WA House bill would make it illegal for police to lie during interrogations
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Purjury is supposed to be serious. But it's not enforced against police officers. Other misconduct like prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence is also rarely if ever punished even when blatently proven and widely publicided.
So why should I believe, if this law passes, anybody in the justice system will enforce it?
What happened to Ted Bradford is awful. The fact he actually eventually was exenorated was like winning the lottery. For most falsely convicted, a statistical impossibility.
That's true for a lot of laws.
It's not easy to prove someone lied.
Yet we find it easy to believe what people say is true (even for juries in court).
I think in all of history only one prosecutor was ever prosecuted for what is known in the USA as a "Brady violation", where the prosecutor hides exculpatory evidence from the defense, even though it routinely happens.
I tried repeatedly for many years to bring a prosecution against some cops and prosecutors for hacking offenses, but since there isn't really the concept of private prosecutions in the USA you have to rely on the prosecutor's office wanting to prosecute it's own. I even sued the prosecutor's office to try and enforce it, but the judge told me "Of course police officers are allowed to commit crimes in the course of an investigation." If I get bored at some point I will have the audio recordings pulled from the court and put them online so other people can see the insanity.
Many statutes include exemptions for law enforcement. If there is no exemption, then it is a crime for the cops, the same as the public.
e.g. https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/072000050K21...
"(d) This Section does not prevent any lawfully authorized investigative, law enforcement, protective, or intelligence gathering employee or agent of the State or federal government from operating any audiovisual recording device in any facility where a motion picture is being exhibited as part of lawfully authorized investigative, protective, law enforcement, or intelligence gathering activities."
I'm assuming, without knowing, that I can have the recordings pulled without paying hundreds of dollars for transcripts. You can't FOIA judicial items in Illinois, but across the country you have a federal constitutional right to judicial items under the 1st Amendment.
Which they can then either keep, or sell off to raise funds for themselves.
This makes sense, average people understand that attorneys defending a murderer aren't bad people, those attorneys are just doing their job and they play an important part of the legal system. Fewer think about the imbalance of resources and how that skews the results. It makes sense that examining both sides properly requires equal resources allocated to both sides.
As you say, it's a long shot, but it's an idea worth trying for. If nothing else, maybe people can remember to include it in the next government we form after the collapse (half joking).
At some point you have to have someone who is unprosecutable, or you have people who can be influenced.
The king, at the top of this heap, is the jury itself; they cannot be prosecuted for their decision, even if it is obviously, manifestly, completely, pants-on-head-insane.
Charles I was executed in 1649. He kept starting wars, Parliament told him to stop, he wouldn't so they tried him for Treason, he asserted that he necessarily couldn't commit treason because he was the King, but Parliament convicted him and sentenced him to death.
Parliament's rationale, then and now, is that their allegiance is to the Crown, a symbol of the country, not to some bloke who happens to be wearing it. He is just a temporary living symbol, even more replaceable than the (relatively expensive) metal object.
You can prosecute individual members of parliament too, this too isn't a hypothetical, if they're convicted of anything serious enough they automatically lose their seat and a replacement is elected, while for more minor offences like anybody else they might keep their jobs if they can suffer the embarrassment of everybody knowing they're a crook
Unlike in the US no individual holds a "pardon power" which could enable them to nullify a conviction, the Crown Power to do this is in practice exercised via a committee which investigates miscarriages of justice. Of course in principle a British Prime Minister could just insist they have this power anyway, and if a Parliament comprising largely of their party members goes along with it, so be it, on the other hand it's hard to see why the millions of British people who didn't vote for them should accept this, and it's not as though Britain hasn't had civil wars already.
1. The UK parliament reversed course and brought back Charles I's son to be Charles II. In doing to it executed a ton of people responsible for revolt. That included Oliver Cromwell -- despite the fact that he was already dead. They dug him up, tried him, convicted him, executed him, and put his head on a spike for decades. So it's not clear how much power that precedent could hold.
2. Charles III is King of the United Kingdom. The title of "King of England" was retired by Charles I's father. Charles I was King of Great Britain.
