Someone mentioned Castle as an example in which there wasn't torture used, while the main heroic detective Beckett has never used it, it was still used twice by police officers. The first case(episode 3x19) was a more positive but brief portrayal in which Detective Espisito(who generally has the badass role) delayed calling an ambulance after shooting someone to get information and when that wasn't enough held his just fired weapon inside the bullet wound. In the second case(episode 4x21), a one episode character played by Adam Baldwin tortured someone to get information but at least in that case it was shown as him being less a badass and more simply crazy. He also ended up being completely wrong about his main suspect and Beckett ending up solving it the right way. This is not counting the case(episode 5x15) with Castle himself(who is a mystery writer rather than police officer and so at least doesn't have authority).
Block wrote:Yeah, but those actually work in real life too, they just take time. Person of Interest is pretty anti-torture, the two main characters are both in the threat of pain works better than actual pain camp. It's actually used to show that a former partner has crossed the line. Other than that and Psych I don't watch cop shows, and Psych was always about tricking the suspect.
The point isn't whether psychological torture works, it's whether it's good to show heroic characters using it and whether the positives outweigh the negatives. Person of Interest however has the downside of showing government surveillance as necessary and useful in saving people. Another problem with that it has it that via a magic computer system, it never requires intelligence analysis which is the real life problem with gathering so much surveillance data in that there is too much to know. This is what leads to the problem after an attack of someone showing that data existed in files somewhere. It isn't enough to have data if one can't use it. This isn't to say that I don't like the show however, despite my criticisms of the premise.
Both Castle and Person Of Interest also featured heroic character on the receiving end of torture at various points. While arguably better than showing heroic characters doing it this has have another downside, that of it being used to show what a badass the characters are. On Castle(episode 3x13), Ryan and Espisito(the two secondary detectives) are both tortured by an ex-military suspect who is trying to discover how much they knew about him. They of course resist long enough to be rescued. Similarly Person Of Interest features Root doing the exact same thing(episode 3x12), though she rescues herself with help from her god. At another point(episode 2x16) Root threatened to torture Shaw and Shaw commented that she sort of liked this sort of thing, though she was flat out stated to be a sociopath(using the more accurate term of an Axis II personality disorder from the current DSM).
Simon_Jester wrote:I think part of the problem is that in America, we now have all these accoutrements of police state tactics (secret prisons, secret trials on secret evidence, highly classified state intelligence/security organs, torture...). But we don't have any experience of those tools being used against "us," the we-the-people that constitutes the American mainstream. They only get used on 'weird bad people.'
A similar issue is that of police tactics that cause false confessions. As the overwhelming majority of people have never had contact with police in a negative capacity, it is easy for them to say that they would never confess to something they didn't do. However there is nothing that requires police tell the truth in any capacity in dealing with suspects and it is quite easy for them to convince people to tell what they know until they spill something that incriminates them, regardless of their actual guilt. Most detectives have a relatively easy time convincing someone to ignore the Miranda rights they just signed.
An interesting fact, the homicide clearance rate in the US
has dropped from 90% in 1960 to 61% in 2009. This is despite modern forensics being much more effective. The key reason is due to less public cooperation which the issue of torture doesn't exactly help with, though generally the problem is gangs and the corresponding lack of trust in both directions.
