It's no secret that Start By Believing seeks to foster cognitive biases in investigators. This results in investigations that seek to reinforce the initial "hunch" of culpability, instead of impartially following the evidence.

Yesterday, Reason magazine published an article that gave several examples of this problem -- attached. Here's one of them:

"Bruce Lisker was wrongly convicted in 1985 of stabbing his mother to death at their home in Sherman Oaks, California. He was not released until 2009, at which point he had served 26 years, after a judge determined that he had been convicted based on false evidence, including the testimony of a jailhouse snitch police knew was unreliable.

"Investigators coerced a confession (quickly recanted) from the 17-year-old teenager through the offer of a plea bargain," Rossmo and Pollock write. "A rush to judgment followed by tunnel vision led to confirmation bias. Exculpatory evidence was ignored, while the alibi of an alternative and viable suspect was never checked despite inconsistencies in his story."

When investigators are told to "Start By Believing" and to view contradictory statements by the complainant as proof the crime actually occurred, that harms the integrity of the entire criminal justice system.