Private prosecutions do exist, but not on a federal level, and anything falling under the purview of the CFAA - which is the umbrella that hangs over all computer-access-related crimes, is federal by definition. Besides, with parallel construction, they can always legally reverse-engineer a legally sound rationale that doesn't violate the 4th Amendment or what-have-you. However, while prosecutors are absolutely immune, the police are not and therefore are subject, occasionally, to federal-level liability either criminal or civil, although the prevalence of police perjury - testilying, as commonly known - is both an academic niche that has produced plenty of papers and have achieved virtually nothing in the real world. The term came into the public consciousness in 1994 and as late as 2018 I've heard it bandied about by cops in a courthouse. Prosecutors need the cops to investigate (public defenders' have a much smaller team of investigators if you're lucky, but even then anything technical is hopefully something you know enough about to find the right expert and conduct a competent cross examination. The police, of course, have the first mover advantage and so they can set up the fall guy who is already pension-eligible and move their assets out of their name before getting tossed in the gentlest way possible under the minivan. I wasn't involved with the case but the classic WA case involving the police using all of their tools available to rearrange the narrative surrounding a murder caught on camera and a federal prosecution is the Otto Zehm case. I had the luck to see what happened at sentencing and it was frankly sickening. https://www.spokesman.com/topics/otto-zehm/
So, police do get prosecuted, but only below the federal level, and extremely leniently, and if weren't for the video it probably wouldn't have happened. Ten years for a murder caught on video is crazy considering that the feds were giving out pleas of 8 years for "trafficking" 4 pills of Oxycodone before fent got into the supply (also thanks to the feds, as it was entirely supply driven) and ten years after leaving WA I still have former clients incarcerated for much more ambiguous fact patterns and convicted after multiple mistrials. As for the feds, now that Bivens is basically dead, even their own IG reports read like lurid crime novels written in the most lawyerly way possible. And if they're really in trouble, creating a moral panic always works. It had worked so far.
For instance, in my case the prosecutor's office acted as law enforcement, e.g. they conducted investigations and conducted an arrest and executed a search warrant. In those cases, when they are acting in a nonprosecutorial role, and in a law enforcement role, they are definitely only qualified immune.
In Illinois it was ruled that prosecutors creating their own quasi-police departments is no longer legal. The advantage for the prosecutors was that they could bypass 99% of the laws and regulations that apply to police because they don't fit the statutory or regulatory definition of a police force.
Edit: Also to note, the CFAA has exemptions carved for law enforcement to do things that are criminal if done by the public:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030
"(f)This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity of a law enforcement agency of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or of an intelligence agency of the United States."
If the only evidence the police have is what you say, then that should be insufficient.
If it were recorded then that's different....
> Per Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2)(a), a statement made by a defendant is admissible as evidence only if it is inculpatory; exculpatory statements made to an investigator are hearsay and therefore may not be admitted as evidence in court, unless the defendant testifies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearsay#United_States
So it's not hearsay if it makes you look bad (but it is if it makes you look good), and police don't even have to be telling the truth, nor do they really have to be worried about perjury charges if a given encounter was not recorded.
I still can't imagine why a confession given in interview isn't logically nullified by:
"How does the defense plead?"
"Not guilty, Your Honor."
Also you have NO obligation to say anything to police in an interrogation and can always request an attorney to speak on your behalf. Subjects are reminded of this during the reading of Miranda Rights.
If you are ever in a police interrogation you should always decline to speak without an attorney.
It is bewildering why people don't exercise their rights.
Civil rights violations are simply status quo. I come from a family with members in law enforcement and the criminal justice system. They have had to kick detectives out of interrogation rooms because the detectives get abusive and simply ignore "I'd like to speak to my attorney". The cops just won't stop harassing, lying, and even abusing the suspect.
Most people are not going to do well in a stressful situation with a person in a position of authority abusing them. And our criminal justice system here in the US is ok with that.
What percentage of the HN readership here would be able to dial the number of a competent criminal attorney?
Engagement with the criminal justice system is so out of the ordinary for most people that they simply do not know what to do. It's easy to say, "shut up and call your lawyer", but most regular joes have absolutely no idea how to find a lawyer, vet them, engage with them, etc.
In normal life, if you need a lawyer, you Google some reviews, or you look up something in yellow pages, or you ask your local state bar association for a referral for the area of legal practice. None of those things are happening at 2am in a holding cell without any of your regular devices. And asking for the public defender is not likely to give you much comfort given their caseload.
Now imagine that you are not the classic affluent educated HN reader with access to all kinds of resources, and consider what it must be like for working class people. It's not fun.
Ideally, you have a relationship with one or more, but if you don't come from an upper middle class background with a refined appreciation for insurance policies, now is the time you call your most competent contact and beg them to get the ball rolling on a lawyer and bail.
What's more bewildering is why juries (who are not facing jail time themselves) don't find defendants innocent in every case involving the police since it's known that the police are allowed to lie, and it's also known they will face little to no repercussions from doing so even under oath.
[0]https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for...
Fifth amendment rights in the US are a joke.
Or we can blame the victims.
> today that statement would be used to show that you couldve been there (because you said so yourself).
They can use "I don't remember" ?
Isn't the whole point of interrogation to get a suspect to make conflicting statements, then pressure them when the statements don't line up as a means to get a confession?
Why is this a bad thing? If this tool goes away, couldn't conviction rates plummet (for eg. violent crimes)?
I'm having trouble seeing an ethical problem here?
The reality in the US is if you want re-elected you better be tough on crime, which means people going to jail. No one seems to give a shit if the people that committed the crime are going to jail, as long as someone is found guilty.
