One thing that I’ll throw in on the question of how to be helpful to the police without making an attorney sad (note: IANAL):
From a previous video that I’ve seen discussing this topic, what seems to get a person onto the police’s radar is lies. Their standard operating procedure is to question you and re-question you in different orders and at different levels of detail to try and confirm that you’re giving them an honest and fulsome account of everything you know. They’re very likely to notice and latch onto any inconsistency or evasion on your answers.
Say for example that you were snogging with your best friend’s wife at the time you witnessed the crime. You start getting evasive when answering what you were doing just before the crime occurred or even lie and say that you were in that coffee shop over there, by yourself, when in fact you were in the park, on a bench, tongue jousting.
Or maybe you want to help the police and you feel like you just aren’t living up to your part as a witness so you start stretching with your information, maybe accidentally inventing a detail or two on first telling then changing that later as you raise you were wrong and just saying what you were fantasizing in your mind.
There are a variety of ways where you can start to lie to the police for, effectively, stupid reasons that have nothing to do with guilt. But once you do lie to them, you have suddenly made yourself a person of suspicion. And, by human nature, once you find someone to be suspicious, it’s very easy for all evidence that comes from that point on to be interpreted towards confirming that suspicion.
So: Don’t lie. Yep, you were snogging your friend’s wife. Tell them that. No, the murderer wasn’t wearing a blue scarf. Don’t make shit up.
Just tell the truth, and keep it fully within the realm of things that you are confident about. Even if tiny lies don’t land you in jail, it still wastes their time and makes it harder for them to catch the crook.
But that’s not always possible. In the Sarah Knox interview, she started believing what the cops were saying over her own memories. Those that confess after hours upon hours of sleep-deprived hours of intense interrogation are not sure what the truth is. Plus I imagine police questioning is a little like those job-hiring psych evals with the same questions phrased differently and asking for absolute answers that as best as you can it is almost impossible to remain consistent. And if you saw that video on why you never talk to police, you can lie without trying to lie. “What were you doing at 11 am?” “I was leaving for work.” You just lied to the police because your RING shows you didn’t leave for work until 11:04.
The bottom line is if you are innocent, going through an attorney can’t hurt you while not going through an attorney certainly can. Why take that chance?
Eye witnesses are so unreliable because that is exactly how memory works. It is constantly re-written, updated, and changed based on how the person imagines the event happening.
Police: Did you see anybody running
Witness: I saw somebody running, yeah.
Police: Was the running person wearing a green hoodie?
Witness: Maybe, I don’t know.
…later…
Police: Describe what you saw.
Witness: A guy in a green hoodie running.
And never, ever, talk to the FBI if they’re investigating you, as it is a crime to lie to them, even by accident. The most recent example of this is congressman Jeff Fortenberry. The normal tactic the FBI uses is to ask you questions they already know the answer to, then they can charge you with lying, even if they don’t have anything else to go on.
Refusing to talk is not a question of helping or not, because they already know the answers to what they’re asking. They only need your help in building a case against you.
Of course that might be different if you’re a witness instead of a suspect, but I’d sure want a lawyer’s assistance in making that decision, and making sure I’m properly protected in the event I misremember something.
In the first case, where you lie, you definitely make yourself look guilty. In the second case, where you tell the truth, the police will encounter a situation where it’s clear that one of two people it’s lying. Unlike before, you aren’t definitely lying, you’re down to half-a-chance lying on a topic that it would be reasonable for someone to lie about, that is unrelated to the crime. It all makes sense.
Let’s also note that the police are probably going to figure out that she will lie if asked in front of her husband, so they would probably not ask her in front of him.
And let’s also note that, if you’re having a relationship with someone, you will also certainly have a documented record of that. You can go a good ways to prove your story.
The police may track all that down to ascertain that you are, factually, engaged in an infidelitous relationship but that would be the target of that portion of the investigation. You’ve already given them the dirt, you can confirm the dirt, and the dirt will survive all scrutiny. But, more importantly, the dirt has no bearing on the murder that you witnessed and the dirt is dirty but not criminal.
That’s a good reason to think about these sorts of topics in advance of ever being in any such situation. Spur of the moment with no prior warning, you’re more likely to flub it and unnecessarily cause problems for yourself and the police.
