I can't recommend enough watching this video. The law professor explains why you should never speak to the police. It's 46 minutes long, but every minute is pure gold.
Still, these occurrences are isolated cases, receive large media attention and are definitely not considered "the norm".
But my impression is that it's rather less common than in the USA and the courts, prosecution and conservative public don't side with the police as much.
The only countries where I've never seen any open abuse by police so far have been Britain and Germany, and I haven't spent a lot of time in Germany.
EDIT: Actually, there has recently been a famous case in Britain where a police officer shoved a citizen to the floor and the citizen died of internal injuries [0]. I didn't actually witness the abuse, but it proves that even the UK isn't immune.
That sounds like wishful thinking. Where exactly did you check?
> the "never talk to police" strategy ... only starts to probabilistically pay off after you've gotten to the point of requiring complex court proceedings (which you might never have gotten to if you were more cooperative in the first place).
> Once you require the services of a trial lawyer, the benefits of talking are off the table and the price of silence looks like pocket change. That's why you hear the advice "never talk to the police." Not because it's a good idea in general (try it next time you get a traffic ticket and tell me how it goes), but because it's a very bad idea in certain very specific cases, which happen to be precisely the cases seen by those giving the advice. Your prior probabilities are different, and your behavior should reflect that.