Good point. Let’s rephrase it: The innocent person has more to lose than the guilty one.
No, that’s not it either. I guess we can’t avoid cumbersome language: The innocent person has more to undeservedly lose than the guilty one.
If the system works exactly as we hope it will, then both the innocent and the guilty will get exactly what they deserve. But if the system backfires, then the innocent will end up much worse off than the guilty.
It’s one thing to answer questions if you think the cops are regarding you as nothing more than a witness/bystander. But it’s possible to say things that cast suspicion upon yourself without even realizing it.
cop: “was the murder victim well-liked?”
Deeg: “no, he was a total asshole, everyone hated him.”
Cop writes in notebook: Deeg states that he hated the victim.
Now you’ve admitted to the police that you had a motive to kill. afterall, you did say you hated him.
cop: “where were you at the time of the murder?”
Deeg: “I don’t recall.” Deeg is evasive.
“I was at home, but nobody was with me.” Deeg does not have a verifiable alibi.
“I was in the next room, but I swear I didn’t hear anything.” Deeg states that he was in the area at the time of the murder.
“I was on the phone then.” Turns out you misjudged the time, and you were off the phone 20 minutes before the murder. An honest mistake on your part, but the cop writes: Deeg’s statement inconsistent with phone logs. Now it looks like you were lying to the cops, trying to throw suspicion away from you, but your mistake has the opposite effect.
At the very least, you’re setting yourself up for more scrutiny, at which point the range of outcomes is:
-additional inconvenient/embarrassing investigation into your life
-criminal charges resulting in expensive legal representation before obtaining a “not guilty” verdict
-criminal charges resulting in expensive legal representation followed by a “guilty” verdict and years of prison before someone finally notices you couldn’t possibly have committed the crime
TL;DR: help the cops as much as you can without saying anything that has even a remote chance of casting suspicion upon you.
I think part of the logic behind “never talk to cops” is that the class of people “who might be involved in less-than-legal activities, or whose loved ones might be involved in less-than-legal activities” is everyone. There are millions of statutes in this country, applying to thousands of different jurisdictions. Nobody knows them all.
The question then, is “Does the system backfire more often when the accused talks to police, or when they remain silent?”
I contend it can only go worse for the accused if they talk.
I believe the truism is that it is difficult to talk yourself out of being arrested, but much easier to talk yourself into it.
Regards,
Shodan
There’s more to it than just being innocent, there’s the likelihood that you’re a good suspect.
If cops are asking you about what happened two doors down, did you see anything, and you say “Yeah, I saw a white van drive down the street just before the commotion, and it sped away after,” you’re clearly giving information that might be useful and is very unlikely to cast suspicion on you, and you’re not an obvious suspect.
But if it’s your wife’s murder, you’re the most likely suspect. This is the situation that must be difficult, because you want to cooperate and give the police every possible lead to catch the killer. Yet anything you say might cast suspicion on you somehow.
I sure I hope I never find out what it’s like to be in THAT spot!
Ok, I’ll concede that if your wife has just been murdered it might be best to not talk to cops. But “never” talk to cops? Seems a bit much.
Please talk to me.
I’m lonely. 
Never! You’re a cop! Didn’t you see those videos?
**No! ** The class of people who need to be concerned is those “who could possibly be thought of by the cops as being involved in less-than-legal activities, or whose loved ones could possibly be thought of by the cops as being involved in less-than-legal activities”.
And that is a pretty darn big group.
Which isn’t to say NEVER talk to the cops, just be far more paranoid than you’d think you should be.
Psst Loach. How you doing? Having a good day?
Better now. Thanks for asking.
I wish I could agree with you, but that’s just naive. I, too, have never done anything worse than a minor traffic violation, yet I’ve been unfortunate enough to be in situations where cops were making baseless assumptions about my activities. On one ocassion, I had a cop want to search my car simply because I was leaving a store where someone else had just been arrested for shoplifting. In another case, I had a cop want to search my car because I had just left a concert and he thought that meant I had pot in my car.
Sure, in an ideal world, letting them search my car, they’d find nothing, and it would cost me nothing, but that’s the best case scenario. If they are crooked, or they are just certain I’ve done something wrong or whatever, it could get hairy. Meanwhile, them not searching my car, they can’t find anything, even if they’re crooked, even if they think I’m fishy or whatever. The worst case scenario for not letting them search is equivalent to the best case for allowing them. So, I’ve got nothing to gain and potentailly everything to lose by allowing them to search. You might argue that that risk is small, and I’d even tend to agree with you, but why take the unwarranted risk? It’s not paranoia to choose not to take a risk when there’s no potential gain, it’s just pragmatic.
I think there’s room for both arguments. The group that you describe should be concerned about the crime the cops started with. I heard a law professor say you should also be concerned with talking to cops because you might implicate yourself in a different crime than they were investigating - a [del]crime[/del] law you had no idea you were breaking.
And that group of people includes everybody.
To repeat an argument someone else made in a previous thread of this sort, if we’re living in paranoid-land in which an enormous percentage of cops are actively corrupt, then the worst thing that can come from not letting them search your car is pissing them off and putting you on their radar.
Not to say that I think you should let them search your car, but once you start thinking that you should do X or Y because you think there’s a large probability that someone will deliberately plant evidence on you, then all law and logic pretty much goes out the window and the best thing you can do is be SUPER nice to the cops always and give them cookies. (And be the right race.)
