3 ms·

> never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They are not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking for an easy way to wrap up the case

by shkkmo 4y ago

> never talk to the police. Ever. Under no circumstances. They are not your friend, they will not help you, they are looking for an easy way to wrap up the case. If the police are trying to talk to you then you are in their sights and they would much rather pin it all on you rather than do their actual jobs. Always ask for a lawyer and never think "Well if I just tell them X they will let me go". There are exceptions to this rule, and I think one is when your girlfriend has just been kidnapped. Sure, in this case the police did absolutely nothing to actually help save the girlfriend, but the chance they might help seems worth the risk of being deemed a suspect.

joshstrange 4y ago
I mean we have seen multiple cases (this one included) where the cops make you the primary suspect and will do anything they can to discredit you or catch you in a lie (even an unrelated lie that they use to "prove" you are guilty). I understand the desire to cooperate but with minor exceptions I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one present. Cops are interested in really finding who is responsible, they are looking to close the file and you are right in front of them, a very tempting target.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  > I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one present. Yes, I think hiring a lawyer would also increase your chances if they can push the police towards continuing to investigate all possibilities (such as interviewing witnesses or testing all the samples as they failed to do in this case) or make them less likely to lie to you (as they did in this case about the lie detector test results).
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I think a lot of people think "only guilty people/criminals ask for lawyers" (thanks largely TV shows and movies that show cops that never make mistakes and only criminals not cooperating) and/or think "If they just hear my side they will understand and agree with me". In a really gross way I think that getting a lawyer might make you look less attractive to the cops (harder to pin it on you now) and force them to look elsewhere along with your other points of using your lawyer as way to push the investigation on their own. Remember, most cops are looking for the path of least resistance, not the truth.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  Multiple cases out of...how many kidnapped girlfriend cases? The cops behavior(and human behavior in general) makes a lot of sense if you view them as pattern matching machines. If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97 of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case. And if merely "multiple cases" is enough to warrant cutting them out of your life, consider that you also need to cut out pizza delivery people (multiple cases of them robbing their clients), baristas(multiple cases of them raping people they meet on the job), mail men(multiple cases of them assaulting their clients), etc.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    Not to sound cliche but with great power comes great responsibly. Police should be held to a higher standard. As far as pattern-matching goes, very simply, they need to do better. They are being lazy if they refuse to consider alternatives, these are people’s lives we are talking about here. The couple in this story went through hell then the police make it even worse, that’s not ok. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they don’t jump to conclusions like this. The police ignored evidence at the scene that corroborated what the couple told them and continued to insist they were right even though they had no evidence backing up their charges. Just their gut feeling and “pattern-matching”. When we here multiple stories about the other professions doing the things you mentioned and, this is key, them getting away with it, no repercussions, we can talk. The police are the only (aside from maybe very rich people/corporations who in some cases use the police to exercise their will) people who have this kind of impunity. The police have the power to kill you with impunity. The police have the power to absolutely ruin your life even if you did nothing wrong. The have the power to take your belonging and require you prove their innocence. They should have to answer for the times they get it wrong.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    > If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97 of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case. Yet, that is the job. If it is difficult for police to keep an open mind, then they need systems and rules in place to force them to keep an investigation broad enough to correctly handle the 3% cases where their intuition/bias is wrong. In reality, I would guess that the failure rate for "cop intuition" is much, much higher than 3%. Allowing cops to overly trust their intuition results in some very biased, racist and clasist policing. One solution, is facing real consequences when you are wrong. I think it is absolutely incredible how few consequences the bad cops in this story faced (instead of consequences, they got promotions and the city paid for the settlement with the victims. The cops didn't even get around to apologizing for years.
lupire 4y ago
Why? If you tell the public, the cops will find out. They won't find her for you. They don't need you to help find her. Talking to them only helps them hurt you.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  > They don't need you to help find her. In what way, in a case like this, is your eyewitness testimony not a crucial part of finding your girlfriend while she is still alive?

by shkkmo 4y ago

joshstrange 4y ago

I mean we have seen multiple cases (this one included) where the cops make you the primary suspect and will do anything they can to discredit you or catch you in a lie (even an unrelated lie that they use to "prove" you are guilty). I understand the desire to cooperate but with minor exceptions I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one present. Cops are interested in really finding who is responsible, they are looking to close the file and you are right in front of them, a very tempting target.

shkkmo 4y ago
> I'd still only talk to them through a lawyer or with one present. Yes, I think hiring a lawyer would also increase your chances if they can push the police towards continuing to investigate all possibilities (such as interviewing witnesses or testing all the samples as they failed to do in this case) or make them less likely to lie to you (as they did in this case about the lie detector test results).
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I think a lot of people think "only guilty people/criminals ask for lawyers" (thanks largely TV shows and movies that show cops that never make mistakes and only criminals not cooperating) and/or think "If they just hear my side they will understand and agree with me". In a really gross way I think that getting a lawyer might make you look less attractive to the cops (harder to pin it on you now) and force them to look elsewhere along with your other points of using your lawyer as way to push the investigation on their own. Remember, most cops are looking for the path of least resistance, not the truth.
oh_sigh 4y ago
Multiple cases out of...how many kidnapped girlfriend cases? The cops behavior(and human behavior in general) makes a lot of sense if you view them as pattern matching machines. If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97 of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case. And if merely "multiple cases" is enough to warrant cutting them out of your life, consider that you also need to cut out pizza delivery people (multiple cases of them robbing their clients), baristas(multiple cases of them raping people they meet on the job), mail men(multiple cases of them assaulting their clients), etc.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  Not to sound cliche but with great power comes great responsibly. Police should be held to a higher standard. As far as pattern-matching goes, very simply, they need to do better. They are being lazy if they refuse to consider alternatives, these are people’s lives we are talking about here. The couple in this story went through hell then the police make it even worse, that’s not ok. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they don’t jump to conclusions like this. The police ignored evidence at the scene that corroborated what the couple told them and continued to insist they were right even though they had no evidence backing up their charges. Just their gut feeling and “pattern-matching”. When we here multiple stories about the other professions doing the things you mentioned and, this is key, them getting away with it, no repercussions, we can talk. The police are the only (aside from maybe very rich people/corporations who in some cases use the police to exercise their will) people who have this kind of impunity. The police have the power to kill you with impunity. The police have the power to absolutely ruin your life even if you did nothing wrong. The have the power to take your belonging and require you prove their innocence. They should have to answer for the times they get it wrong.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  > If you've seen 100 cases of a missing girlfriend, and in 97 of those cases the boyfriend is the cause of the missing girlfriend, it is going to be very difficult to convince a cop that the boyfriend isn't the most fruitful avenue for investigation for their 101st missing girlfriend case. Yet, that is the job. If it is difficult for police to keep an open mind, then they need systems and rules in place to force them to keep an investigation broad enough to correctly handle the 3% cases where their intuition/bias is wrong. In reality, I would guess that the failure rate for "cop intuition" is much, much higher than 3%. Allowing cops to overly trust their intuition results in some very biased, racist and clasist policing. One solution, is facing real consequences when you are wrong. I think it is absolutely incredible how few consequences the bad cops in this story faced (instead of consequences, they got promotions and the city paid for the settlement with the victims. The cops didn't even get around to apologizing for years.

lupire 4y ago

Why? If you tell the public, the cops will find out. They won't find her for you. They don't need you to help find her. Talking to them only helps them hurt you.

shkkmo 4y ago
> They don't need you to help find her. In what way, in a case like this, is your eyewitness testimony not a crucial part of finding your girlfriend while she is still alive?