Police Bias

In his closing argument during the 1893 trial of Lizzie Borden for the murders of her father and stepmother, Governor George Robinson, Lizzie’s lead defense attorney, continually brought up what he considered questionable police conduct regarding Lizzie, highlighting their bias against her. He made it clear he believed that their investigation into the murders was tainted by that bias, and the evidence they produced against Lizzie was tainted as well, marred by their lack of objectivity. “When once a theory possesses our minds, you know how tenaciously it holds its place and how slow the mind is to find lodgment in something else.”

In return, District Attorney Hosea Knowlton mounted a spirited defense of police officers. “It is true they are police officers, but they are men, too. They made many mistakes. The crime was beyond the experience of any man in this country or in this world, what wonder that they did? They left many things undone that they have done; what wonder that they did? It was beyond the scope of any man to grasp in its entirety at the time. But honestly, faithfully, as thoroughly as God had given them ability, they pursued the various avenues by which they thought they might find this criminal.” He added that police officers only reluctantly concluded from overwhelming evidence that Lizzie committed the murders. “And because they have been called into this case and because they have found things which they present to you, I say it is wicked to brand them as overzealous or unkind or prejudiced or biased.”

Which attorney was correct? Is there evidence of police bias against Lizzie? Or a more pertinent question might be, is there evidence police failed to seriously consider other possible suspects?

Signs of Dismissive Police Attitudes

When going through newspaper archives and reading articles on the Borden case that appeared in 1892, we can see that Lizzie was suspected by police almost immediately (For more on exactly how quickly this happened, see Rush to Judgment). This is not too surprising as Lizzie admitted she was home and, as far as she knew, alone in the house during the time Abby was killed. Even George Robinson found no fault with police pursuing an investigation of Lizzie. He acknowledged the public clamor for police identify a suspect and said, “Naturally, as men feeling the responsibility of their office, they must go do such work as that.”

We see other signs of a stunning lack of interest by police officers in pursuing any possible culprits other than Lizzie. When Officer Mullaly interviewed ice cream peddler Hyman Lubinsky on August 8th, he learned that Lubinsky had seen “a lady” in the Borden yard the morning of the murders. Mullaly believed Lubinsky told him he had seen this woman at about 10:30 a.m., although Lubinsky would later testify at the trial it was more like 11:10 a.m. Either way, the police had just learned that a woman was seen in the yard of the house where two murders took place, very near the time the murders happened, and they apparently did nothing to follow up on that sighting; they did not try to discover who that woman was and what she may have seen. (Assuming Lubinsky was telling the truth, then it was almost certainly Lizzie he saw, as she said she was on her way back to the house from the barn at that time.)

Likewise, when a Fall River physician and Borden family friend named Dr. Benjamin Handy reported a man acting strangely in front of the Borden house in the time frame between the two murders, police first attempted to wave the man off as a known local drunk. But when Handy disputed that, they made only half-hearted attempts to track down other possibilities—at least that’s what State Detective George Seaver told The New Bedford Evening Standard. “That clue,” he said, “is being worked for all it’s worth, and in my opinion it’s not worth much.” Why wasn’t it worth much? Seaver said Dr. Handy’s former acquaintance with Lizzie made the information suspect in his mind.

A thorough reading of the Witness Statements reveals that police officers made great efforts to pin down details about Lizzie’s movements in the days before the murders and what other people knew about Lizzie’s feelings toward Andrew and Abby. Yet there are no reports in those preserved statements on efforts by police to learn more about anyone else who may have had conflicts with either victim. Some of their activities to follow up on “leads” provided to them by anxious citizens eager to help are included, which were entirely of the wild-goose-chase variety. (The search of a pond and the “suspicious” discovery of a banana in a bag tied up in string that was carried to the station brings a chuckle.) There are numerous reports of interviews with people moving about on Second Street the days of the murders in which each one said they “saw no one suspicious.” But there is nothing to support that police officers interviewed Andrew’s business colleagues or other professional associates to learn more about what activities he may have been involved with or who might have had a reason to want him dead. Even Officer Medley’s report on his interview with Charles C. Cook, Andrew’s business manager, shows he asked Cook primarily about the possibility of Andrew having a will, and about his relationship with Lizzie. From these reports, we can see that police ran down tips given to them, but they don’t seem to have done any real detective work to develop leads of their own. Then, of course, as William Spencer noted in his excellent book, The Case Against Lizzie Borden, the Fall River police force was a “constabulary” comprised almost entirely of patrolmen who merely followed orders; none were trained detectives.

To be fair, the preserved Witness Statements were compiled by police specifically for the purpose of aiding the district attorney in his prosecution of Lizzie, so it is tempting to think there are perhaps numerous reports that were not preserved and would have revealed the intense effort that Knowlton insisted police made to discover other possible suspects. “I am not permitted even to tell you,” he said, “how many men were followed with the thought that perhaps they had something to do with crime, how many towns and cities were investigated, and how many were watched and followed, how many trails have been pursued.” Why the district attorney would not be “permitted” to say what police did to more fully investigate the murders is curious, as it would have only helped his case against Lizzie. Still, one hopes for the sake of justice for the victims that he accurately characterized their efforts. Perhaps the eventual publication of the papers of Police Marshal Rufus Hilliard, which were donated to the Fall River Historical Society, will reveal a more complete picture of the police investigation into the murders.