I think we can find some common ground; don’t we all agree that: bad cops, or cops with arguably good intentions but acting in bad faith or unethically, are dangerous to everyone, individually and as a community. Agree?
If a department has a 90%/10% ratio of professional, good cops / unprofessional, bad cops, and the guy confronting you is one of the 10%, it really doesn’t matter that the other 90% are stellar, and would even pick you up from the airport. Your bad experience with a member of the 10% is going to affect you personally, your family, and ultimately the community and the department as a whole.
It IS a real problem, in every department. When I started in law enforcement, at three different agencies, there was a strong emphasis - from the top-down and within ranks - on ethics and professionalism. When I later moved 130 miles away and went to work for a department in that area…things were different. Ethics seemed “situational”. I was very uncomfortable, and ended up quitting. Their style of aggressive enforcement - enforcement for its own sake - was very different from the other departments I had worked in.
If you live in one of the communities served by “aggressive enforcers”, you have my sympathy. The only answer I have, long-term, is that the ethical culture comes from the top-down. If the sergeant and lieutenant tolerate “doing what it takes”, then there is a cancer that won’t be excised without major surgery.
Sorry for the ramble.
We had a neighbor who ran a daycare center out of his home. One of the children accused him of molesting her. She had a history of such accusations of others, but he didn’t know that. The police came to question him, and since he had never abused her, he spoke to them very openly and candidly. After all, he reasoned, he was innocent of anything bad and had nothing to hide. In the course of the long discussion, he described how he would often help the children climb on the play equipment, and that, yes, he could certainly have touched her legs and butt while doing so, albeit completely innocently and without any sexual interest. Guess what? He just confessed to a crime. After he was arrested, then he got a lawyer, who was able to limit the damage to something like “inappropriate touching.” He lost his business, though.
Well, that’s true, but since they are going to suspect me anyway, and assuming I am innocent, I would go ahead and answer any questions no matter what my earlier advice said. Both because I would be upset and not thinking clearly, and because I want them to catch whoever did it so I can see them put away for life.
But if I don’t have an alibi for the time she was killed, that looks suspicious. And if I do have an alibi, that looks suspicious because I obviously planned it. And if they ask me if we ever argued and I say No, that looks suspicious because everybody argues once in a while, and if I say Yes, then I have a motive. It’s going to wind up like Machine Elf described. Stuff that looks perfectly innocent still makes me look guilty, if the police or anyone else decides I am a suspect.
But I would blab everything anyway. I have to assume that they will still look at other suspects even if most of the time, the husband did it. And so if the police look into the details of my boringly conventional life (no adultery, no drugs, no financial gain from my wife’s death, no gambling debts, no domestic violence, no previous arrests for anything, ever, etc.) I hope eventually they would figure out that I really am as dull as I seem and start investigating the delivery man or the neighbors or people from her job or something and find out who really did it.
If I did do it, I would clam up instantly and never answer any question, no matter what. Wouldn’t that make me look guilty? Hell yes, but since I am suspicious already I am not giving them anything to use. I wouldn’t even try to give them a story of how I didn’t do it. Let them work out their idea of what happened and work with my lawyer to come up with reasonable doubt about as much of it as we can.
Not that I could get away with it for a minute. I couldn’t even hide from my wife my sinister plan to whisk her away to Las Vegas for a weekend.
Crime doesn’t pay, both because it doesn’t attract the best and the brightest, and because I am incompetent at deception.
I better stick to the straight and narrow.
Regards,
Shodan
This is not what I worry about. With that ratio, my chance of a 90%er being present to ensure my rights are not violated are pretty good.
I worry about cops who behave ethically about 90% of the time; assuming the unethical behavior is not random, all the cops present may be susceptible to the same trigger. Such as … me.
I have wondered about this and have wanted to ask about these two incidents.
- Years ago, my late husband and I were coming home from temple on Friday night. I was driving. A cop pulled us over on the open highway-- 70 mph speed limit. It was dark and I had to pull way over on the shoulder. It was open country-- no one and nothing around for miles. (We lived in a small town in south Texas and had to drive into the nearest city to the synagogue.) My husband was disabled and would not have been able to walk easily on the highway shoulder in the dark-- he was an amputee and on his first prosthesis.
Anyway, the cop asked me to get out and then had me walk with him to the back end of the car where he showed me that one of the two license plate lights was out. While we were standing there, he asked me where we were going/coming from and I told him. Yeah, sure, you don’t have to answer questions, but I didn’t see how not to. I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and in retrospect, I wish I had insisted on walking up to the passenger side so my husband could hear our conversation. It seemed like a pretty pointless stop and it was creepy standing on the side of the highway at about 10 pm, pitch dark, with cars flying by at 70 mph. How could he even SEE our license plate lights? He didn’t give me a warning or anything, just sent us on our way.
- Another time on that same stretch of road I was coming from town back to my home in broad daylight and a cop pulled me over for speeding. I was speeding, going about 78 in a 70 zone. Fine. But he also asked me where I was going/coming from. I told him I was coming from school (which I was) and going home. He asked me a couple of other questions about what I was studying and what I did for a living. Frankly, I don’t see how NOT to answer those questions, but they were none of his business. He gave me a warning, but no ticket.
I’ve only ever gotten ONE speeding ticket in my 40+ year driving career. I’m guessing if I had gotten antsy about the questions, he would have given me my second ticket ever.
I don’t see how NOT to answer questions from the police.