It’s also a good thing to realize about yourself. If you might be the sort of person who has such a strong need to self-aggrandize that you could simply never tell a minimal and truthful tale about anything - e.g. you are Donald Trump - then, no, you should not talk to the cops without going through your attorney. For as much as that might slow them down, it might be more useful to get a lawyer in there who knows you to filter out the untruthful bits, so the real parts can eventually get over to the police and help them out.
The problem is that the typical person is not skilled at being manipulative and playing mind tricks, while the cops are very, very good at it. They do it all the time, day in and day out. They’re pros, you’re on their turf, and the odds are stacked way against you. The best advice is also the simplest: tell them you want to talk to an attorney, that you will not say anything without an attorney present, and ask if you’re free to leave. Keep asking if you’re free to leave until they let you leave. And then talk to an attorney ASAP.
According to the first story I Googled up this is not true; you’ve left out the 3 most important of the four reasons they suspected him; refusal to submit a DNA sample simply put him on the radar. The story doesn’t say how many other men refused or would have… for all we know 20 other guys could have or did put themselves on the radar as well.
The story is literally titled “what sharp-eyed officers noticed in killer’s apartment”. It was the green carpet, the weights, and the bleach smell that led them to go all out to get this particular guy’s DNA, not his initial refusal to provide it. Plus this is an example of the worst kind of guilty killer, not the average person being asked to talk to the police. Of course not talking to the cops isn’t going to help you when you leave the body parts in your garbage can.
This is what a lot of people who get convicted think about themselves; and they only realize their arrogance after the fact. Have you ever wondered why police officers and lawyers themselves who are accused of crimes will keep quiet and hire their own lawyers? As one of my favorite videos on this subjects suggests: take the lead from those in the know on this.
Because the cop on the street is not a one-man show; they just start the legal chain of events and depend on colleagues higher than themselves to believe their story and act on their advice. The actual prosecutors who decide whether or not to act on the cops advice know they have to follow certain rules/standards and that the defense and judges will call them on it if they mess it up.
So, they can’t go too bat-shit corrupt and need to stick to a reasonable version of events which includes at least pretending to follow procedure. When they do go super corrupt documentaries are made of it and people lose their careers.
The long-term successful corrupt people in the system need to maintain their reputation with the prosecutors and courts, or they become unreliable witnesses and are either quietly transferred out or loudly fired.
I once asked on this board why a corrupt-inclined police officer, with their qualified immunity and assumed trust in court, doesn’t just run rampant and abuse their authority day-in day-out since they can legally get away with it. The answer was because under most circumstance they couldn’t socially get away with it. The prosecutors and judges if decent will soon recognize the corruption and address the situation with their supervisors or in court. If they are themselves corrupt but smart, they’ll see that this person is going to get them all in trouble and curb the extreme behavior other ways.
Here’s why you should never talk to police, and indeed the most hard-hitting point of the whole “never talk to police” video. Immediately after the attorney speaks (27:00 mark), the cop gets up and says, “And everything he said was true.” The COP agreed with never talk to cops.
This is like the original video from years ago. Thanks, but building off that(we have threads on that), I was asking about the video I linked to that suggested you shouldn’t even speak if you have your lawyer there. Like, don’t even go to the station…even with your lawyer…unless absolutely forced.
It’s ironic how you trust a cop when he tells you this.
What I feel is the reality is that an attorney made a video telling people they should be hiring attorneys a lot more often. I suspect his views on this topic may not be unbiased. He then found a cop who was willing to follow the script if paid.
Only the video doesn’t push hiring a lawyer and then talking; it urges people not to talk to police at all. Also the detective does actually dispute some of what the lawyer says (specifically that he doesn’t go out looking to jail innocent people), and if they were working together then they must have put an awful lot of effort into making appear as though they weren’t.
Then there’s that pesky fact that most if not all other videos on the topic generally say the same thing, and that there’s a distinct lack of videos and advice out there telling people not to hire lawyers, and to just answer whatever the police ask. The closest thing you see to the latter are videos of police smugly mocking and laughing at all those cooperative suspects that make their jobs easier.