Still, police seemed to be fairly open about their activities with the reporters crawling over the city looking for news, and while there are newspaper reports in the days after the murders of police ruling out several former tenants of Andrew’s known to be disgruntled with him, as well as plenty on their wild-goose-chase activities in response to public tips, there is nothing about officers venturing forth to dig into anything that wasn’t voluntarily provided to them by others. And once Lizzie was arrested, just one week after the murders, their fruitless search for an intruder was essentially over, and their mission became proving their case against her. Perhaps that is why we find so many repetitions in newspaper accounts of the phrase used by the reporter above when there was a mention a possibility other than Lizzie: “Police attach little importance to this matter.”

What the Trial Revealed

William Spencer had an interesting take on mistakes made by the prosecution at the trial, particularly in asking Officer Medley to tell the jury about his “dust experiment” in an attempt to discredit Lizzie’s alibi about going up into the barn when Andrew was killed. Medley’s testimony was thoroughly discredited by defense witnesses who testified to being up in the barn before Medley, which negated his assertion that there were no footprints in the dust in the barn loft. Medley’s testimony, wrote Spencer, “added to the defense’s allegations of a too-quick focus on Lizzie Borden. The constant reminders of promotions given to various officers may have also helped the jury lean toward police incompetence in the case, or even police bias.”  

The defense, Spencer also noted, made such a good case against Medley’s experiment that “if the jury deduced that Medley was making up evidence against Lizzie, or at least being inept in his procedures, might other evidence gathered be suspect as well? It also further supports the defense’s assertions that the police were selecting only incriminating evidence against Lizzie. How could the defense, with only a few men, find these witnesses that challenged Medley’s experiment, but the entire police force could not? The obvious answer is that the police felt they had no reason to doubt Medley or at least did not want to.”

It is apparent from this, and other examples that came up during the trial, that the police simply did not want to consider other possibilities. They had decided Lizzie was the culprit and, as Jennings noted at the preliminary hearing, “All their labors have been directed with that view.”

What Modern Psychology Tells Us about Bias

While it seems clear that police officers were operating under a certain bias against Lizzie, they were not particularly unique in falling prey to it. In fact, it can be argued that they could not avoid it. As Knowlton rightfully noted: “It is true they are police officers, but they are men, too.” And, being men like other men, they were subject to a quirk of the mind that affects all humans.

In 2024, American Police Beat magazine published an article called “Exploring confirmation bias in policing.” The author, Dr. Michael Loesli, a professor at Minnesota State University, begins his exploration with a famous Mark Twain quote: “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” He then tells us that Twain was exactly right: “Human nature tends to seek and interpret evidence in ways that align with our preexisting beliefs and expectations, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias.” He goes on to say:

“Confirmation bias is not exclusive to policing but affects individuals across all professions and situations. However, in the vast landscape of the criminal justice system, key people are all at risk of being ensnared by the subtle yet powerful traps of confirmation bias. These individuals include police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, forensic scientists, judges, jurors, dispatchers and witnesses. This bias can significantly influence decisions, leading to errors with far-reaching consequences. Human susceptibility to confirmation bias is widespread in our lives and society, as evidenced by numerous studies over many years. We all harbor preconceived biases and often fixate on evidence that aligns with our beliefs while disregarding contradictory information. In sum, we want to prove ourselves right.”

In the end, the problem wasn’t that Fall River police were determined to prove themselves right, the problem was that they didn’t recognize their bias—so didn’t allow that they might be wrong. Unrecognized bias can lead to a kind of tunnel vision, wrote Dr. Loesli, and “having tunnel vision on the ideas that confirm our original idea could potentially lead to overlooking or discounting crucial information that could alter the course of an investigation. Sometimes, our first reaction to something seems correct but is actually wrong and requires thinking more deeply about it.” Police bias, he concludes, “can veer police investigations off course,” and cause officers to “overestimate how accurate [their] first reaction is, even when presented with more reliable information later on … resulting in errors with widespread repercussions.”

Of course, we don’t know if police were presented with more reliable information after their initial rush to judgment; but that could be because they weren’t looking for reliable information about the murders, they were simply looking for information that would confirm their suspicion that Lizzie was the murderer. Their suspicion of Lizzie was reasonable, and Robinson was correct in saying that investigating Lizzie was the proper course of action. But he was also right that the tunnel vision created by confirmation bias prevented police officers from investigating in directions that might have led to other suspects. The police “lose faith in anything which lies outside the Borden fence,” wrote a Boston Post reporter on August 11th. “That house and what it contains is their camping ground.”

Of course, our modern understanding of the impacts of bias was not available to the Fall River Police Department in 1892. There was no American Police Beat magazine sitting around the station to warn officers to be cautious about settling on Lizzie’s guilt too quickly and closing off other avenues of investigation (although Lizzie’s defense seemed able to grasp what was going on easily enough). If they had proceeded with more open minds, perhaps they would have moved beyond the “camping ground” of the Borden household and discovered more evidence to work with to bring the killer to justice, whether Lizzie or someone else. Then again, if they had moved more slowly, maybe mobs of anxious citizens would have stormed their doors demanding that they make an arrest.

Either way, there is nothing we can do now to alter how things unfolded in the past. But one thing we can do now is recognize that police bias likely played a role in the rush to judgment against Lizzie, which caused them to lose the trust of both Borden girls and thus lose the cooperation of their most valuable information sources. The result was a hasty investigation that produced such poor and unpersuasive evidence that the one suspect they put on trial for the murders was found “not guilty.” As we look at the case today and analyze the evidence, whether we conclude Lizzie was guilty or innocent, it’s helpful to ask if we ourselves are also falling prey to confirmation bias.