They absolutely can, and will use that in a court of law. Any comment that you make that seems completely fine from your perspective can quickly be turned around to lock you up.
I highly recommend checking out this lecture when you get a chance: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Police are not generally concerned with getting the right person, they're just concerned with getting a person.
Even if they do, the real question is whether false convictions will plummet more than true convictions. There are an awful lot of people who "confessed" to crimes didn't commit.
This is when they don’t have fingerprints.
> So why should I believe, if this law passes, anybody in the justice system will enforce it?
I haven't read the text of the bill, but according to this article, evidence obtained during an interview where the cops were lying can be excluded. This forces judges to consider the evidence during pre-trial motions in limine, and if a judge errs in allowing such evidence, that error can be appealed. That doesn't 100% solve this issue, but if enacted this will provide a real remedy. And trial judges hate to be overturned on appeal.
he proposed a "corruption court" and that went about as far as you'd expect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IebE8dDKEWM
Public defenders don't get into the line of work as a backup option. At least at my law school, they didn't recruit, because frankly they can't beat private firms or even the prosecutors on just about anything but the possibility of being on the right side of history. The pay barely covers interest on your loans, even during trials you have to run out to fill the meter every 4 hours where I was at - only the police got free parking. Everyone in my class with my skillset ended up at an IP firm or doing in house work somewhere, mostly in the Seattle area but also down to California. I don't regret a minute of the work, but in the grand scheme of things it's impossible to make a difference on any scale when you are an active participant in the system which is inherently skewed and allows prosecutors so much leeway and so much coercive power that the police can totally get away with not outright lying in interrogations and just play on the ignorance of the accused and implied threats and achieve the same result. The lying is just the most fun a cop can have without planting a gun on someone.
Also, from what I understand perjury is more widespread than you might believe, and tends toward frequent fliers in court. As I understand it, some officers take the attitude "if they're going to lie, I'm not going to commit to always being honest, even if it means letting a POS out"
Don't agree, but just to address the point regarding cops being treated differently. People lie in court all the time, even getting caught red-handed and unprosecuted.
P.S. Regarding that police attitude toward lying, it's the same as any corruption: You might think prosecutors and cops pull out all the stops for the "real bad guys", and this may be partially true; however in reality, it just comes down to who pisses them off the most, which often doesn't have that much to do with whether someone is the worst of the worst.
Easy: because interrogations are videotaped and disclosed to defense attorneys. Currently, police can walk in and say “we found your prints at the scene, so you better start talking”. If an officer did this under the new regime, it would be illegal — and would be disclosed to the defense attorney.
And under the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine, anything elicited by that lie would be excluded from trial.
Basically, the types of lies people make on the stand are hard to disprove. The types of lies that cops tell in interrogations are not hard to disprove. They are also on video, and handed over to defense attorneys.
It's amazing how much they have to work around things that would incriminate or sway a jury (such as cutting out anything that might reveal priors), and this would be something more.
Isn't this necessary especially in larger cases where it's necessary to get one suspect to roll over on another?
As long as defense attorneys are involved, what is the harm in this?
There's the harm.
If preventing cops from lying results in fewer trials going to court for violent crime, then I'd be curious to compare the two figures.
I'm anxious about having fewer tools to investigate and prosecute. We used to have a 70% homicide clearance rate, but that's dropped to just 50% [1]. This feels like we'd be further trying our hands.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3878472-nearly-half-of-us-murde...
MOST of them are guilty, so killing ALL of them is OK! Wouldn't want to let off the guilty ones.
The smart cops cut out all of this by simply killing the unarmed suspect before pronouncing the 'p' in 'stop'.
"Hell no" seems like the obvious answer, but you seem to disagree?
But we're supposed to presume "innocent until proven guilty". A suspect is only accused, not convicted.
The whole point here is that the person at this stage is presumed innocent.
Good point, suspects have a right to an attorney and the right to remain silent. But much of the successful lying probably happens when an attorney isn't present. For example "look, we can wait for your lawyer to get here, but this is looking really bad for you. We just arrested your buddy and once he sings we'll just throw the book at you. If you give your side of the story first, you get the better deal."
A suspect without a lawyer might waive the right to counsel/silence and incriminate himself. Of course, he would be guilty, so it's not entirely clear this is a bad thing (unless he is falsely admitting guilt, which does occasionally happen).
There are multiple countries where it's not allowed, so it's definitely not necessary.
>As long as defense attorneys are involved, what is the harm in this?
Generally the cops will try as hard as they think they can get away with to keep your attorney away. This article is about someone who immediately asked if he should have an attorney, was told he didn't need one, and when one showed up anyways, he wasn't even allowed to know there was someone hired to represent him.
