The wrong guy

by Walter Olson on December 30, 2011

How often does Los Angeles County throw people in jail due to mistaken identity? In some years “an average of once a day.” [L.A. Times]

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Denver mistaken-identity arrests
01.11.12 at 12:56 am

{ 7 comments }

1 Andreas Moser 12.30.11 at 8:54 am

Yet people still say “He must have done something wrong, if he has been arrested”. It’s sad that the presumption of innocence is not ingrained in our minds.

2 gitarcarver 12.30.11 at 9:10 am

And don’t forget the corollary of “why not talk to us if you have nothing to hide?”

3 John Rohan 12.30.11 at 10:04 am

This article says nothing about what is really fueling this problem. When you have millions of illegal immigrants in your state, many (if not most) of whom are using some kind of stolen identity in order to work, then these problems are going to happen. Of course since the LA Times is a huge cheerleader in support of illegal immigration, they aren’t going to mention this.

4 Jack Olson 12.30.11 at 10:08 am

Wonder how many of those falsely arrested are victims of identity theft. Since identity theft is one of the favorite crimes of illegal aliens and Los Angeles has hundreds of thousands of them, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were a large source of the problem.

5 ras 12.30.11 at 10:22 pm

How does L.A. County’s error rate, re mistaken identity, compare to other cities’ with similar crime rates?

6 Greg 12.31.11 at 11:25 am

My question would be how many people they put someone in jail per day?

7 roy in nipomo 01.02.12 at 4:11 pm

A question I have is that does it count as a “false arrest” (for purposes of the article) if a person, suspecting they have a warrant for their arrest, gives a friend’s or relative’s name and is incorrectly arrested on the other person’s warrant. This is far from an uncommon occurrence.

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