Dexter's Copaganda Part 2

Junk Science in Criminal Justice

In my last post I highlighted the fact that police in the U.S. kill five times more people each year than serial killers do and how policing as an institution is used to stifle democratic movements and worker organizing regardless of how good or bad any individual cop is. In this post I’ll give a few more examples of copaganda in the TV show Dexter, and then connect them to the flawed forensics that police, prosecutors, and so-called expert witnesses use to convict people, regardless of their innocence. I want to make clear here that I do not hate police officers, and while I believe a future without police is possible, I have no illusions that the transition will be quick or easy. My concrete goal in both writing and the work that I do is to create supportive structures which will actually make the work of police officers easier and the communities we live in together safer for everyone. Part of safety includes police accountability and ending police impunity, in addition to placing core safety functions like responding to mental health crises in the hands of trained and unarmed professionals.

All that aside, an important question to answer is, why is copaganda worth worrying about? Because it influences people’s perception of crime and criminality, not only giving them a false understanding of the prevalence of crime, but also drives emotional narratives which fuel calls for punishment over compassion and rehabilitation. According to the Pew Research Center,

Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down.

In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period.

While perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans believe crime is up in their own communities. In every Gallup crime survey since the 1990s, Americans have been much less likely to say crime is up in their area than to say the same about crime nationally.

This is the same effect we see with public schooling, where Americans rate their local public schools highly, but rate national public schooling poorly. These false perceptions are pushed by far-right politicians and pundits both at the national and state level to create a culture of fear so that people support increased funding for policing and prisons. This comes at the expense of funding for education, youth activities, job training, and social services that would create stronger communities and prevent crime. Crime is down, but fear is up and that leads to bad decision-making.

Four More Examples of Copaganda in Dexter

1. Cops are shown as mostly by the books rule followers, but whenever they break the rules, it's to save victims and catch the bad guys. This is similar to point three from last post, however last time I focused on the humanization of police over “criminals,” and this time I want to focus on the depiction of rule following.

Spoiler alert here. One major story arc of the later seasons of Dexter occurs after his sister Debra sees him killing someone. First he convinces her to help him cover it up and then several episodes are dedicated to him proving to her that the rules that protect people from the police are actually getting in the way of saving lives. This culminates in one of the sickest serial killers featured so far building mazes and killing a woman (after being released because the police never read him his Miranda Rights) and almost killing Debra. Finally Debra gives in and agrees with Dexter that sometimes police can drop the rules and be judge, jury, and executioner to save lives.

There’s a lot to unpack in this story arc including the fact that police incompetence (not reading Miranda Rights), is due to an annoying bureaucratic hurdle that prevents police from doing their job effectively and lets a bad person go free (see point 2 below). The main point, however, is that Debra is such a rule follower that it takes serious convincing for her to see the need to break the rules sometimes. In reality, rule-breaking is rampant in many police departments, with the most notorious departments full of gangs of corrupt officers who commit serious crimes themselves and protect each other while qualified immunity protects others who violate the limited protections people have from police. To give just one example, ProPublica reports that Chicago police do a terrible job investigating themselves for the many crimes their officers commit (duh):

In reviewing more than 300 sexual misconduct and assault complaints against Chicago police officers, the Invisible Institute and ProPublica found a pattern of the department failing to vigorously investigate accusations of sexual assault by officers, whether those complaints were lodged by fellow cops or members of the public. The claims were often downplayed or ignored, sometimes allowing officers to abuse again and again.

A 2017 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Chicago police found officers frequently minimized the seriousness of sexual misconduct accusations against colleagues and didn’t employ best-practice investigative techniques. Police, the investigation found, closed cases without conducting full investigations....

The Chicago Police Department has a long history of failing to identify and deal with patterns of troubling behavior within its ranks. Officers who stole from suspects were able to do so repeatedly before getting caught. Detectives who coerced confessions, sending innocent people to prison and costing the city tens of millions of dollars in legal settlements, did so without ever being disciplined. And some cops who abused and tortured Chicagoans did so for years before they were stopped.

