4 ms·

I'm not a lawyer but I've studied criminal law, am generally anti-cop and really sympathize with all the "don't talk to cops" videos and pamphlets out there. I

I'm not a lawyer but I've studied criminal law, am generally anti-cop and really sympathize with all the "don't talk to cops" videos and pamphlets out there. I understand that mens rea or premeditation can be argued and proven by a single stray comment you make to police. However there's always been a big gap for me because, I mean, obviously there are some times where it makes sense to talk to police. * The cops knock at your door, your neighbor has been murdered, were you at home last night and did you hear anything? And you were and you did but if you go all ACLU and say nothing while carefully keeping the cops out of your home, you're withholding information that might catch the real killer and in any case now the cops might be a lot more interested in you. * The cops want to search your trunk at a traffic stop. If you hand them your keys that can be interpreted as consent. However if you don't, it's obvious they will drag you out of your car and beat you, take your keys, maybe plant some drugs or a gun because you got all uppity, and lie about it all later. So why not just hand the keys over and save yourself the trouble? Etc. I feel like all the pamphlets and so on don't really get into these real situations.

otterley 4y ago
> However if you don't, it's obvious they will drag you out of your car and beat you, take your keys, maybe plant some drugs or a gun because you got all uppity, and lie about it all later Here we go again with that troubling word at HN: “obvious.” Best to strike that from your vocabulary; things you might think as obvious both rarely are so, and often much more complicated than you think. What you’re describing is a situation that does sometimes happen in the worst cases, but by no means is it normal or frequent relative to the number of ordinary police encounters every day. These episodes make the news because they are out of the ordinary (“newsworthy”). If they happened at every stop, they wouldn’t be reported in the news. Do these things happen? Sure, and they are awful. But they are by no means standard procedure and they are unlikely to happen to you. And if it does, lawyer up right away.
- sky-kedge0749 4y ago
  > Here we go again with that troubling word at HN: “obvious.” Best to strike that from your vocabulary. My fault for sloppy wording. I was supposing for the sake of the hypothetical that the police made it obvious to you personally that they would attack you if you fail to comply. In any case the ACLU-type advice of "stay silent and don't consent to anything" assumes some strange middle ground, where the cops in front of you are hostile enough to be actively fishing for something to arrest you for, but not hostile enough to just beat you, plant stuff and lie. And, further, that I, a random person who rarely deals with the cops, will be able to correctly sense what sort of encounter I'm having, against police who do this dozens of times a day, who are very scary, and who might be specifically trying to trick me. Or just to rephrase what you said, the ACLU-type advice is great if you're the sort of person for whom awful police encounters are unlikely and who can lawyer up right away if things go wrong.

otterley 4y ago

> However if you don't, it's obvious they will drag you out of your car and beat you, take your keys, maybe plant some drugs or a gun because you got all uppity, and lie about it all later Here we go again with that troubling word at HN: “obvious.” Best to strike that from your vocabulary; things you might think as obvious both rarely are so, and often much more complicated than you think. What you’re describing is a situation that does sometimes happen in the worst cases, but by no means is it normal or frequent relative to the number of ordinary police encounters every day. These episodes make the news because they are out of the ordinary (“newsworthy”). If they happened at every stop, they wouldn’t be reported in the news. Do these things happen? Sure, and they are awful. But they are by no means standard procedure and they are unlikely to happen to you. And if it does, lawyer up right away.

sky-kedge0749 4y ago
> Here we go again with that troubling word at HN: “obvious.” Best to strike that from your vocabulary. My fault for sloppy wording. I was supposing for the sake of the hypothetical that the police made it obvious to you personally that they would attack you if you fail to comply. In any case the ACLU-type advice of "stay silent and don't consent to anything" assumes some strange middle ground, where the cops in front of you are hostile enough to be actively fishing for something to arrest you for, but not hostile enough to just beat you, plant stuff and lie. And, further, that I, a random person who rarely deals with the cops, will be able to correctly sense what sort of encounter I'm having, against police who do this dozens of times a day, who are very scary, and who might be specifically trying to trick me. Or just to rephrase what you said, the ACLU-type advice is great if you're the sort of person for whom awful police encounters are unlikely and who can lawyer up right away if things go wrong.