I was going to post this as a comment, but it was in an anarchism community, and I figured some sections of it might be unacceptable there. Hence, new post.
Here’s a guideline of how to interact with cops. There are more or less three modes, depending on your read of the situation. Cops are not always the enemy or the maniacal whole-job-is-making-evil thugs that Lemmy sometimes makes them out to be. It really is bad for people to get mugged or their cars broken into, and they’re the solution our society has come up with to minimize the amount of it that happens. It’s not always a bad thing.
If you find yourself talking to the cops, there are more or less three ways:
- They’re there to solve a real problem. Someone’s car got broken into, someone got beat up. Just talk with them. Tell them what you know, help them figure out the situation. In almost all of the US, their effect on the problem will be positive, and it’ll be a lot more positive if they have a good grasp of what happened. If, in your opinion, the person they’re trying to catch really did do something that warrants a law enforcement response, then give them a hand. Use your judgement as to whether that’s warranted of course, and your impression of the justice level in your local area, since it varies quite a lot in the US.
- They’re there for you. Shut the fuck up. Don’t say a goddamned word. It doesn’t even matter if you didn’t do it. Don’t explain. Shut the fuck up. Be polite, obey lawful orders, definitely don’t fight them or you’ll get a felony and might also get injured or worse, but tell them that if you’re suspected of a crime, then you’d like to talk to a lawyer, and you have nothing else to say. And then, shut the fuck up and cooperate. Maybe you want to go as far as “Were you shoplifting?” “What? No. That wasn’t me, man.” But any further explanation than that, just leave it alone. Definitely don’t make something up on the spot, to make yourself sound innocent, if you did do it. For the love of God, don’t do that.
- They’re there for someone who didn’t do anything wrong. The reason for this post is, anything and everything with ICE and immigration falls into this category. Some things with local cops will, also. Just be unhelpful and simple. No, I didn’t see anything. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Be vague. Don’t get creative, keep it simple, don’t refuse to give your ID or otherwise antagonize them or commit minor crimes of obstruction, but just do your best imitation of someone who just fell from the sky. “So you’ve NEVER MET your neighbor. Your neighbor across the hall.” “Nope.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I don’t know.” “I mean, she gave us your name, she said she’d talked to you.” “I don’t know, I don’t remember that.” Don’t embellish. Don’t explain why. Just calmly let the silence linger and the pressure build up, without adding extra words.
Like I said, everything with ICE or other immigration authorities falls into the third category. No exceptions. Everything. The same applies with any type of federal law enforcement, I suspect, for the next few years.
It depends on what they were trying to prosecute. If someone got murdered, and your security footage was relevant and they needed your participation in the trial to help put the guy away, and your only takeaway from it was “How the fuck DARE they interfere with my busy life for this bullshit,” then I think you need to re-think about it.
If it was drug charges or some similar crap, then yes, you probably should have made them subpoena the footage or something. But weren’t you just upset that the cops weren’t enthusiastic enough about trying to prosecute people who did something wrong?
Do you happen to know what the charge was they were trying to get the person on? Presumably you do, if you testified.
I did not testify because the accused took a plea deal, which the state kindly did not inform me of (although they wasted in total about $4 in postage threatening to arrest me for no reason) until the day of the trial after it had been rescheduled for the fourth time. The charges were indeed dumb shit. Nobody got murdered.
It has nothing to do with my busy life, it has to do with not enabling bad behavior from the police and state. The police demand respect but give none in return. You do you, but that doesn’t fly on my doorstep.
I will not be bullied. By anyone.
If the charges were dumb shit, why did you decide to help the cops with your security camera footage?
It sounds, looking over these comments, like a lot of Lemmy lives in some kind of locality where there is never an actual crime to be addressed, and the only reason someone might ever call 911 and the cops come out is… well, I don’t know, I guess the cops just ride around just fucking with innocent people full time for no actual reason. I’m sure there are places like that, but I definitely do not live in one.
Because this was many, many years ago and back then I was naive and thought contributing might have actually made the world a safer and better place. I know better now thanks to experience.
The issue is that it’s a case of the boy who cried wolf. Yes, there likely are “actual” crimes out there that need to be solved. But they are in the tiny minority of what the police pursue and prosecute overall compared to petty drug bullshit, harassing people for existing while black, writing speeding tickets, busting homeless people, and jailing people who need to steal to eat on behalf of megacorporations – crimes for which the police will show up for near instantly when called, whereas if someone victimizes you, Mr. private citizen, they generally can’t be bothered.
That’s how the cops operate here. I know how the cops work here because I live here. I don’t know what to tell you about where you might happen to live, but I’ll bet you if you look at it hard it isn’t that much different.
This absolutely isn’t my experience.
The FBI actually keeps statistics about this compiled from a lot of state and local agencies:
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/arrest
I’m having a little trouble making sense of it. I was able to find a better-formatted report somewhere else for a few years back, but this is what I could find easily that’s current. If we take what’s in “Offense Category,” though, it shows 26 million arrests, of which 8 million are “other,” 4 million are drugs, and the rest look like pretty legit crime to me, until you get down to the 100,000 category, stuff like “drunkenness.” If you consider how much more drug “crime” there is than murder, or robbery, or what have you, it sounds to me like they are working, generally, on some real problems. Definitely the 14 million non-drug non-“other” arrests are not a tiny minority, even if we’re assuming that everything in the “other” category is bullshit.
I’m not going to tell you that your experience where you live isn’t your experience. But I do not think it is representative of the US as a whole, or even close to it. You’re saying some stuff that is simply objectively not true, about what percentage of arrests they make for different things and so on. I have a decent amount of personal experience with it, also, in my area.
Your same source also includes charts of reports versus clearance rates (i.e. arrests and prosecution) of all types of crime categories.
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
Compare how high the grey line (prosecutions) is compared to the reports (blue line) for:
Versus, say,
The clearance rate for shoplifting is higher than rape.
More shoplifters. Get prosecuted. Than rapists. What does that tell you about priorities? Think about it.
Yeah… I mean, we can talk about it. The clearance rate for drugs is near 100%, because of course it is, because it’s going to be very rare for drug “report” to go into the system for any reason other than that a cop found drugs on the person, and then promptly arrested them. The clearance rate for car theft is basically 0% (okay, you got me, that is perfectly fair I admit, you’re probably not getting your car back until the person’s done with it). There are crimes where it’s naturally a lot more difficult to find the person, but you do know that it happened, and those are going to be the ones with lower clearance rates.
Like I say, we can talk about it and whether that’s the specific explanation for any particular crime’s clearance rate, but you’re changing the subject away from the idea that you said “real” crime was this tiny minority of all the arrests, but it’s not. If you want to switch to talking now about how they should be arresting “real” crime as an even bigger majority percentage than it is, then sure, you might have a point, but that’s different from what you said before.
I am also entertained that there’s a category for “Treason,” with 0 reports and 0 clearances in it.