I have searches online and almost all advices are, never talk to the police. Does it apply to all situations, though?
Sometimes the police might be far from certain who the perpetrator is, and they just treat you as a person of interest, so by asserting your right to remain silent as soon as they come to your door and ask questions about you, you are very likely to red-flag yourself and become suspect #1 and the cops, initally might just want to ask some questions, now highly suspect you are guilty and put much more resources into investigating you, making you worse off than if you actually talked with them.
What do you think of the scenario above? It seems to me it defeats the “never talk to the police” principle. Any thoughts? Inputs are welcomed.
If you’re the victim of something and called 911 I suppose you might want to talk to the police.
All the sites that say never talk to the police I’ve read have this basic attitude that the police want to make an arrest and it doesn’t matter who it is just so long as they can clear the case. This is nonsense.
It is always better to be polite and cooperative with police until you feel they are either overstepping their bounds or you have become a suspect. At that point it is better to politely ask if you are being detained, arrested, or free to go. If you are not free to go then it is better to assert your right to counsel and keep your mouth shut.
But the problem is that you can’t know which type of scenario you’re getting into when the police come calling. Better to just keep your mouth shut. (So I say…but when the police knocked on my door the other day about a missing 2-year-old in my building, it’s not like I wouldn’t have told them if I’d known anything. I’m not a monster.)
The problem with this approach is, you might have already given away information that could incriminate yourself before you asserted your right to remain silent.
If nothing in your history or circumstances makes you look like a suspect, the you also have nothing to fear form becoming “suspect #1”. The police can investigate all they like, they will never find anything to build a case on.
If you do have something in your history or circumstances makes you look like a suspect, then the police can only find that out in one of two ways: either you tell them or someone else tells them. If you refuse to talk to the police, they can’t find out from you. If the police are able to find out from other people, then you would have become a suspect even if you had talked to them.
So the only time that talking to the police can possibly *help *you is if you are in that tiny area where evidence exists that makes you look guilty, but talking to the police will prevent the from looking for that evidence. Those circumstances have certainly arisen in the real world on numerous occasions. But far, far more frequently talking to the police leads to people giving away evidence that leads to the police investigating further. And you have no way of knowing which situation you are in until after it happens.
In other words, the exhortation to “never talk to the police” is based on the odds. It is almost certain that, if you look have something that makes you look guilty, talking to the police won’t stop them finding the evidence of your guilt. But if you don’t talk to the police, they can’t find it out from you. And if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from an investigation. So the chances are much higher that you will harm yourself by talking to the police than by not talking to them.
Of course, if you are innocent, and you have an iron-clad alibi, and the police really are just making routine enquiries, you can usually save yourself a lot of trouble by talking to them. If you have a legitimate and provable reason for being somewhere and a cop asks, tell them and they will almost certainly be free to leave. Otherwise you’ll probably be detained and they’ll look for a reason to arrest you. You won’t be charged, but it’s far easier to simply get it over with and be on your way.
It’s long, but worth watching all the way through.
The basic gist is that, no, you should never speak to the police because anything you say CAN AND WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU in a court of law. Whether you’re guilty or not.
I don’t get it. If I were a police investigator and, in the course of an investigation, somebody asserted the right to silence and counsel, I would politely respect that right… and I would also consider that person as the primary suspect.
And that is the danger. The reality is that if police ask you more than “Who are you”, “Why are you here” and “Have you seen this suspect/victim/car”, then you are already a potential suspect.
If a bank was robbed, for example, the police certainly wouldn’t be overstepping the bounds by asking me where I was at the time. But they wouldn’t ask that unless I was already a suspect. They also wouldn’t ask if you knew a murder victim if you weren’t a suspect.
By answering any of those simple questions you may well have incriminated yourself. Far better in those cases to refuse to talk.
So what? Why should they care what you consider them to be?
If you were a police investigator, and you had enough evidence to charge them, then you would charged them regardless of whether they had talked to you. And if you don’t have enough evidence, then you can’t charge them regardless of whether they had talked to you.
What a police investigator *thinks *of them is utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people.
As i said above, the only possible way that refusing to talk can harm them is if the have something to hide, and you will stop making all inquiries if they talk to you. That has certainly happened on occasion, if there were incompetent investigators. But it is far, far less common than people incriminating themselves.
