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Notes -
Pinging in @Jiro. I understand you're argument, and while I addressed the potential adversarial motive in selection of the evidence, it was more as an aside, an observation that would give me another reason to be suspicious. But it isn't essential to my argument, because this failure mode seems to happen regardless of whether the observer has an ulterior motive, and is usually the result of a completely logical chain of events.
The cases I was referring to where this happens with police is where they get a Level 2 Description and become on it to the point that they fail to appreciate how broad it is. Take my example from above, where a witness sees a perpetrator running from a crime scene who is an African American teenager, short and very overweight. Let's suppose that a couple hours after the incident a beat cop canvassing the neigborhood come across a young man of that description who is 5'4" and 200 pounds in a pool hall a few blocks from the crime scene. Detectives question him, and while they don't get much in the way of evidence, they don't entirely buy his story. So they spend the next several weeks investigating him, never coming up with anything useful, but also never considering that he might not be the guy. Years later someone writes a book about the case and talks to an old cop who insists that this kid was the killer but they never had enough to prove it.
The police in a case like that didn't go on a wild goose chase because they had some special reason they wanted to pin a crime on that kid, they did it because they came across him early in the investigation and he matched a description given to them by an eyewitness. They didn't consider that the description could apply to hundreds of people, and that they should have been casting a broader net rather than narrowing the scope of the investigation early based on the description alone. It ultimately doesn't matter if Baker has an animus against the police. Even if he was arbitrarily reviewing CCTV footage to try to find a match, if he found some guy walking outside a restaurant who matched to the same degree and started making the argument that it must be that guy based on nothing else, then it's still just as bad.
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