Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

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That ACLU flyer is wildly out of touch with reality.

"You have the right to remain silent during a traffic stop." Yeah. Sure. You try that and let me know how it works out for you...after your car has been disassembled, all its upholstery ripped, and put in impound. After you are released from jail exactly 47.9 hours later, or charged with "interfering with the duties of a police officer" or "obstruction of justice" or "causing a public disturbance (which may or may not be dropped by the DA. Or thrown out at your hearing the next afternoon, by the judge.)

"If your rights are violated while being arrested, take notes" - with what, exactly? The pen and paper the people who violated my rights gave me? These people live in a alternate reality.

The ACLU has no concept of what constitutes practical advice for dealing with abusive police or the issues the vast majority of Americans face when stopped by an officer...like ending up in jail and missing work the next day, your car destroyed, and being summarily fired for failing to show.

Congrats! You are now unemployed, with an arrest record, probably your name in the newspaper police blotter, and a bunch of legal expenses from the trumped-up charges.

But hey, you followed the advice of an organization that will do absolutely nothing to help you after you followed their instructions and it caused you to end up unemployed, in debt to an attorney, with no wheels...then homeless because you missed your rent.

I don't think a single person at the ACLU has ever had to worry about having enough money to buy groceries, lived one paycheck away from missing rent, or worked a job where if they didn't show up for a shift on time, they were fired.

IAAL but this is not legal advice.

You’re mixing up a number of distinct concepts and problems. The ACLU’s advice is not meant to insulate you from lawful investigatory procedure. It’s meant to help minimize the likelihood that you will be convicted of a crime and to maximize the likelihood that unlawfully-obtained evidence will be suppressed at trial.

They say in the U.S., “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” This is true. You can assert your rights, but it’s best not to interfere or say anything other than “I do not assent to search” during the initial encounter. But you might be arrested, taken to jail, etc. Does it suck? Yes. But if I have no other choice, I’d rather spend a week in local lockup while everything gets cleared up than a year or more in state prison (and potentially the loss of other rights afterwards) because I got convicted of a crime.

Sometimes there is just no way out of a bad police encounter here. I wish there was, but the best we can do as a society is vote to change the laws around policing.

Finally, keep in mind that your perspective may be distorted by the news, in a sort of reverse survivorship bias. For every instance of police abuse during an encounter, there could be 10 or 100 where asserting one’s rights leads to no dramatic episode at all, and where the ACLU’s advice led to a conflict-free outcome. You don’t have the full picture, and it’s best not to draw conclusions with certainty if you’re not an expert. (Even experts usually temper their analyses.)

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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