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What to do if you’re stopped by the police

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Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#141

Post by macinjosh »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #129
CodeAndCuffs wrote: post #17

Former cop here. The article states "You cannot lie to the police". This is, generally, incorrect. Some jurisdictions may have some specific law, but other than certain exceptions, lying has no general consequence. If it did, there would be a lot more charges against pretty much everyone who has been arrested. In my experience, people will lie about stuff that's not even relevant, or helpful to them. Exceptions inclu…

Were you a federal, state, or local cop? Lying to a federal officer is a felony. Lying to a local cop can be less of a problem, but the feds can even make that a big deal if the entity being lied to receives federal funding. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements

Lying is an act of speech and the government is prohibited from abridging that right according to the first amendment. We all know how that goes. Graduates of Yale, Harvard, et al. are appointed to SCOTUS over the course of generations. They parse plain language to mean whatever suits them and, well, here we are.

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#142

Post by Johnny555 »

slumdev wrote: post #11

We live in a police state. If you're not an attorney (or as well versed in law as the attorney in the video), your best bet is usually to be friendly and comply. You comply because they're allowed to lie to you, they're allowed to search you with very little reason, and they're allowed to arrest you using circumstances and behaviors that they knowingly and purposefully antagonize out of you. And this is how freedom d…

Given what you just said, why would you comply? Seems better to heed the Miranda warning "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law" and just say "I'd like to talk to an attorney first". Whether you did what you're suspected of or not, given how the deck is stacked against you, compliance seems like the wrong choice and you may very well end up making things worse for yourself.

The cop is already pretty sure you did it (or he wouldn't have brought you in), so seems like there's little you can say that will change his mind.

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#143

Post by thephyber »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #27
quicklime wrote: post #18

> "I'm going to remain silent. I'd like to see a lawyer." On TV shows, the guy would then call his lawyer, who is under a retainer or something. The lawyer has all the context on exactly what's going on, and tells him exactly what to do, and he gets off free. But as someone who doesn't have a lawyer, what exactly happens if and when the cop agrees to this? Are they obligated to provide me with a lawyer? Or do I need…

> what exactly happens if and when the cop agrees to this? I don't believe they are obligated to provide you with a lawyer. A court is obligated to do this; the police aren't. The point of this advice is to make sure that you don't say anything to the police, or -- if you do -- to get it thrown out of court. Because of some bad precedent, you need to make the statement that you do not wish to answer their questions a…

> you need to make the statement that you do not wish to answer their questions as explicit as possible

It's also important to phrase it as a declarative sentence (including the correct inflections) and be sure of what you say. If you preface it with "maybe I should..." or "can I have a lawyer?", you are not asserting your right and police are free to continue to questioning you.

I learned all I know about the law from the internet, so it's worth what you paid me to hear it. IANAL

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#144

Post by iudqnolq »

thephyber wrote: post #137
iudqnolq wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. I personally think I would assert my rights as soon as I was asked a question like that, if I hadn't already. My point was basically if it occurs to you that you maybe should use some intenet advice in this encounter with a police officer that's a red flag that you should stop talking. If you get flustered and forget neither of our advice will help.

> I would assert my rights as soon as I was asked a question like that I think everyone would like to think that they would be able to identify when the important questioning starts, but I don't think you usually notice it until you are partway through the line of questioning that the officer cares about.

Fair, although the sentence you quoted started with "I personally think I would...".

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#145

Post by thephyber »

knocte wrote: post #85
toadi wrote: post #66

Title should be if you get stopped in the US by the police. The US until today is not the world. In my country have been stopped by police a lot. Most of the time they are civilized. Some cases they can come over as dicks but as long as you don't escalate the situation and stay friendly nothing will happen.

THIS. In any other country that is not the US, the advice given by the article is really bad advice.

Conversely, there is no such thing as "advice given in X article is really great advice in all countries". All countries have different laws.

Whenever you read about how law is applied, put it in the correct context of the jurisdiction and time frame in which it is written.

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#146

Post by dang »

quaquaqua1 wrote: post #92
CodeAndCuffs wrote: post #17

Former cop here. The article states "You cannot lie to the police". This is, generally, incorrect. Some jurisdictions may have some specific law, but other than certain exceptions, lying has no general consequence. If it did, there would be a lot more charges against pretty much everyone who has been arrested. In my experience, people will lie about stuff that's not even relevant, or helpful to them. Exceptions inclu…

Despite your helpful advice and decision to leave the "law enforcement" profession, please allow me to give you and all of your former colleagues a gigantic fuck you for all of the tickets, court hearings, fines, fees, heartache, and bullshit you have personally caused me over the years. Additionally, for my friends and for others I don't even know that police officers have killed or wrongfully imprisoned, please all…

You can't attack another user like this on HN, regardless of how you feel about the police, which I'm sure you have good reasons for.

