The core idea is that there are institutions in society (police being one of them) whose goals and incentives are contrary to your best interests. It doesn't matter that the people who work for them are "nice" or not, the act of performing their job can be very detrimental to you even if nobody involved actively wishes it. This observation is true.
By design, "anything you say can and will be used against you" which is a one way street.
*Note: have a lawyer in the family
There are some countries like the UK where not talking to the cops can potentially land you in trouble too. (In England and Wales, juries are permitted to draw adverse inferences from a defendant not raising information with the police that they later rely on at trial.)
If you are arrested, exercise your right to counsel. This is guaranteed in both the US, the UK and most of Europe (under the European Convention of Human Rights), as well as lots of countries elsewhere.
Yes, it might mean you have to wait an hour or so for the lawyer to get there. Yes, the police will try to convince you that only guilty people need lawyers (not true) or that it'll make things worse for you (also not true).
The counterpoint to this is: if the cops are following procedures correctly and have legitimately collected evidence, they have nothing to fear from you exercising your right to free and independent legal advice.
Back, in my developing country, I ate out every meal every day because it costs like 1 USD a dish.
Just like you wouldn't volunteer everything to a rival in the office, you don't volunteer everything to someone who has the authority to arrest or fine you. Especially when they know all the rules and you know a handful.
To put it another way: if a policeman isn’t the best (safest, most informed, whatever...) person to talk to among hundreds of strangers you could talk to, isn’t that a sign that the police force in question has failed completely?
I've been harassed by the police simply for my looks, I've seen them beat up handcuffed people. I have policemen in my extenden circle of friends, whom I like to keep at the fringes of "extended", because they are anything but well trained or professional.
The police here fought a case all the way to the local supreme court that they should be allowed to harass people based on the color of their skin - no weasling around, trying to not say the quiet part out loud either, straight up "black people are more prone to crime".
> isn’t that a sign that the police force in question has failed completely?
I don't know about completely, but if the police aren't there for everyone then it certainly is some sort of failure.
Yes, yes it is. And that's the current state of policing in the US. With the irony of police committing acts of brutality against people protesting police brutality, and the officers and their enablers being too ignorant or too hateful to recognize the stupidity of the action and how 2020 has set them back decades in getting people to trust them.
However, those people probably don't think that the police "committed acts of brutality against protestors", they likely see the videos of BLM peacefully protesting and police standing by, and Antifa committing arson and attacking police and police fighting back. (Portland, Chicago, Kenosha) And they think that fighting and arresting rioters is exactly what they pay police for.
> their enablers being too ignorant or too hateful to recognize the stupidity of the action and how 2020 has set them back decades in getting people to trust them.
You were talking about BLM here? Because "Breona" is just as fake as Jussie Smollet's story, and Jacob Blake would have been shot if he was white, etc. Watch the videos of woke white people in Portland shouting racist slurs at black cops to show how much they care about black people in general.
I didn't dwell on my identity (because those aren't the words I'd choose to use if I had to). It was a way of self-disclosure like saying if you work for the company being discussed. It's to say "while I'm probably one of the people you're talking about ...".
> an attack on you personally so that you don't feel a need to defend yourself from an imagined attack.
Oh, no. You're out to left field. I'm explaining, not defending, everyone who tends to be misunderstood. I'm trying to say that people can support a thing without being 'enablers', and that two people who both see the same problems (police violence) can see different solutions.
I'm sharing my personal views to help explain how, regardless of labels, that most of our group hatreds are based on intentional (by others if not us) misstatements about the others, not their own words or actual views.
"...isn’t that a sign that the police force in question has failed completely?"
Sad, but true, in a lot of cases. Hence the suggestion not to talk to them.
Strangers don't have the authority to potentially detain and arrest you. I don't think anybody should be rude to the police. But obviously most people interact with the police in adversarial situations. Last time I remember talking to them, I was stopped for crossing (on foot) an empty street on a red light in the middle of the night.
They're not. In any country, that is fundamentally not the purpose of police.
Maybe the line instead should be, if you believe you are being interrogated by the police, do not speak until you have an attorney present? Different entirely.
Watch the video about this and how the law professor says that your casual honest comment to a cop might be taken to be a lie based on nothing. Not just wrong, or potentially incriminating, but a lie, and because of that they can and will start to try to fit the evidence to you.
> This perpetuates the mantra that cops are an evil force out to get you.
That's not a requirement for this rule to be useful, but I'll act carefully to protect myself rather than to test that theory in either case.