It's not about being guilty or not being guilty. For worse, the police in the US have become (or are perceived to be) generally antagonistic towards the communities they police. It's not a universal truth, but it is a common truth.

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.

Exactly. US centric. If you trust that the policeman is a well trained professional there to serve you and with only your best interest in mind, why would you be scared to talk to them?

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?

That is not very US centric at all - my experience in this wealthy European country is that I am clocked as looking "too foreign" immediately, and treated accordingly.

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.

> isn’t that a sign that the police force in question has failed completely?

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.

Many conservatives (that's how I'm labelled on here, so...) do not support the police as is. I've specifically witnessed more than one instance of absolutely treasonous behavior by police - threatening to hurt people and make up charges. It's counterproductive to think that only 'the left' is against bad police - nobody wants to pay people to ruin the system.

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.

Perhaps meditate on #48 from the linked article about keeping your identity small. You may find that you're less likely to assume that a comment that makes no mention of left/right or BLM is an attack on you personally so that you don't feel a need to defend yourself from an imagined attack.

Right, because the issue of calling people 'enablers' of bad policing is generally so bipartisan that I'm coming from nowhere with my group labels... What's the # of the one about psychological projection?

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.

My experience, in being in a fair number of non-US non-European countries, is that cops can vary considerably, and many of them are worse than US cops in many ways.

"...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.

The most US centric part is you could actually try refusing talking to them. The vast majority of countries out there let police ID anybody at will. And challenging the police in court tends to be tough in most places.

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.

"don't talk to cops" doesn't mean you should be afraid to ask a police officer for directions or something like that. if I'm on foot and see that a street is blocked off, I will sometimes ask an officer nearby what is going on. this is fine. what you shouldn't do is volunteer unnecessary information. maybe this is just american myopia, but it's hard to imagine that anything could be gained by giving police more personal information than you are legally obligated to share.

> If you trust that the policeman is a well trained professional there to serve you

They're not. In any country, that is fundamentally not the purpose of police.

I don't think so, there is no context of that in the article. This perpetuates the mantra that cops are an evil force out to get you. In my country, police are quite respected, and the ability to go over to a police officer and ask for help means that a more trusting relationship is built. How can the US ever hope to achieve police reform with this kind of antagonistic attitude!

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.

Nuance is sort of counterproductive here because most people don't recognize how many things could trigger an interrogation. Any little personality quirk, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the officer is suddenly taking note of every word you say.

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.

It refers to cases where you aren't guilty of anything and don't do anything wrong. USA has felony laws that make word itself a crime.

Expanding on "could be guilty" meaning not just "I might be guilty" but also "I might be perceived as being guilty"

Was that the section title or something? “Things to remember when committing crimes?”