>There are no downsides when you decline to talk, Whilst I understand the principle, I'm not sure I 100% agree with this statement. I've been in a few situatio

>There are no downsides when you decline to talk, Whilst I understand the principle, I'm not sure I 100% agree with this statement. I've been in a few situations in the past - demos/football matches etc - where declining to talk would quite likely have resulted in me being detained for questioning (and in some of those cases, for others who tried this approach, this was exactly what happened), but a polite answer to the cops resulted in them simply leaving me alone. It's true that had the cops decided to nick me anyway, then anything I said could well have resulted in bigger problems than if I'd kept quite. But they didn't. In my view, there are quite definitely some downsides to refusing to talk, but they are far lower than the downsides could be by talking.