This is a really good article that is grievously mistitled in the submission. Yes, there probably are police that 'trick' people, but this isn't the point of the article.The original is "Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong", which captures much more of the nuance.
Ignore the HN title, and read the article.
"One of the things we used to do at the Innocence Project is we would try, just informally, to predict which cases would end up being exonerations and which ones would end up confirming guilt when the DNA came back from the lab. And I was wrong more than I was right. What that tells me is that I was raised in the system before DNA evidence, where I relied on all these other types of investigative tools to determine guilt or innocence. That's one of the important things about DNA for me: It taught me how unreliable my own intuition is. Now when people say, 'What do you think is going to happen?' I say, 'Whatever happens happens, I have no idea and I don't want to speculate.'"
While the title doesn't reflect the whole article, I don't think it's entirely wrong in the sense that the article does show that the police have gotten false confessions from numerous people.
The central park "wilding" case: "Five kids are picked up in the park that night, they're all interrogated, the interrogations are not recorded but the ultimate confessions are. Later the kids say the confessions were coerced and that they're innocent, but they get convicted."
Police Officers do "follow their intuition" and thus use tricks to get confessions from people they are sure are guilty.
Ignore the HN title, and read the article.
"One of the things we used to do at the Innocence Project is we would try, just informally, to predict which cases would end up being exonerations and which ones would end up confirming guilt when the DNA came back from the lab. And I was wrong more than I was right. What that tells me is that I was raised in the system before DNA evidence, where I relied on all these other types of investigative tools to determine guilt or innocence. That's one of the important things about DNA for me: It taught me how unreliable my own intuition is. Now when people say, 'What do you think is going to happen?' I say, 'Whatever happens happens, I have no idea and I don't want to speculate.'"