The harm is that juries and judges really love signed confessions and cops love to pressure for one. The Reid Technique's entire goal is to take someone from saying "no, I didn't do it" to "okay, I'll sign that I did it". Ted Bradford had an alibi and a recanted confession that confessed things that obviously didn't match the facts of the case, and the confession was enough even when he finally had an attorney. It was enough that:
>Despite the exonerating DNA evidence and the fact that Ted had already served his entire sentence for the crime, Yakima County prosecutors chose to charge Ted with the same sexual assault once again, offering his initial false statement in 1996 as the evidence against him.
Not to mention that defense attorneys are usually overworked, working for free and you generally get what you pay for.
(One of the strange side-effects of mandatory sentencing is removing plea deals because if they HAVE to charge you with X, and guilty or plead on X is Y years in jail, then there is no reason not to go to a jury trial, because the worst case is you get Y years anyway, which you get when you plea out.)
If criminals really were organized and forced everything to jury trials, the United States would collapse.
And the “defense attorneys” are going to be overworked underpaid public defenders while the prosecutors have what amounts to an unlimited budget
I understand how impossibly hard that could be in the moment, but never never go quietly into that dark night.
Unless, of course, you're guilty and you know it, then clap your hands on anything that reduces what you have to suffer for it, I guess.
How about because defense attorneys are very expensive?
The problem is that--so far--we don't have a good way to allow the acceptable kinds while also prohibiting the terrible kinds.
Imagine the police give an overwhelming list of false/non-existent evidence and testimony, so that the average (innocent) person would assume they're being deliberately framed by some power they are unable to fight, and that the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones is to buckle under.
Another example would be where police lie/deliberately-mislead a suspect about the consequences of a confession.
Interrogations are not always videotaped. State laws vary widely.
Many states require audio recording only. Other states only require recordings for felony investigations. Many states only require recording of custodial interrogations for specific offenses, such as rape and murder.
At one point, California only required recordings of custodial interrogations involving juveniles suspected of having committed murder, but that might have changed — I haven’t looked into this in a while.
The FBI doesn't do audio recordings, let alone video.
A man was lied to by police about a hit-and-run putting the victim in critical condition (it did not), and committed suicide before any trial happened. https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/seattle-police-officer-d...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/michigan-case-offers-pub...
> Brian Chaney says he asked for a supervisor during his arrest in Keego Harbor, Michigan, and Police Officer Richard Lindquist told him that another officer present was in charge. The problem: That second officer was not a supervisor or even a member of the Keego Harbor Police Department. Lindquist was never disciplined and his chief says that while a suspect has the right to request a supervisor, what the officer did was OK.
If he wanted to make a "there's no right to a supervisor" argument, he should have. "You have the right, but we'll fake it" is the worst of both worlds.
Essentially, unless you believe every single cop is pure at heart and incapable of making a mistake, you should be wanting a presence of more than just 1 cop.
I assume the intention is to comply with the letter of the law while maximizing the chance that the suspect will abandon the request and not force them to wait until the supervisor arrives.
You see this quite often in the cases where the suspect wants to stop talking and speak to their attorney, and the detectives do the "Oh, yes, we'll let you call them in just one second, but first answer _____"
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/fulltext.asp?DocName=0...
"...if, during the custodial interrogation, a law enforcement officer or juvenile officer knowingly engages in deception."
Hopefully they extend it to adult interrogations.
I just did 10 years in jail waiting for trial before the charges were dropped, partially due to a bogus interrogation (that was ruled unconstitutional by the court) where I refused to talk and they badgered me for 45 minutes after that telling me I couldn't use that right and then threatened my family. That's the point you break, not when the cops hit you with a wrench, but when they threaten people you love.
" ... if you say that X is wrong we throw you in youth care, you get put in a place little better than a summer camp, among criminal youngsters, with 2 adults per 30 kids that don't bring you to school, don't help with homework, where all your stuff is stolen, and we use the police to arrest you if you ever decide to leave until you're 18, when you'll likely have failed all your schooling and be thrown into the street ... "
You cannot be honest to kids about youth services the way it currently exists in the US, in any state. That's just absurd.
It is truly amazing that we call this mess a "justice system", as if justice was anywhere even close.
How is it we are able to legally "waive rights"? That should be addressed - under no circumstances should a not-yet-convicted person ever be stripped of rights. Voluntarily or not. Otherwise, what are they?
Sure, someone can choose to not exercise them; maybe cooperate with the police, but if at any point they choose they should be available.
Am I missing something?
That's how you waive your rights.
You waived a right by saying that but you can choose.l to not speak after.
Even if the paper waived an attorney you should be able to change your mind
Cops are very persuasive when they want to get an answer out of you. Say, they arrest you for whatever, and they can just threaten you to remain in custody for a day... no matter if your pet is alone at home and needs to be fed, or your children need to be picked up from school. Sure, you may call a lawyer to arrange for stuff, but we'll keep your house's keys as evidence...
The freedom to not say anything is utterly depending on circumstances allowing you to do so.
They're not being stripped of their rights; they're acknowledging that what they're about to say can be used against them.
