok, you’re probably normally a totally law-abiding citizen,
with barely a speeding ticket to your name. But let’s just say that
at some point in your life, you feel the need to smoke a little weed. Since you
don’t grow your own and don’t usually buy drugs, you don’t have a regular
source for the stuff.
No problem. This is Eugene; word on the street is that you can buy
marijuana most anywhere, from the back of an LTD bus to the UO campus to
an alley in downtown Eugene on a Saturday night.
You fi nd a hookup and get ready to seal the deal. But you naturally want
to make sure that despite breaking the law, you’re not actually going to
get in trouble with the law. Before you hand over the cash, you ask the nice
gentleman who is about to sell you that bud, “Are you a cop?”
And if he’s a police offi cer, he has to tell the truth, right?
Wrong.
A little informal survey of people around the Eugene Weekly offi ce and
downtown from students to attorneys reveals that a rather large number of
Eugeneans believe that if they ask a cop some version of “Are you a police
offi cer?” the cop in question has to answer truthfully. This is also apparently
a commonly held belief among hookers.
What bad TV shows are you people watching? Here’s the truth that law
enforcement doesn’t want you to know: Cops can lie.
Police offi cers don’t have to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth — not while they’re trying to arrest you, investigate you or even
while they’re interviewing you. There are times they do have to tell the truth,
and there are times when lying becomes entrapment, and that’s not legal.
Law enforcement would prefer you didn’t know about this whole lying thing;
it makes it easier on them to arrest you. EW’s here to help you out.
16 JANUARY 21, 2010
EUGENE WEEKLY
PANTS ON FIRE
Lying police offi cers are a dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about. The Eugene
Police Department had no comment and the Springfi eld Police didn’t reply. Even criminal
defense attorneys want to speak off the record on the issue.
In response to the Weekly’s request for comment on situations in which a police offi cer
might have to lie — undercover operations, stings etc. — Melinda Kletzock, EPD’s public
information offi cer responded, “We do not discuss interview tactics because that might
jeopardize cases.”
In hopes that EPD could discuss arrest or investigative tactics, rather than interview
tactics, EW was more specifi c: If in the middle of a drug deal, for example, a drug seller
asks the buyer, “Are you a police offi cer?” Does the offi cer have to tell the truth?
Unfortunately, “We aren’t able to provide these details for your story because we can’t
discuss tactics,” says Kletzok.
Lying is fast. Lying is useful. Lying is effective when it comes to taking down
criminals, but the police would prefer this remained under wraps. As Winston Churchill
supposedly said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to
put its pants on.”
Day Owen of the Pitchfork Rebellion ran into a possible undercover cop playing with
the truth last November when his activist group went to the Bureau of Land Management’s
offi ces in Springfi eld to deliver the verdict from their Halloween mock trial protesting
pesticide spraying on public lands.
Owen says not only was the Pitchfork Rebellion followed from the old federal courthouse
to the BLM offi ces by a car with Department of Homeland Security license plates, but at
the BLM offi ces a separate, unknown man trailed after them with a camera.
Owen says when the man was asked if he was a police offi cer, he denied it and responded
that he was “just a concerned citizen,” and said, “None of you broke any laws; you did just
fi ne, so it doesn’t matter who I am.”
If the man was a police offi cer, then he lied to the Pitchfork Rebellion when he didn’t
identify himself as a police offi cer, and that’s perfectly legal.
After a photo of the man ran in EW, Owen received an anonymous tip that the man who
followed them was Springfi eld Police detective Robert Conrad. EW’s repeated requests to
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