2. The failings of the criminal justice system are almost always presented as legal rules and technicalities getting in the way of cops and letting violent criminals go free. This is the reason a person like Dexter is needed and why his dad taught him to kill "bad people” having become jaded by seeing people released from jail only to commit more crimes. One implication of this is that police are automatically on the list of good people and get to decide who is bad. If police weren’t superheroes, if for example, they were regular people like everyone else who could be good or bad as individuals, they might actually need rules and accountability to prevent them from committing abuses like those noted above.

3. In the search for the Trinity Killer, cops set up cordons and DNA test thousands of people across the city. In taking this action, they explicitly talk about the "ACLU having a field day with this." Violating civil rights in the show is depicted as justified by the greater good and organizations that protect people from government abuses of power are annoyances that get in the way of stopping criminals. This line of reasoning is upheld by one of last post’s examples of copaganda in which implies there are an overwhelming number of serial killers and “irredeemable” people and therefore any abuse committed by police is justified as it is less serious than what those people might do. As we saw last week, police kill five times more people than serial killers each year, so any justification of police force based on the value of human lives goes right out the window.

4. Finally, blood spatter analysis is presented as a real science! This point is somewhat contradicted in the show itself by the fact that so much relies on Dexter's hunches or on him actually being present at the crime. 90% of his work is bullshit, but it is presented as a serious endeavor which provides police with the leads they need to catch their person. Blood spatter analysis is just one example of…

Junk Science

Last year I read Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System by M. Chris Fabricant. Through a detailed historical timeline and a variety of examples, Fabricant underscores the very flawed science used to prosecute and convict people both historically and today. The book summary on Storygraph describes it well:

Weaving together courtroom battles from Mississippi to Texas to New York City, Fabricant takes the reader on a journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role forensic science plays in maintaining the status quo.

In detailing the history of several unscientific forensic techniques, including bite-mark analysis, ballistics, hair fiber, and blood spatter analysis, Fabricant reveals an important piece of copaganda perpetuated by prosecutors as well as TV shows like Dexter and CSI among many others. Though lacking scientific rigor and formal studies using the scientific method, prosecutors rely on them to convince juries of the guilt of people they want to lock away, and therefore they convince juries of the expertise of forensic practitioners. In reality, this expertise has relied almost entirely on informal training, forensics studies that were not replicable, and a line of apprenticeships building “expertise” by following subjective teachings of a prior “expert.” Juries don’t want to convict an innocent person, but prosecutors often use their lack of knowledge about forensics to provide credible-seeming analysis that starts with a tiny grain of truth and extrapolates a lot of subjective details which seem to point to the person the prosecutors wish to convict.

In a series of telling examples, once DNA analysis was available to test evidence from past convictions, The Innocence Project started to review cases and found that hair fiber samples from crime scenes which forensic scientists had matched to a defendant’s hair sample were actually from a dog in one case and a carpet fiber in another. The Innocence Project has identified people who were wrongly executed based on such pseudoscience and has helped exonerate others who were sentenced to death. This is one of many reasons why the death penalty should be abolished.

Fabricant provides numerous other examples in his book, but to bring this back to Dexter, a huge portion of his job on the show is total nonsense. Every scene where he magically recreates a crime by looking at the blood or stringing lines of red yarn to a point is unreliable pseudoscience. One recent study of 75 analysts found that bloodstain pattern analysts’ conclusions were wrong about 11% of the time. This means that one in ten convictions relying on bloodstain analysis could be wrong, an egregious rate. They also found that “any two analysts’ conclusions contradicted each other at an overall rate of about 8%.” This points to the subjective nature of the analysis, and the fact that prosecutors could seek out multiple “expert” opinions and use the one that fits their need for a conviction. In fact:

A comprehensive 2009 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that "the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous" and that purported bloodstain pattern experts' opinions are "more subjective than scientific".

I used Dexter as an example because I watched the show recently, but our fictional and non-fictional media is awash in copaganda that perpetuates false notions of public safety and how policing and forensic science actually works. Taken together, these portrayals create an environment in which copaganda is as natural as the air that we breathe and even people who critically think about their media consumption get caught up in false narratives without the time to debunk each claim. It’s critical that we take the time to look at the facts and rigorous research that debunks the narratives, otherwise we will be stuck in the errors of the past and continue to fund cages instead of care for our neighbors.

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