Waiving rights is common in American law. Open source licenses waive the right to sue; the third-party doctrine waives the right to privacy of the data that companies take. To some extent, liability releases for participating in dangerous activities waive the right to hold the company you're paying responsible -- think climbing guides, race tracks, sky diving outfits, etc. But from what my non-lawyer self understands, there are some rights you can't waive, like the right to sue over gross negligence.
In this case, it sounds like that waiver was used more as an intimidation tactic to make the suspect believe that they were stuck there and couldn't decide to stop talking. Which... That sounds like something you'd get a lawyer for to help explain the situation.
That's not a realistic scenario. All actual evidence is disclosed as a matter of course in the justice process. Any bottom barrel attorney assures this, to whom the defendant has a right.
More from https://wainnocenceproject.org/stories/ted-bradford/
> An attorney sent by Ted’s wife was prohibited from entering the interrogation room by law enforcement, who told the attorney he would not be permitted in unless Ted specifically requested an attorney.
The cops are not interested in playing fair.
The cops may be doing something illegal, at which point the interrogation would be inadmissable. But that would validate that the system works. Remember that we are discussing lying and afforded protections against it. His attorney is an afforded protection, and he should have requested one.
It doesn't help that "not good" can include using a slightly slangy sentence ("laywer, dog") or sounding like you're asking permission or stating an opinion.
More importantly, the previous comment is referring to plea bargaining. Essentially, law enforcement is using the poor state of the current justice system to pressure people without resources into accepting a guilty verdict because the system is so stacked against them. Imagine:
"Yeah, you can try to prove your innocence, but we're going to hold you until your arraingment. That'll be at least a few weeks, which will mean you'll lose your job and your apartment and your car will be repo'd. And you'll probably lose anyway, because we've got all this evidence against you, and we promise its bulletproof. Or... You can take this deal we're offering. You plead guilty, and we'll let you walk out of here today."
"If you're found guilty, you could go away for life, but if you confess I'll go to the judge and offer less time"
Constitutional protections aren't there for the legal system, they're there for the accused.
Make it harder to convict, and maybe it'll get to a point where we realize we can't lock away societal problems, and have to start fixing root causes.
Ironically these techniques work better against the innocent than criminals. The criminals know that the cops lie and that simply shutting up is often a sufficient defense. The innocent get bamboozled and end up with jail time.
People really need to internalize this when it comes to their interactions with the police (and ultimately when it comes to their obligations as voters). After an investigation starts, the police's one and only job is to put someone in prison. Not to solve the case. Not to get to the truth. Not to promote some notion of justice. It's to get a conviction and that's it.
Choosing to talk to the police "because I have done nothing wrong" or "because I want to be cooperative" or "because I think they'll go easier on me if I do" are all terrible choices. When they are talking to you they have a single goal: To convict you.
Sure, that's the point. Less fucking over of innocent people should therefore be less impactful. ;)
The way they do in countries that have long forbade lying in interrogations:
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/84483/is-it-generall...
> when they have no proof at all it's going to put a heavy burden on the prosecutor to get that person in jail.
Oh, how awful it is that a prosecutor has to prove someone's guilt! What next? Presumption of innocence?
Having followed the topic on and off for well over a decade: As a juror I never believe someone's confession. Rather irrelevant as most confessions won't get to trial, but it often takes very little to get a suspect to produce a false confession. At times, even without any deceit from the interrogators.
I wish I could recall one particular case: A person was murdered, and they charged another person living in the apartment complex. After a long interview session, he confessed. But his confession didn't match any of the evidence. So they pressured him to name an accomplice. The accomplice confessed. The evidence still didn't match. They kept pressuring the original suspect to name names until they had 4-5 people - all of whom confessed.
They later retracted their confessions, claiming duress. But the jurors convicted them on the strength of their confessions ("Who would confess to a murder? I wouldn't!").
They were, of course, all innocent. They spent time in prison, and eventually managed to get the courts to release them. But one or two still haven't been "exonerated" - their conviction stands and thus can't get jobs (or even an apartment).
Oh, and no physical coercion was involved. They were simply worn down by the long interrogation.
IIRC, over half of people whose convictions have been overturned involved a confession of guilt during interrogation (maybe it was just death row folks - don't remember the specifics).
Other than "nice day, eh?" or "No, as a matter of fact I do NOT know why you pulled me over", don't talk to cops without a lawyer.
For bonus points, quote "99 Problems":
"Do I learn like a mind reader, sir? I don't know."
(that entire verse is quite educational)
In the few situations where I was pulled over for speeding, I asked the cop to show me the reading and also whether the device was calibrated in the past few years, and they've always obliged (after answering "I know how fast I was going" and "I think the speed limit is...". If they have a calibrated device and they show me the reading, I'm not really sure how my answers to those questions affects the decision tree.
What you want to do is avoid creating an unnecessary confrontation by acting adversarial.
