Don't talk to the police

[Believe]

Aside from Darus, I like how most these stories include the person doing something illegal in the first place, and usually end up not getting into any trouble or are whining about how the cops were rude or they were inconvenienced.

[Chips]

Why it's good to be a police officer in Italy.

[Bristlebane]

Story on that Lamborghini:

BBC NEWS | Europe | Italian police to have supercar

It was a gift, and there's only one of them. Still cool, though.

However, Italian supercars are high maintenance, and known to be quirky. In reality it wouldn't make a good police car for vital work.

[Ubiquitrips]

Personally I have never had any altercation with the police that I thought was unfair. I have probably been pulled over less than 10 times all together and I have only gotten 1 ticket from this, which I definitely deserved(95 in a 70 on my way back from a road trip).

Anyway, to play devil's advocate, one argument that is being thrown around revolves around how other countries have it worse. What does any other country's law enforcement have to do with ours? To not expect more from our officers just because another country has it worse seems like a poor argument.

All things considered, I would say the vast majority of officers are fine. The problem is the amount of power and someone that is a prick or without morals has and these are the cases that stand out most of the time.

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by Sunder

The lack of personal responsibility through out this thread is really staggering.


And never talk to the cops.

Today's governments have people jump through so many loops it's quite easy to miss one every now and then.

[Rhaze]

You guys should just make a consolidated thread about how much the police suck, and compare bong sizes, would be totally rad.

Also, compare who's parents basement is cooler.

[Scientologist]

My parent's basement is a workshop and I don't own a bong. I guess I lose.

[Rhaze]

I'm gonna buy stop snitching XXXL tee's for all my homies on the FoH boards who hate those poe-lease


Join a local militia, I heard they are always looking for astute recruits.

[Cathan]

Originally Posted by kcxiv

I just be nice and only answer with yes, or no. Thats it.

You still answer at ALL even after the 2 videos in the first post? If you watched that shit at all you are the dumbest motherfucker on the planet. You don't say shit, not yes, not no, nothing but lawyer 1 time and then you stful.

[GrobbeeTrull2.0]

Originally Posted by Rhaze

I'm gonna buy stop snitching XXXL tee's for all my homies on the FoH boards who hate those poe-lease


Join a local militia, I heard they are always looking for astute recruits.

It's ok, Rhaze. One day you'll be a real cop and you can show us what's what and totally vindicate us in our beliefs.

[Torrid]

At the beginning and end of that cop's video, he says "we don't do this stuff to innocent people." And the rest of the video is him explaining how they put innocent people in prison.

This is insane. Like all you cops and lawyers have this magic ability to know when somebody is guilty or not? It's ok that cops can follow somebody around long enough and always find a reason to put somebody away because "we don't do it to innocent people"? Yeah, sure. Just don't LOOK guilty and as long as you did not in fact commit a crime, you're fine? What great policy. I think I heard twice in those videos to sit up straight. Wish I could, my spine is curved with metal attached, locking it in place. Wish I could not look nervous with my anxiety disorder too. Good thing I'm not black, then I'd be really fucked.

[Millie]

Originally Posted by Havelock

Easy to say, hard to do (if the investigators know what they're doing and aren't just getting their tough guy jollies on). Some of the cases I handle involve cop defendants. A lot of a lot of them confess before they ever talk to a lawyer, and most of the rest manage to tie themselves up in some ridiculous lie so that when they finally do get a lawyer, his immediate advice is for them to deal. And these are police, who know exactly how things work and have seen all the dos and don'ts in action for years and years.

I doubt this applies in situations like the lobster case, but when somebody does something obviously wrong, 90% of people will have an almost uncontrollable urge to confess provided you approach them the right way. The other 10%, the sociopaths, are almost as easy, again provided you approach them the right way.

If you're in a co-defendant situation, particularly in the federal context, it may also make a lot of sense to flip early. There is basically 0% chance that the dominoes won't start falling; someone will crack, and that gives the investigators the hammer to get everybody else to crack. And there is hueg incentive to flip early. The disparity between the sentence of someone who gets on board early and someone who goes to trial is pretty much unconscionable. The more help you can provide, the better your deal will be.

Don't talk is good advice, but the best advice is to stop breaking the law. Sure, there's the occasional lobster case, but I suspect that those guys did something to get on the federal radar and the lobster route was just the easiest way to get them once they were identified as bad guys (as it sometimes happens) - those guys were represented by Miguel Estrada, one of the sharpest legal minds in the country, and the fact that he couldn't take care of them suggests their conviction was not some arbitrary fluke.

Pay your taxes, drive sober, don't traffic in drugs, find out what the gun laws in your locality are and obey them, etc. Once you get to the point where you have to decide whether or not you want to talk to the police, you are quite possibly already completely screwed. That particularly applies when the feds come for you. There are a zillion potential federal cases out there, so that by the time investigators decide to invest their time and effort in yours, there's a good chance they've already got enough to know that it will be one of the good cases worth chasing down. When you get that knock on the door, you don't know whether one of your best friends is a confidential informant, whether they've been surveilling you for a week, whether they've gone up on a wire, whether they have DNA, or what. Be smart and focus more on avoiding that knock on the door than on thinking about what you'll do if it happens.

