Funny how you pretend to be smart. Have you ever dealt with police before? I guess not. You are likely to be the people who self-incriminate themselves by believing they can somehow talk out of the situation.
my best friend was a city cop…he invited me to go for some ride-alongs (highly recommended)
One night we have a car speeding towards us…we flip around, and I assume he sees that. he speeds up, but we were going lots faster. around a blind corner, we zoom by a bank (closed) and I see him, lights out, hiding in drive thru lane…so we circle back, approach from his blindside with lights out, and catch him.
rich lawyers kid. he went out of his way to say his dad was a lawyer, and that nothing we could tag him with, would ever hold up.
my friend, not upset at all, looks at me, and asks if I recall him ever saying anything about a ticket…In fact, he was about to be promoted to detective, and told weeks ago he stopped writing tickets, due to follow up working months later.
I said I was sure he had not. He told the kid he WAS just going to run a “28” on his info, and if he was clean, send him on his way. But he liked the kids idea better.
Kid got what he spoke up and asked for.
Another night we pulled a woman over…one headlight out…just a warning to fix in 5 days. She starts yapping about just having a short drive home from the bar, then she was going to call it a night…No cop writes warnings for DUI…her driving was fine, BTW.
Btw, this was in 1999. Seems most of the depts cars had video audio cameras near rear view mirrow, with sensitive mics outside…they come on when the lightbar comes on, or manually anytime…so anytime a cop is dealing with you, the car is recording what it sees and hears…no kidding, i could hear what the citizens were saying inside their car…when a cop pulls you over, they usually wait in the car to see if you are wanted…while they are doing this, you have already rolled your window down…when you do this, they are listening to whats being said in your car. Based on what the occupants of the car say, they now have probable cause to search.
Keep your windows up until the officer approaches, and only answer what he asks. He will then go back to the car, and once again be hearing you. “what a fat pig” , " god, please dont look in the trunk" will make for a long meeting. In fact, the “look in the trunk” prayer was actually from an episode of “real stories of hiway patrol”. Cops had car stopped on I40 near Memphis, and the camera recorded the driver making this repeated prayer, when the driver “knew” cop could not hear…it was a near record drug bust.
Frankly, I’m not too worried about it. I’m a middle-class white guy with evidence of a kid and of my middle-class profession in my car and wallet. Chances are pretty good that a cop isn’t going to try to pin something on me as the best suspect, the vast majority of the time. As long as I remain innocent of major wrongdoing, I’m happy to talk with the cops.
If I were a 20-year-old poor black man, I might well sing a different tune.
Hell, the cop in that video above largely makes that point. For those that haven’t watched it the lawyer gives a cop time to give his point of view. He agrees with the lawyer, don’t talk to him if you’re smart. The cop says pretty much what you’ve said. He’s got decades of experience doing interviews and he’s interviewing people that basically have next to none. He’s an expert and they’re amateurs. He points out it turns out pretty much exactly you’d think it’d go if you went head to head with an expert in his own field.(IE not well for the amateur.)
Yeah, I really like that video, and I like this one too. It’s kind of entertaining with the bad acting.
Well that kid was being arrogant, that was why he was charged, but because he did not talk to the cop.
And I don’t understand the second example. Were you saying the woman incriminated herself afterwards?
Only a judge can force you to talk, right?
No one can force you to talk. Judges (and police, to a lesser extent) can impose consequences for not talking, but no one can force you to talk.
Good you mentioned that. Threads like this confuse me. I always thought you don’t just cooperate with the cops fully, you’re supposed to volunteer information that may be useful to them.
And more likely than not, that won’t ever cause you any problems. But you really, REALLY don’t want to be the one it does cause problems for.
Google “Billy Wayne Cope”. This poor guy lost literally every single thing that matters in life (his daughter to a vicious rape and murder, ALL of the rest of his family, his freedom, his reputation as a non-rapist and -murderer…EVERYTHING). And he’s a previously law-abiding middle-aged white guy. Not a real bright one, but still. It’s SO obvious he’s innocent. How many other cases are there where the person is innocent but it’s just less obvious for one reason or another? More than anyone would care to think. The Innocence Project has a bunch more stories, but almost all of them are cases where people were exonerated with DNA evidence, which obviously is not available with most crimes.