Look at the base rate of speeding. When I drive on 101 in the bay area in clear traffic, I'm doing around 65 (the limit)-75 in the right lane and the majority of people are passing me on the left (or tailgating me because they want me to go faster or drafting or whatever it is that causes people to drive too close behind me when I drive near the speed limit). From what I can tell, unless a cop is actively trying to be punitive, they typically don't stop a car simply because it's going up to about 15MPH over the freeway limit.
It seems like in this situation I could have honestly answered "no, I did not know the speed limit".
I mean, where I said I'd know the speed limit above, if it was truly obscured, I think I would be playing it safe and judge things on what the road looked like, whether there was a school there, and the weather and other ambient conditions.
I did not answer any of the officer's questions during the stop, but did identify myself and hand him all the documents he requested. I figured I wasn't going to avoid the ticket using my mouth, so I saved it for the judge.
How did you proceed past the initial questions, IE how did you refuse to answer in a polite way (I'm curious because there is a whole genre of youtube videos of cops stopping people and the driver getting in an adversarial situation by refusing to talk).
Also, just out of curiosity, what was the default limit for that type of road, and what was the posted speed limit? Are we talking "driving 35 in a 25 zone". Any other contextual information, like weather conditions, nearby school, recently changed limit, etc? The cops that park at the school near me usually don't stop people unless they are driving 45+ in our 25 zone.
I watch a lot of those YouTube traffic stop videos (they are addicting), and a lot of suspects in these videos talk themselves into (or attitude themselves into) an arrest. Not to mention incriminating themselves. You know the ones who don't make it onto YouTube? The ones who shut the fuck up and probably end up much better off.
For how fast I'm going, I'm usually checking my speed every 30 seconds or so, but can also tell how fast I'm going simply by looking, how hard I'm pressing the pedal (my car is in "Eco" mode, which means it's pretty pokey all around).
I never drive more than about 15 miles above the speed limit (and then, only on a freeway where folks are driving fast enough that I don't feel safe driving slower, because people frequently come right up behind me and change lanes at the last second if I drive the speed limit on California highways). So I am not particularly worried about the cases you're describing (speeding like that is a misdemeanor, not a felony). I used to drive faster, but over time I concluded that driving slower has a wide range of benefits, both in accidents, as well as fuel consumption. It's not like driving 10MPH faster on the freeway is going to make a huge difference in your arrival time.
I see a lot of armchair lawyers on places like Hacker News who confabulate all sorts of scenarios to justify their adversarial relationship with the police, other folks who assume all cops are racist/classist/whateverist, and other folks who just don't want to follow laws because they don't like authority. I really don't know what to say to folks like that. Collect telemetry and bring it to court, and good luck with that!
If that traffic stop leads to the cop finding something else in your car, and that leads to a crime, a simple question can make the difference between a legal or an illegal stop in a court of law. Since the best case scenario in a traffic stop is "don't get a ticket" and the worst case is "Be confined to a concrete cell with a serious criminal conviction for the rest of your life" I don't answer any questions whatsoever, no matter how trivial. Happens to innocent people all the time.
Getting a $200 ticket you could have otherwise "talked your way out of" is a small price to pay to vs. the risk.
This might not be as significant as you think. My understanding is that many models allow them to set that number directly. If I recall correctly, the source for this was "A Speeder's Guide to Avoiding Tickets", written by a former state trooper.
I don't know if it's factually accurate, but the advice in that book has generally been solid.
Again, if cops are actually going around setting values to get citations, there are larger systemic problems. Also, many vehicles have GPS and other datalogging showing actual speeds, so if the cop is faking the numbers, that's going to start showing up in court.
Unless there's a cloud in the sky. Wouldn't wanna lie to an officer...
Are you telling me that I should have shut the door in his face, and called my lawyer?
I can't believe you would do something so dangerous as to post a message on a message board.
Both getting in a tigers cage and interacting with the police are things that you have many choices in moderating and making the event safer.
there are a multitude of legitimate reasons to talk to police without a lawyer. e.g. you are a victim, you are helping a victim, you are being friendly.
The real advice is not to try to talk your way out of a crime because it rarely works.
If they're asking for a description of a car after I watched a hit-and-run, I'm probably not a suspect
Does it negate the utility you can get from talking to the police?
like I said above:
1) Do you think that is good basis for a universal rule?
2) Does it negate the utility you can get from talking to the police?
Anyways, it is impossible they thought they werent a suspect and helping a victim after 9 hours when he was signing a confession.
Here's a different example:
Police have a policy of shooting aggressive dogs, under basically any circumstances. So if you have a pet that is slightly protective of their territory, then any situation that brings the cops within shooting range of you pet can get your pet killed.
That doesn't mean never call/talk to the police. That is a crazy viewpoint driven by hyper focus on risk mitigation.
It is like refusing to leave your burning house because you might be hit my lightning.
