From a game theoretical POV this is false; no good can come from speaking to them, and only bad can.
From a game theoretical POV this is false; no good can come from speaking to them, and only bad can.
In the first case at least they are surely going to suspect you, so you should still be careful. But “no good can come of it”?
In the latter case, I would not call them at all.
What good would police contact do in either of those cases? In each instance they cannot help me.
The police (in the USA) are reactive and respond after crimes are committed, not before (unless they are responding to social disorder requests, which is generally unrelated to crime). Even then they choose which crimes they deem worthy of responding to (the classic example being rape victims being dissuaded from proceeding with making a police report).
Most people have a mistaken mental model of how police actually function. Most police officers are about as non-proactive as you can get (except near the end of the month when the traffic ticket quotas are due).
Except we're not talking about game theory here, we're talking about reality.