Tom (Retired FBI Agent)

There are differences between the East Coast and the West Coast, how certain things are done, attitudes, training varies.

And above all, the operational experience of agencies vary.

And

Police agencies are shaped by those experiences, shaped by the things that go right, by the things especially that go wrong, by controversy, and are ever-changing.

I think it's important for people to remember that law enforcement is not a static organization.

monolithic beast, but one that is responding, responding to society, responding to the expectations of society.

When I started in the FBI, for example, the FBI didn't record interviews.

And it stemmed from an era where it was just understood that if an agent testified, the jury would accept their testimony, that that wouldn't be

Questioned in any way.

It was just a sort of a given.

And meanwhile, at the same time, local agencies had long ago begun recording interviews.

And it's only in recent years, towards the end of my career, that we started recording interviews.

And that's now gone.

I'm not sure where it is exactly now, but it's moving to be sort of the standard because juries are evolving too.

They respond to what they see in the news.

They respond to what they see in media.

The show CSI was very popular for a number of years, and it led to something called the CSI effect, where jurors came in with an expectation that police forensic science had all the capabilities that they saw on TV.

And it's something that...

prosecutors would have to educate a jury to sharpen their expectations to make them more realistic.

So it's fluid.