After all, you wouldn’t *be *questioning someone if they weren’t already a suspect.
The above-linked video suggests that one should talk to the police while with legal counsel. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t prevent an actual criminal from being caught simply because you, an innocent person, are exercising a right.
It’s situational. I think there was a long thread here where a poster at the time was caught in a municipal park after hours talking with a girl, and the police showed up. They basically asked him who he was and he refused, and he got in a lot of trouble.
That was sort of based on his severe misunderstanding of what you’re required to do for police who are detaining you.
It varies from State to State, but in all States it’s pretty safe advice to say that you can:
Identify yourself if asked to by police. (In some States this can be legally required in certain circumstances, but even where not required it can do little harm unless you’ve got outstanding warrants.)
Assist police investigating something immediate and unrelated to you. Just a quick example…you’re on the street and a cop runs around the corner and says “have you seen a guy in a red hoodie??” There’s very little chance anything in that answer is going to incriminate you. Same thing if a police officer shows up at your door saying “have you seen this missing kid today, he is missing from this neighborhood?”
It’s also pretty universally safe to say do not do any of the following:
Let police search your car or your home without a warrant. In some circumstances the police can do so without a warrant, but it’s subject to some strict legal requirements. If the police insist on doing the search above your objections, do absolutely nothing to stop them but if you have access to a phone book or the Internet while the search is going on I’d be looking for a criminal lawyer in your area and calling them ASAP. Never fight the police, but if they do a search over your objections and they can’t demonstrate there was a compelling reason to do so the evidence will be thrown out. There are specific legal doctrines involved in warrantless searches…if the police has legal right to do one then you’re screwed either way and if not then trying to physically stop the search gets you in a world of physical and legal hurt.
Answer any questions other than identifying yourself while in police custody. A custodial interrogation means you need a lawyer’s help, there is no such thing as a casual custodial interrogation and any questions you answer you may say something stupid that would lead the police to suspect you of a crime.
If you aren’t being taken into custody but police want to take you in for voluntary questioning, refuse. They will either take you into custody or not (depending on what evidence they have), but there is never a time you should voluntarily go to the police department to speak with police about something they think you’re involved in.
Even if I was involved in a self defense killing or something, I wouldn’t volunteer anything even I knew the explanation would probably be sufficient to convince both the police and DA it was self defense. I’d just say, “I was in fear for my life, and I can explain the situation with the assistance of counsel.”
Being that I’m a basically law-abiding citizen (OK, I occasionally do manage a minor traffic infraction, but haven’t had a ticket in almost 20 years), I have no qualms about cooperating with law enforcement. I just don’t have quite that level of catastrophizing paranoia.
There are plenty of situations where it’s perfectly fine to talk to a police officer – that is, when it’s clear they are looking for a specific person, and that person is not you.
For instance, the store up the street has just been robbed, and the police are checking up and down the block to get some more info on where the person fled to. This happened to me in college. A op came by and said, “Did you see a guy in a red shirt running by here in the last few minutes?” If I had said “yes”, presumably he would have asked a few more questions to get more details – could I provide any more details about his appearance, which way he went, did he get into a car, or whatever. But I just said, “No, sorry” – which was the truth, and the cop went on his way.
I suppose, had another person being questioned given wrong information – like the guy ran into the store where I was working – it’s conceivable my answer might have led me into trouble. But the odds against that happening are pretty astronomical. And since this guy had just robbed a retail store up the street, I would rather help catch him, so he wouldn’t rob me next time. And that means cooperating with the police.
Another time, more recently, I heard a woman screaming and called 911. In fact, she was running through the neighborhood screaming and a man was chasing her. He was caught, though the woman was badly beaten, and a few days later the police called me (as I was the first person to call 911) to try and get more details. All I could tell the officer was that I saw her through my window. She ran out of a gap between two buildings, turned and ran to the corner, turned again and ran up the street in front of my house. There was a guy maybe 25-50 feet behind her. It was dusk, they were both at least a hundred feet away, and I couldn’t provide a good physical description of either – not even their skin color.
I’m pretty damn sure I wasn’t risking my freedom by talking to the police either time, if for no other reason that the 911 operator could herself hear the woman screaming in the distance when I made the first call.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying you could have some things in your past that might make you look sketchy even if you didn’t have anything to do with the crime being investigated.