talk to the police
Jul. 5th, 2025 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacEvery once in a while YouTube shows me a link to a video urging its watchers never to talk to the police. I've never watched one of these videos - lectures on haranguing topics are not a high priority in my life - but I have looked the question up on Quora and Reddit. There it appears that the urgers don't mean this literally. For instance, when I was in a crumpling three-car auto accident, calling the police and talking to them could hardly be avoided, and it was clear that I wasn't at fault.
But otherwise the answer seems to depend on who's giving it. Police writing say that innocent people should always talk with the police, who just want to gather as much evidence as possible. Others, especially lawyers, say no! no! Whenever there's a crime involved, ask to get a lawyer first. Some say only if you're being detained to be questioned.
And the reason for all this is that the more you say, the more opportunity the police have to twist your words into evidence of your guilt. I know this happens. I've seen a number of accounts of cases where the police, having made a preliminary survey, take a first guess as to the culprit, and then devote the entirety of their attention to finding, sometimes even concocting, evidence of that person's guilt, ignoring anything that points to their innocence or to guilt lying in another direction.
OK, I thought, but if you're an innocent person terrified that the police might fasten on you as the presumed guilty suspect, wouldn't defensive insisting on a lawyer only make the police more likely to suspect you?
I just found some evidence, admittedly in a fictional movie, for that point of view. The movie was The Town, which I came across on Netflix. I hadn't heard of it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was a crime drama which got good reviews. So I watched it, and it was indeed a good movie. It's about a bank robber, played by Ben Affleck, who falls in love with his hostage. Well, it's more complicated than that. First the robbers, who are masked during the crime, let the hostage go. Then they decide to tail her, and that's how Affleck meets her without her having any idea that he's one of the bank robbers. It's set in Boston, which I think is required for movies starring Ben Affleck, and is full of Boston accents coming out of unlikely people like Jeremy Renner.
Anyway, quite early on, the ex-hostage (Rebecca Hall) is being interviewed by the lead FBI agent (Jon Hamm). Worried that she might be considered complicit because she opened the safe at the robbers' orders, she asks, "Should I have a lawyer here?" and he replies, "This isn't a very civil libertarian thing of me to say, but anyone who lawyers up is guilty."
So I guess you should take that under advisement too.
But otherwise the answer seems to depend on who's giving it. Police writing say that innocent people should always talk with the police, who just want to gather as much evidence as possible. Others, especially lawyers, say no! no! Whenever there's a crime involved, ask to get a lawyer first. Some say only if you're being detained to be questioned.
And the reason for all this is that the more you say, the more opportunity the police have to twist your words into evidence of your guilt. I know this happens. I've seen a number of accounts of cases where the police, having made a preliminary survey, take a first guess as to the culprit, and then devote the entirety of their attention to finding, sometimes even concocting, evidence of that person's guilt, ignoring anything that points to their innocence or to guilt lying in another direction.
OK, I thought, but if you're an innocent person terrified that the police might fasten on you as the presumed guilty suspect, wouldn't defensive insisting on a lawyer only make the police more likely to suspect you?
I just found some evidence, admittedly in a fictional movie, for that point of view. The movie was The Town, which I came across on Netflix. I hadn't heard of it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it was a crime drama which got good reviews. So I watched it, and it was indeed a good movie. It's about a bank robber, played by Ben Affleck, who falls in love with his hostage. Well, it's more complicated than that. First the robbers, who are masked during the crime, let the hostage go. Then they decide to tail her, and that's how Affleck meets her without her having any idea that he's one of the bank robbers. It's set in Boston, which I think is required for movies starring Ben Affleck, and is full of Boston accents coming out of unlikely people like Jeremy Renner.
Anyway, quite early on, the ex-hostage (Rebecca Hall) is being interviewed by the lead FBI agent (Jon Hamm). Worried that she might be considered complicit because she opened the safe at the robbers' orders, she asks, "Should I have a lawyer here?" and he replies, "This isn't a very civil libertarian thing of me to say, but anyone who lawyers up is guilty."
So I guess you should take that under advisement too.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-06 04:32 pm (UTC)