The boy was for one, unarmed and they decide to start shooting (eleven times!!) at him? I cannot imagine what those people were thinking.
You can talk to the police during normal goings on just fine. They are not going to interrogate you just for asking for directions. It's during an investigation that you should lawyer up.
He emphatically told me I should never, ever, ever talk to the Police. Even if I witness a hit and run and just happen to be standing there and they walk over to me. Any one of 10,000 scenarios where the Police ask me for something, or want me to give information about something (even if I wasn't there).
They are actively searching for someone to blame, and if you happen to say the wrong words while trying your utmost to be helpful, they'll happily pin it on you.
Also the example is ludicrous, you're saying the cops would try to blame someone for a hit and run that isn't even in a car. No, the cops are not that cartoonishly bad. Some cops in some departments may be, and I can almost guess the cities, but the average cop is not a monster, they're just some person like you or me.
You can construct many "what ifs", but they mainly apply if the police are actively subverting the normal rules of law or incompetent.
There are a subset of cops who are corrupt, or racist, or classist, where merely interacting with the police can lead to serious outcomes, but that's sort of a different problem that has to be addressed more systematically.
Cops in the US barely receive training - the average length is 22 weeks, while Germany clocks in at 2.5 years [1]. Of course a lot of police will be incompetent in the first place given the length and priorities of these trainings, made worse by cargo-culting from "senior" officers and by "killology" training [2].
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-training-us-falls-short-com...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/11/police-trai...
The fundamental problem is that you don't know whether the police officer you are talking to is good or not, and if you find out, it is too late.
Talking to a police officer is like petting someone else's dog. Don't do so unless you've talked to someone who feeds it first.
The average person like you or me who becomes a cop gets chased out of the profession because they wouldn't turn a blind eye to the crimes their fellow officers commit against the public. Everyone left is most likely either just as guilty or complicit and enabling.
It doesn't help that whenever police organize in any capacity, denying and covering up abuses always seems one of the goal. Just look at what FOP says every time there's a police shooting.
> They are actively searching for someone to blame
That seems very, very far fetched.
There are absolutely police officers who are lazy or will power trip or love busting perps. But each officer is not starting dozens of investigations every day. Especially the beat cops you are most likely to run into.
I also briefly worked at a motel in the middle of nowhere and you better believe that regular conversations with police officers is a critical aspect of the job.
If you're the middle class, middle American, nicely dressed, and got that harmless look. Well, expect things to go pretty well. Business owners of non-sus businesses generally have it pretty good too.
Are you a minority? Not dressed well? A youth? Well, things can go sideways for you quick.
If you are getting actively stabbed talking to a police officer might be a sensible decision.
Never talking to police is a much worse advice then "don't participate in questioning without a lawyer present".
> in a way that can't be meaningfully predicted. The stakes are incredibly high, too.
If we're talking about giving people advice for the police, I don't think people are going to need help with "Oh, you're being stabbed as we speak, should you call 911?" That's not the question people need help with. You're not boosting anyone's judgment here by leading with that argument.
However, if police want to ask what you're doing on your property in a friendly way, should you respond or should you say that you want to contact your lawyer? Or if you feel like striking up a conversation with the police to develop warmth, should you?
The right answer might come down to whether you're black, Native American, Asian, man, woman, etc., but without knowing more, don't talk to police is solid advice which has developed through a long relationship between citizenry and police. Even if you're just a witness, it would be naive to think you have nothing to fear. Even when you are the person who needs help, it would be naive to think you have nothing to fear.
If the police of America want to turn around their reputation, that's totally on them. The ball is in their court.
People are conflating two things in this thread - "talking with the police" (aka voluntarily consenting with questioning) and literally just having a conversation with a police officer.
If you have a moral directive to slight the police, I can understand. But just asking for directions or telling them what you saw is not going to increase your chances of having a felony pinned on you more than showing up in random security footage.
If people know that if they get hit by a car or robbed or something like that none of the witness will talk to the police they are going to be way more inclined to support more surveillance.
(The link by jp191919 is gold though, I'd recommend to watch it at least once if you can find the time)
TL;DR - the video is a lawyer and a cop both saying don't talk to police, even to be helpful, and they back it up.
You should watch it. Your loved ones should watch it. Your friends should watch it.
[1] https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/84483/is-it-generall...
> SEATTLE — A Seattle police officer who unnecessarily used a ruse to locate a hit-and-run suspect in May 2018 has been suspended for six days after a watchdog agency found that the lie caused the man to take his own life.
> The unnamed officer sent word to the man through a friend -- the complainant in the case -- that a woman injured in the crash was in critical condition and might not survive her injuries.
> In reality, the crash was a minor fender bender and no one was injured, according to the Office of Police Accountability, an independent investigative office within the Seattle Police Department. Andrew Myerberg, the civilian director of the watchdog, authored the November report on the findings.
> The driver, who friends said “was despondent about the fact that he may have killed someone,” died by suicide less than a week later.