When my car broke down on the freeway in Oregon one year on my way home for Thanksgiving, two cops stopped by while I was waiting for my dad to come help tow my car back home the rest of the way. You can bet I answered their questions and let them know that I had help coming and that I was fine, no one else was with me, where I was going, etc. I can’t imagine the world of hurt I would have been in if I just refused to answer any of their questions other than my name. They probably would have called a tow truck in and towed my car and then hauled me down for questioning.
So yes, sometimes it’s better to talk to the police. Sometimes, they are actually trying to help you and make sure you are safe and taken care of.
I heard an interview with Barry Shenk (sp?) where he pointed out that the Innocence Project finds that about a third of the people who ask it for help end up being proven innocent by DNA testing. That meant a couple of things to him. One was that the percentage of actual innocent people was almost certainly higher than that, but their innocence couldn’t be demonstrated because there wasn’t DNA evidence available to test. The other was more important IMHO. There’s no reason to believe that the numbers of false convictions is any higher or lower for crimes involving DNA evidence than for other crimes, and so there are probably VERY large numbers of falsely convicted people in prison.
What he didn’t say, and I don’t know, is how or whether the available data can be extrapolated to a reasonable estimate. I suspect it can’t be, or they would have come up with a number, and I don’t believe they have. The people that the Innocence Project tries to help are AFAIK self-selecting – they ask the IP for help with an appeal. Presumably there is a much larger percentage who don’t ask for help, because they know they’re guilty or because they know the nature of the evidence against them is not going to be disprovable with lab testing.
IMHO there are probably a GREAT many number of people who are in prison for crimes they did not commit, but most of them probably did commit other, similar crimes. That says nothing good for our justice system, but at very least it makes me feel less sad for them.
And then you have people who really didn’t do ANYTHING like the crime they were convicted of. That’s so sad I can hardly stand to think about it.
Haven’t read the thread yet because it’s knee-deep, but as a former civilian employee at a police dept. I’d say Always be co-operative and Keep It Simple Stupid. (They’re trying to assess a situation quickly and it’s always wisest to answer direct questions without volunteering more info.)
To me, the line’s drawn if they click the handcuffs around your wrists. Ask for a lawyer and then shut up.
So if methods and techniques to proving or disproving beyond reasonable doubt have improved, shouldn’t there be greater cooperation and transparency? Or does the opposite argument become valid: “I’m keeping my mouth shut.”
There’s still a very long way to go before it’s improved enough. Your user name suggests you might be Latino, but your posts in this thread make me think you must not be? Because if you were (and in the U.S.), it seems like you’d probably know this.
i’m a filipino. in the philippines we are trained in english from primary level onwards. the name is a joke in reference to my 9-year old child, a girl. and being in a “third world” country i can see just how imperfect the system is.
funny though. other asians (the recently prosperous and therefore stupidly arrogant ones) call us the ‘mexicans of asia.’
So you live in the Philippines now? I have no idea what the justice system is like there. I wouldn’t imagine it to be too non-corrupt just based on the nature of justice systems in general and the fact that the Philippines is considered a developing nation, but I could be wrong. And obviously they wouldn’t discriminate against non-whites like we do here in the U.S.
The discrimination here is less sophisticated, usually dictated by economic and social standing, color, and outright popularity. That’s with respect to the justice system. Justice comes very slowly to the poor man.
Other forms of discimination are more cosmopolitan. The blue chip companies will hire only graduates from the top-3 universities, ethnic Chinese families do not allow marriage to Filipinos of Malay stock, hold-outs from the days of Spanish colonization inter-marry, control of the military and police transfer from one batch of the military academy to another, depending on who’s appointed to the top military post.
But swerving back to the topic, I’ve a feeling Filipinos hate their police force in a way Americans can’t imagine. Every cop is bad. Every cop is for sale. Nothing is worth reporting to the local police station.