he was a law clerk for a federal judge in Virginia. He then worked as an FBI Special Agent in Virginia and Washington, D.C., followed by his doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Retrieval of Liberalism in Policing; The Police Identity Crisis: Hero, Warrior, Guardian, Algorithm; and Police Deception and Dishonesty – The Logic of Lying.
Hunt applied the “Page 99 Test” to Police Deception and Dishonesty – The Logic of Lying and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Luke William Hunt's website.[W]hen members of the public engage in criminality over the course of fulfilling social contractual obligations, we might say the police have the right to rescind their end of the deal—bringing the police and the public to a pre-contract state of nature (and state of war), so to speak. Indeed, that’s how things tend to look in the real world. But this line of argument is deficient…as illustrated by the next analogy to contract law.I was worried that I might find irrelevant nonsense buried on page 99, but the Page 99 Test works. The above excerpt illustrates how the book draws upon the norms of contract law as a way to understand the normative foundations of the police institution.
The police have what we might call a preexisting duty to engage with the public in good faith. The preexisting duty rule simply means that performance of a preexisting duty is not a valid basis of the bargain in a contract. Suppose there is a murder and a $10,000 reward for anyone providing information leading to the arrest of the murderer. Now suppose the lead detective on the case finds a key piece of evidence; he promptly schedules a press conference and offers the evidence in exchange for the reward. This would of course be absurd, and the doctrine of preexisting duties establishes that public officers such as the police, whose efforts were made in the performance of official duty, are not entitled to share in rewards. There is no “consideration” (basis of the bargain) for the offeror’s promise of a reward because the police had a duty to do the work anyway.
The analogy is not perfect, but it’s reasonable to think that the state’s duty of good faith is not contingent upon the public’s criminality…. [T]he nature and existence of political society is based upon reciprocation that necessitates good faith; this suggests that good faith reciprocation is a sort of preexisting duty. … [S]ocietal deviance can be a correlative of institutional force and fraud. Instead of focusing exclusively on those who are so-called social deviants, we can turn out attention to the institutions that motivate some of that (reasonable) deviance.
If the police foster an environment of deception, dishonesty, and bad faith, they exacerbate fear, distrust, and deviance. So when we think of public deviance and criminality as a “breach” of the social contract, we should pause and consider the possibility of a prior failure by the state [to fulfill its preexisting duties].
Suppose I’m charged with a crime, and subsequently agree to do something for the police (gather evidence, testify, confess) in exchange for a (potentially) reduced sentence. If my agreement is based on a material misrepresentation by the police, then it sounds like I was subjected to a fraudulent bargaining process. The norms of contract law illuminate that point. More abstractly: Societal arrangements modeled on the ideal of a social contract—agreements between the government and the governed regarding security—are relational in nature even if they cannot be captured exhaustively in a literal contract. Persons are conceived as entrusting certain tasks (governing, judging, policing) to agents of the state, and it is through this entrustment that persons can be thought of has having a right to be secured in good faith and free from fraud.
The second half of the book applies these ideas to real-world cases studies focusing on legal and philosophical analysis (including analysis of rare cases in which fraudulent policing might be justified).
--Marshal Zeringue
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