Identify yourself when asked, ask for a lawyer, then shut up.
If communicating something to the police might be helpful for you, do that through your lawyer.
"You can beat the charges but you can't beat the ride"
The Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, has ruled that you cannot exercise your right to remain silent by merely remaining silent, and that the Prosecution can say things like "you didn't have an answer when asked questions".
To exercise your right to remain silent, the Court says, you must say "I am exercising my right to remain silent".
And don't say "I want a lawyer, dawg", or else the police will say they were unable to find you a canine who had passed the bar, and thus your request for counsel was not a serious one and that they are free to continue your interrogation... and the Court (in this case, the Louisiana Supreme Court) will say that that was a perfectly reasonable interpretation of your request.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/10/suspect-asks-for...
But I would live through that everyday of my life if I knew I would never have to get to the sometimes next chapter of this kind of thing: jail in a small Texas town. There I learned about both physical and psychological torture. But its too much to get into.
And yes I tried to fight the most egregious event of torture, spent alot of time talking to lawyer, explaining what happened to me. My stop was unlawful even in that case. But I came in with a some fancy Austin lawyer to Brownwood, TX and they all but laughed us out of the courtroom.
And even after all that, don't even get me started on how they extract your money and sanity for years and years if your lucky like me to get probation for an eighth oz of mushrooms. I was a special case because I ended up going to grad school and it was easy for me to work the weekends to make the money I needed to pay them that wasnt covered by my stipend. I am also so grateful I kept a spreadsheet of my payments to them, it truly truly saved me from more years and money. They are really good with all their paperwork, except for anything to do with paying them money.
But very important to realize in all this: this is not at all exceptional, and I am a card-carrying privileged white man. This is just how it is.
Can you expand on this?
I was pulled over because I passed an officer going the speed limit of 65-70mph. He was stopped on the other side of the road, I passed at that speed, and he immediately started to pull me over because he said he "didn't think my seatbelt was on". My lawyer made a very good case that it would be somewhat impossible for him to see one way or another, using pictures of where I passed, as well the model of my car.
Because it wasn't a trial, there was no jury, it was just the judge's call. I remember feeling so hopeful after we went to court because our argument seemed good and we barely heard anything from the DA to counter it. But it was still denied. My lawyer really wanted to go to trial after that, but I was too scared at that point.
In the USA you might be able to get the statements thrown out afterwards, but as long as the police didn't actually commit any violence then they are likely to get promoted.
And you have to be pragmatic; you might be able to get the charges thrown out, but you could easily spend a decade or more in pretrial detention to do it.
Don’t do this. If the charges are serious, if the motivation is so serious they’ll use illegal violence, say nothing. Demand a lawyer.
Where I disagree with this is in super minor cases. I took a left without indicating, once, and got pulled over by the town pub. I figured they were looking for drunks, so I co-operated; the worst I was admitting to was a traffic ticket.
If they are threatening violence, you can be sure your demands for a lawyer are going to go unheard.
I've run into a lot of people who have heard that advice and take it very literally, to the point that when I've asked them what they would do if an officer responding to an explosion and fire at their workplace asked the people who got out if they knew of anyone still in the building said that they would not answer without getting a lawyer first.
Law enforcement has become more and more hostile towards citizens with time, not less. Wariness is the only way to navigate it, unfortunately.
In the case of the fire I wouldn't say anything except "Little Timmy is still inside, on the second floor". Do not discuss how the fire started or anything like that.
Better, maybe: never concede. And if it goes beyond the sundry, call counsel. (If you don’t have counsel, weigh being technically correct and massively inconvenienced against being pleasant but subordinate.)
TL; DR If they’re asking about felonies, shut up. If they’re telling you off for a tail light, ehhh!
Why? I say this as someone with personal counsel on retainer, and who has been pulled over but not gotten a ticket in a decade. I’m legally conservative but also practical.
Most people don’t have the time to be arraigned every time they might have gone five over. “Never talk to the police” means every random stop turns into interrogation. That simply isn’t the baseline risk for most of us.
I believe your advice is bad because it's being given to a wide audience that very likely doesn't know better.
There's a whole host of new potential investigative technology that may be right around the corner:
- memory extraction
- DNA to photograph / phenotype
- photograph to DNA
- environmental DNA recovery from exhalation, etc.
it's not even clear why you would want to anyways. Human recall is notoriously terrible.
That said, directly reading memories is unlikely to be necessary. In Daniel Suarez's Daemon/Freedom™, he proposes using fMRI and increasingly narrow questions to extract truthful information. The blood flow in our brains changes when we lie, and is much easier and faster to detect.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216184729/http://newscenter...
Except when we're innocent and anxious, or sociopathic and calm. or misguided and/or dellusional and believe our lies as truth.
In other words, the same pseudoscience as good old "lie detectors".
USG still uses that pseudoscientific nonsense in its security clearance process. They could save a whole lot of money by buying e-meters from the Church of Scientology, and achieve the same result.
Perfect way for the powerful to completely control the population as slaves.
If they can have total access to your every thought, they might as well stop the charade of treating you like a free person.
And then police will stop you for a busted taillight and extract the memory of 76 counts of jaywalking.
But when Jeffrey Epstein v2.0 is caught, the scanner will mysteriously malfunction and he will also die in his cell, just like the V1.0 did.
Just like the current spying and tracking apparatus - great at finding blackmail and dirt on a random citizen, but it will never finding any evidence to convict a CEO, and never find who stole your bicycle in the hood.