This all seems to be pretty solid advice. My only addition would be to only plea bargain in the co-defendant situation if you're actually guilty. If you're not guilty, don't feel compelled to strike a bargain in response to the (considerable) pressure that the criminal justice system and the prosecution will bring to bear upon you. If you are obviously guilty, don't waste the court's time bringing everything to trial; take the plea bargain and get the reduced sentence. "Roll" on your friends if you must, but make sure you're the first person to do it (game theory ftw).

And yeah, people make the "arrested for having an undersized lobster" type of nightmare scenario seem a lot more common than it really is. Chances are, if the feds are in your house in the first place, they're not there looking for illegal fish and game. You probably gave them other, probably good reasons to bust down your door. Mistaken identity raids do happen, but not often (nobody likes getting sued, and oftentimes, the feds will have planned the break-in weeks to months before bashing down the door).

If possible, try not to get convicted of a felony in California, Georgia, Texas, or Colorado. These states almost always convict in criminal trials, use extremely harsh sentences, and in the cases of CA and TX, are execution happy. Colorado isn't as bad as the others, but I'm including it on the list because it's home to the highest-security prison in the country (ADX Florence).

[Ilum]

To start I really liked both of the lectures, the first one was one the better lectures I have heard all year.

The only part that kind of bothered me in the whole lecture was the part about European police and they're way of handling suspects.
I myself am in (dutch) law school and know for a fact that in the Netherlands alone the amount of police violence is kept to a minimum.

Any violence that does goes down is immediately national news when caught on camera and if not than when the case goes to trial it will litter the newspapers for weeks.

If this somehow fails to get picked up in the initial court hearing and a conviction follows then there's always the possibility to appeal which look at the case in even more detail.
If in this procedure ANY flaw is found in the way the suspect was treated, any evidence becomes inadmissible and your case goes bye bye.

Well when shit hits the fan and this doesn't work there is always our supreme court that solely looks at the way our law has been applied in the case and if it was applied as was intended by the legislative order.

All this takes place in front of professional judges and (of course) prosecutors, so no jury at all.

In my eyes this limits the fact that emotions and a charming lawyer/prosecutor screws with the truth finding that is supposed to happen in the courtroom.

Well of course there is the slim chance that your still found guilty, when you are really innocent.

Then they're is the European court system that takes over (note: this works for EVERY European country) and they really, and I mean really fucking frown upon any abuses of human rights. I will result in massive fines for the states involved and you're case will get thrown out in an instant.

So to conclude the sheer notion that European police departments abuse suspects when interviewing them is just not true.

Sure there are mishaps in the system, but that is why there are other people looking over the shoulder of local law enforcement.



To illustrate the latter with an anecdote:

I was arrested half a year ago when I was trying to steal a traffic sign.
I was hammered and I didn't notice that is was next to a trailer park.

Some thrashy dude walks up to me and beats the living daylights out of my, after he is finished implementing his rudimentary sense of justice he calls the cops to ensure his own arse from landing in to jail.

This all while doing a rail of coke in between (I shit you not).

I have never been more scared in my life the gun toting retard threatened to kill me if I even moved an inch so I didn't.
When the cops showed I was so fucking happy, and I confessed everything.
They treated me kindly and even the breakfast lady laughed at me for my shitfaced actions.

All in all what helped to most is I guess just being cooperative, they had no intention of fucking me over and vice versa.
This is how the system should work, proportional action/reaction of law enforcement without the fear of the cops being your enemy.
I ended up with a 300 dollar ticket which I payed gladly.

[AngryGerbil]

I read the posts from Euros. I do. This board and others.

I read them and think about them. Not just this thread but many others.

Then (and I admit full ignorance here), I wonder if they have anything equivalent to north city St. Louis, (Natural Bridge and Kingshighway for you Nelly fans). A place I work in every day as a paramedic.

I read and read, and read some more. And I really don't think Euros fully grasp what an American inner city is like. I mean, it's not even what you could call civilization. It's like little microcosms of anarchy hemmed in by almost totalitarian policing of the 'accepted' borders.

Every day I become less and less convinced that an idealistic approach stands any chance what-so-ever at solving this problem. If I was emperor of Earth, I would take one of your Netherland officers and put him in Normandy, St. Louis and film it. It would likely land itself on Comedy Central.

I'm not entirely sure what my point is here other than, American cities have a distinctly different social fabric than anywhere else on earth, and that makes it worth listening to our friends in Europe, but Europe isn't exactly the paragon of answers for us on this topic. They may lead the way in many respects, but policing is not one of them I don't think.

I dunno, I tend to ramble when I've been drinking (both of which I am doing right now). But I just cannot reconcile how a nordic cop would deal with a crack house east of the depressed lanes in St. Louis. You almost have to be bilingual, and that's just the start.

*EDIT*

Just to be clear, I also wouldn't assume that I could walk into Amsterdam or any european city and understand the inner workings of its felony-equivalent organizations or the way its inner city functions.

[kcxiv]

Originally Posted by Cathan

You still answer at ALL even after the 2 videos in the first post? If you watched that shit at all you are the dumbest motherfucker on the planet. You don't say shit, not yes, not no, nothing but lawyer 1 time and then you stful.

I didn't watch it. I am not like i used to be when i was younger and had a reason to be scared of them. I don't do anything illegal anymore. I am 100 percent by the books. So they don't bother me anymore.