In this case, the police were all but certain they had the right man. There was video footage of him stealing the car. He had valuables from the car in his pock

In this case, the police were all but certain they had the right man. There was video footage of him stealing the car. He had valuables from the car in his pockets. Likewise, the police were pretty sure the baby was still alive. It had only been 20 minutes since the car had been stolen. Based on these likelihoods, they thought beating information out of this man was worthwhile. I can't fault their judgement. We deal with the same sort of uncertainty when sending people to prison. We accept that at some point, the likelihood of guilt is high enough to warrant imprisonment. Set this threshold too high, many criminals go free. Set this threshold too low, many innocent people go to prison. Because determining guilt or innocence is noisy, you're always going to false positives and false negatives. It's a trade-off; you pick a threshold that does the most good.