Keep in mind the ONLY people interested in such laws are those who have committed crimes in the first place. As always: if you HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING WRONG, you have NO REASON TO WORRY about police abuse. Such questioning, in fact, is the ONLY way we can get many criminals to admit or at least infer crime has occurred, particularly with matters pertaining to child molestation and abuse.
I cannot condone this series. I have nothing to hide, and anyone who has nothing to hide would only be hurting themselves by following the videos. SOURCE: My wife is a law enforcement legal professional; and while the advice is biased, she works with victims' groups all the time.
Most police are intelligent, honest, and ethical. Most. Unfortunately, the ones that are otherwise do not have bad cop tattoos on their foreheads, and there's no way for John Q. Public to tell the difference.
I can only assume, sir, that you have lived your entire life in communities where the police
never lie on the witness stand; never decide that a person is guilty before talking to them, based on nothing more than first impressions; never try to trick, intimidate, or force a citizen to waive Constitutional rights; are always honest and never corrupt; never make mistakes in recording a person's statement; always get jobs as police officers because of merit and not because knowing someone makes up for lack of qualifications; never arrest anyone for contempt of cop; never give a suspect a few whacks with a baton
after handcuffing him to teach him a lesson; never give a compliant misdemeanor suspect a quick jab with a baton before handcuffing him in an attempt to provoke a defensive (and possibly felonious) reaction; never mysteriously lose evidence that puts them in a bad light; never plant physical evidence; never add items to the personal property inventory form of someone they've arrested in order to support additional charges; never pull someone over for driving while black; et cetera.
I am not a criminal. I do not associate with criminals. I do not aid and abet criminals. I have no direct knowledge of any criminal activity which would have any value in any evidentiary sense. I am not even the sort of person who would normally be the target of bigoted assumptions or profiling I am a white male, well past thirty, well-educated, able to express myself clearly and articularly, dress conservatively, et cetera. And yet more than one of those things has happened to me personally. Nor is my experience the result of living in an unusually bad community. I've lived in four different places in three different states in my life, and have experienced and/or heard from credible sources of problems like this happening in all of those places.
There's one thing which has been left out of this discussion. I'm not an attorney, but I've been told this by two different lawyers.
The fact that you refuse to speak to a police officer cannot be used against you.
It cannot be used to establish reasonable suspicion the level of proof an officer needs to detain and/or frisk you. It cannot be used to establish probable cause the level of proof an officer needs to arrest you. It cannot be used to establish a prima facie case the level of proof necessary for a grand jury to indict you. It cannot be used to establish proof to the exclusion of all reasonable doubt the level of proof necessary for a criminal conviction.
To repeat you have nothing to lose by saying to a police officer I'm going to remain silent and doing exactly that.
In short, sir, I find your all-capped assertions that an innocent person has nothing to worry about from the police to be shockingly naïve, and your implied advice to always fully and freely cooperate with the police to be dangerous. Period.
It appears that you no longer frequent this board, but in parting I leave you with a question. Please ask your wife, the law enforcement legal professional, what she would do if she found herself under suspicion for a crime she didn't commit. Would she gab freely to the cops? Or would she clam up and lawyer up?