> “Notably, the night before he took his own life, he directly told his roommate that the incident was causing him to feel suicidal feelings,” the OPA report stated.
Seattle PD is also notoriously not well behaved even by police standards.
> Seattle police union rank-and-file leaders are under investigation after an officer was recorded on his body camera appearing to make light of the death of a woman who was killed by another officer this year, saying that she “had limited value.”
> Auderer left his body camera on after responding to the South Lake Union neighborhood, where a marked patrol vehicle driven by another officer struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula on Jan. 23. That officer had been responding to a “priority one call,” police said a day after the incident, when he hit Kandula, 23, who had been in a crosswalk.
> In the brief clip, Auderer, who is vice president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, is driving and can be heard discussing details of the incident in a call with the guild’s president, Mike Solan.
> Auderer said that the officer whose vehicle struck Kandula had been “going 50” and that “that’s not out of control.” According to a police investigation report that was referred to prosecutors for review last month, the officer had been driving at 74 mph and Kandula was thrown more than 100 feet.
> “That’s not reckless for a trained driver,” Auderer also said in the video, adding that he doesn’t believe “she was thrown 40 feet either.”
> “But she is dead,” he said. He later laughs and says, “No, it’s a regular person.” Only Auderer’s statements are audible in the video.
> "Yeah, just write a check," he also said and laughed again. “Eleven thousand dollars. She was 26 anyway,” Auderer said, misstating Kandula’s age. “She had limited value.”
Some of the most racist things I've heard in my life was from the officers delivering that lecture. And most of it wasn't even brought up deliberately - they were just telling anecdotes from their day to day work and the kinds of stories that they trade with colleagues. It goes beyond racist, too - one of them literally said that people in the neighborhood he has to work in are "all filthy disgusting animals".
What we have at the moment its a system backsliding towards something that looks similar to post-soviet law like the current Russian system. Its not a good look, even if we probably still have a legal system in the top 10 least fucked.
I can think of a very small handful of cases where the prosecution drop marginal cases. I've seen cases where there is zero evidence be taken all the way to the day of trial in order to try and get a plea. I see a great number of cases dropped on day of trial when the defendant won't plead out.
Source: 11 years experience in the criminal justice system.
Really, it shouldn't be an adversarial system against the law-abiding citizenry.
How else do you propose doing it? A system - in sometimes highly distrusting, dangerous, and angry situations - that relies on good will seems unlikely to work. Advocacy accepts the adversarial nature of the issue.
Countries do have different systems. France relies more on judges somehow, but I don't know if the accused gets an advocate.
It seems to me we land a long way from this idea. In reality what happens, especially for poor people, is the prosecution has, in relation to the defense, a virtually unlimited budget and leaves no stone unturned. The defense is often a public defender without the time or resources to turn many stones at all and is viewed by our population as sleazy because they simply try to do their jobs.
While imperfect, adversarial systems are still our best means of establishing the truth. Whether it is Quality Assurance testing in the context of engineering, reproducibility in the context of scientific experiments, or trial courts in the context of law.
What’s the probability of any given indicted person actually being guilty? It’s way over 50%.
I would say 95% of people who are indicted are guilty of something related to the indictment. Often not exactly what is in the indictment (overcharging is rife), but guilty of something. What we need to do is charge people more accurately. Overcharging is used to elicit guilty pleas on lesser charges.
The jury decided pretty much immediately that the prosecution hadn't proved shit. But a different jury... who knows?
I know people who bulk buy large quantities of weed because they have to travel out of state to get it and they want to minimize the risks of being caught with it all in transit.
But, to me, the prosecution shouldn't take on cases where they don't have good evidence and they should drop cases if it becomes clear they are wrong. If prosecutors did this they'd still have a very high win rate.
Why should we stack the deck in favor of prosecutors and police, by giving them extra privileges, like being able to intentionally lie to defendants?
And maybe all evidence from interrogations should be inadmissible unless video recorded beginning-to-end with no interruptions.
Then everyone could see if the suspect was browbeaten into a confession or if statements were taken out of context.
The Czech GIBS could serve as a blueprint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Inspection_of_Security...
It reads like the insanity it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_oversight_in_Chicago#Hi...
That may be better!
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
"When New York police officers temporarily reduced their 'proactive policing' efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics."
"'In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity,' the researchers wrote. 'The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated.'"
The odd thing is that most often it's not even necessary. Thanks to TV shows, movies, books and a handful of rare cases which get featured in the media, people assume a significant number of police questionings are like some cagey chess match with a criminal mastermind. In reality the vast majority of criminal suspects brought in for questioning are caught red-handed or with strong evidence of guilt. Because of this most convictions are plea bargains and the few convicted at trial are not close judgements. If we strengthen these protections, IMHO, it will change the conviction rates very, very little.
Nice to see the good ol rules for me, not for thee still exists..