We ban accounts that violate the site guidelines this badly, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. Maybe you don't owe the person you're replying to any better—though if you're blasting them just because they belong to a category, maybe you do—but you definitely owe this community much better if you want to participate here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#147

Post by thephyber »

Johnny555 wrote: post #142
slumdev wrote: post #11

We live in a police state. If you're not an attorney (or as well versed in law as the attorney in the video), your best bet is usually to be friendly and comply. You comply because they're allowed to lie to you, they're allowed to search you with very little reason, and they're allowed to arrest you using circumstances and behaviors that they knowingly and purposefully antagonize out of you. And this is how freedom d…

Given what you just said, why would you comply? Seems better to heed the Miranda warning "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law" and just say "I'd like to talk to an attorney first". Whether you did what you're suspected of or not, given how the deck is stacked against you, compliance seems like the wrong choice and you may very well end up making things worse for yourself. The cop is al…

> The cop is already pretty sure you did it (or he wouldn't have brought you in)

There are different stages before arrest that matter here.

There is a burden of "reasonable suspicion", "probable cause", etc. (or some equivalent like "exigent circumstances"). An arrest requires both of these, plus some evidence of a crime. Being convicted at trial requires "beyond a reasonable doubt" (for criminal charges, as opposed to {civil, tax, military}).

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#148

Post by jlgaddis »

throwaway55554 wrote: post #70
tjpnz wrote: post #54

So it's true that you're liable in the US to having your brains blown out if you try to reach for anything?

Knowing that cops carry, would you really want to risk it?

Not only do they carry guns, they are trained to automatically assume that everyone they encounter is out to kill them!

Imagine how paranoid and afraid that'd make you after a while!

Given that, it's not really surprising we have police officers killing someone who "pulled a gun" -- except that then they discover it was just a candy bar.

I've got a few friends who are police officers and I wouldn't want to do their jobs. Of course, my LEO friends are all older, smarter, and, due to experience I suppose, more "laid back".

Nowadays the first thing drilled into a new police officer's head is that "everyone wants to kill you".

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#149

Post by chadcmulligan »

wyclif wrote: post #121
chadcmulligan wrote: post #79

So on the hacker news front page today: Colleges are closing because they're to expensive What to do if you're stopped by police The Top 10 books include 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 all we need is something about medical insurance sending people broke and the ever present incarceration rate. You guys should really fix this (not an American), its not that hard.

I get what you're saying and I'm sympathetic to it— a lot of the HN user base is outside the USA. I think there should be more differentiation of USA-specific content in titles and such. But I think the assumption of YCombinator and HN is that since so much of what is under discussion here is SV related, then readers should assume it's USA-specific unless stated otherwise.

I meant fix the US :-) not hacker news showing the content. It seems a never ending stream of news from the US of things that are fixed (mostly) in every other western democracy but not in the US. Why do I care - well the US is the largest western democracy if it keeps heading this way then it will likely spread to us.

Re: What to do if you’re stopped by the police

#150

Post by thephyber »

slumdev wrote: post #11

We live in a police state. If you're not an attorney (or as well versed in law as the attorney in the video), your best bet is usually to be friendly and comply. You comply because they're allowed to lie to you, they're allowed to search you with very little reason, and they're allowed to arrest you using circumstances and behaviors that they knowingly and purposefully antagonize out of you. And this is how freedom d…

> We live in a police state.

I don't think that's accurate, although I've previously said it myself before on social media.

I, do, think that too many citizens and lawmakers always assume police can do no wrong and are willing to give them whatever tools they ask for, no matter the cost to freedom. I think we have too many laws on the books, far too many for any person (even for a judge or attorney) to be able to read, let alone memorize, interpret, or internalize. I think the only thing that saves every last one of us from being convicted is a scarcity of police time, but technology is likely to change part of that (digital footprints on phones, GPS devices, WiFi / bluetooth devices, SaaS security systems like Ring, cars with dashcams) and the increasing changes to grade schools (campus police officers, "zero tolerance" policies) that increase the impact of normal childish outbursts.

I have lots of problems with police tools and tactics and I will continue to use my citizen voice and vote to trim those back, but I think that we aren't a police state right now.

> And this is how freedom dies.

If we live in a police state, then freedom is already dead.

It's not clear to me if police + legislatures are taking our freedoms faster than corporate land-grabs for my digital information and psychological profiling.

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