Well, yes. Bias and laziness. Not behaviours that are acceptable in the justice system.

It may also be that establishing which people you need to sample to substantiate somebody’s claims of lineage, gathering the consent and the samples (potentially across jurisdictions), testing to judicial standards, and procuring expert interpretation involves a fair amount of professionals’ time and energy, as well as substantial cost. It seems like much of the judicial system depends on things being largely within the realm of the reasonably imaginable, and this crime is so weird. I mean—sustaining that level of imposture for 35 years? A sane-seeming person being able to document 35 years of living under this name, in formal paperwork that’s legible to the state? When is that ever the most likely explanation?

I think back over the number of marginal people I’ve met, many of whom are in altered mental states either temporary or permanent, who claim to be secretly Rothschilds, or spurned princes, or reincarnated deities, or representatives of extraterrestrial species… while the long delay in applying technology here delayed the fix to a travesty, I understand why the policy for the routine use of that technology may be what it is.

If anything, I’d be curious how the detective got authorization to apply so much time and so many resources to running this claim to ground.

I generally agree with this point of view, because a 100% failsafe solution can be so costly. I think medicine is a good example of how the cost of perfection scales badly.

However, it sounds like significant resources went to institutionalizing the person. Maybe that's good for the police who get to take the cost off their books. The government overall is still paying.

This is why any identification period should start from birth. Parents and relatives, possible kindergarten, home addresses, schools, etc. Something that might be much harder for the thieve to remember. And too many failures in these should destroy any later evidence completely.

How would this work for "any identification period"? Any time I want to apply for a credit card or move house or enrol in a school, someone responsible needs to quiz me on all those things and verify them in a way that is secure, yet doesn't leak information to the next identity thief?

This is madness. Instead, you have a fairly rigorous process for some form of state-issued ID, and allow using that to reduce friction in every other identification process.

In this case, the identity thief fraudulently obtained a state ID, and later a birth certificate, which really does "start from birth". The institutions that issued him with those probably could have done better, but they can't stop everyone, and they need to make some tradeoffs when demanding documentation from decades ago just to let their citizens participate in society.

> This is why any identification period should start from birth.

How does that work for immigrants?

How does that work for kids of parents who do not care enough to keep track of their kids identity documents?

How dies that work for orphans or children of incarcerated parents of children of homeless addicts who are raised by grandparents or an aunt?

As a teacher, I know the world is not so simple.

Contact the country of origin.

Should not matter.

This is the simplest case, there should be plenty of information with child protective services. Just verify some of those facts.

Why do you think the country of origin has better records?

I'd prefer police detectives to use biases based on past experiences. Otherwise they are bad detectives. Your assertion is perfunctory and hollow.

But an inevitable part of ANY decision-making system.

It's the oil of the justice machine.

Your world is awfully black and white.

> My guess is LAPD deals with drugged up violent stupid crime every day and some nut job homeless guy making crazy claims 99.99% of the time is just crazy, so why bother?

No, something more than that went wrong. From the article:

>> The real Woods was arrested and charged with identity theft and false impersonation, under a misspelling of Keirans’ name: Matthew Kierans.

I would bet that Woods did not supply that name to the authorities. (How would he have known it?) It had to have come from Keirans. But that changes the story from "some nut job homeless guy making crazy claims" to "a dispute between two people who know each other".

Doesn't this happen on the boarder from time to time?

A US Citizen will be deported to Mexico because they didn't happen to have an ID and the agent just thought he was in the 99.9% of people claiming they are citizens? Then they get stuck in the system and it takes a lot to get back into the country and prove who they are.

Ok, but probability doesn't work like that. Even if 99.99% of the time a given individual is delusional, you still have to check every time because this person might be the 0.01%. It's like the question of "you flip a coin 9 times in a row, and it has come up heads all 9 times. If you flip the coin a 10th time, how likely is it to be heads?"

Also, and perhaps even more importantly, if you aren't actually checking every time, then you don't actually know what the statistics for delusional vs not are, you're just guessing.

Your resources are limited, DNA tests aren’t free and doing the footwork takes labor. The claim is evaluated, triaged, and then prioritized.

If we put more resources into the system, throwing caution to the wind is much more likely.

I'm not sure what you mean about throwing more resources into the system, but as regards the DNA evidence, in this specific circumstances just asking the fraud "What's your Dad's name?" was sufficient. No expensive DNA test needed

they’re police officers trying to do their best with limited time, not mathematicians trying to prove a point

I am also not a mathematician, and indeed got fairly mediocre math grades throughout most of my education. But you don't need to be PhD candidate to understand that if you never actually check, you never actually know.

As we all recently discovered - not testing means the thing isn’t happening (obviously), which is convenient if you don’t want to know.

Some people go looking for problems, and they find them. Some people don’t, and they don’t. Some people are so uninterested in finding problems that they’ll attack or ‘fix’ people that find them.

How on earth could you know that? That's a strong assumption to make.

Yeah, I would guess Iowa is quieter. LAPD is one of those archetypal failing police organizations, with so much on their plate even their own officers form organized criminal gangs. No wonder they don't have time for some poor mental hospital hobo's insistence that his identity was stolen 30+ years ago and that people are pretending to be him, especially after he was already convicted for identity theft. But that's also a systematic failure, and it shouldn't be happening. No police organisation anywhere in the world in that bad of a shape shouldn't undergo basically complete restructuring and reconsideration of duties. No court should have ever let that first ruling pass. Such a simple thing as a paternity test to discover who is clearly in the right should have been the obvious thing to do right away, instead of brushing people away. Even in the first court case, honestly.

Should == ‘I wish’.

The tricky part is making another outcome happen when real life is involved. You’re welcome to try to change it if you like. A lot of people are doing so every day, and it would be even worse without that effort every day.