Scaring people into doing the right thing may be all the cops have right now. Good for them.
The criminal justice system is not fair. If you expect fair, don't get mixed up with it. Stuff like this goes on all the time.
Police find drugs in a house. They tell the man of the house if he doesn't confess to the drugs, they will jail him and his wife and see to it that his children wind up in a children's home somewhere.
Prosecutors have a case to file against a defendnant who is currently serving time in state prison. They wait until a week before he is due to be released and then file the case, so he will have to serve back to back sentences - the one he just finished and the one on the newly filed case.
A state supreme court rules that whenever anyone is convictred of any crime and is put on probation, it is legal to include a search and seizure provision in the terms of probation requiring the probationer to submit to search and seizure at any time of the day or night, with or without probable cause, overtuning decades of law which had previously held that a search waiver condition of probation is not legal unless it bears some rational relationship to the crime committed.
Police promise a suspect that they will release him if he confesses. He confesses. They don't release him.
Detectives tell a defendant that if he will turn snitch, the charges against him will be dismissed. The defendant, at great personal risk, turns in half a dozen drug dealers, only to have the police turn their backs on him when they have all the information they think they are going to be able to get out of him.
Police pull a car over for no reason, order the occupant out, search the car and the person of the occupant, find contraband, make an arrest and then write a report which says they pulled the car over because of a defective tail light, failure to signal a turn, etc.
This kind of stuff happens all the time. Of course, it never happens to the "good guys," so the "good guys" not only don't care - they ENDORSE it.