Tough Day To Be In Law Enforcement

Gameface said:

The police know that you don't have to answer questions. Getting aggressive with a person who chooses to remain silent could cost them their job. The important part for me is to be very polite, calm and cooperative. Not answering questions doesn't have to be confrontational. You can say "My lawyer friend told me I shouldn't answer questions, I'm just following their advice."

When I'm speaking to police I speak to them the way I would have spoken to a superior officer in the Navy. I'm polite, calm, professional and I always call them "Sir" or "Officer" basically every sentence I say. I have a tendency to act in a formal way even when I shouldn't but in situations like this I think it helps me. I'm very formal. I say things in plain simple language that leaves little room for interpretation. I don't try to make jokes. I don't try to be a smartass. I don't challenge them on anything they are saying.

If the officer starts getting agitated then I comply with whatever they want, short of answering questions. But I continue to refuse to answer questions in a very neutral non-argumentative way. "Sir, I just don't answer questions. With all due respect, I'm not trying to make your job any harder than it already is, I just have a personal commitment to remaining silent."

I provided a couple examples of times I've been pulled over and refused to answer the "where are you going?" question. I had very positive interactions both times.

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I agree with you. Most of the time that strategy is fine. I have seen videos on youtube of a person employing your method. Dude didn't get detained, didn't get physically assaulted or anything but the conversation between the dude and the cop was much longer than necessary and the cops was visibly upset and agitate, though he kept his cool enough to not press things too far.
Thats just not my style. If im driving home from fishing and a cop pulls me over and asks how my day is I will probably say its been great, i just got done fishing. Maybe he asks how I did and I tell him that i had a great day and caught a nice 21 inch brown. He might congratulate me and ask if im headed home now and I respond, yes after I stop for a bite to eat first. Im excited to see my daughters dance recital tonight. He might say, I hope she does great. Enjoy your day.

I would leave that interaction feeling pretty good. Im a people person and sometimes enjoy talking to people with a friendly detailed discourse. Maybe that scenario goes incredibly wrong and I end up in prison for murder or something somehow but im comfortable taking my chances.

fishonjazz said:

No thats a fair point. I guess I just gotta play the percentages. I think that a cop asking me where im headed and me answering with "im not going to answer you as its not your business" or something similar could lead to things getting testy and heated. Or at the least drawing things out by the cop trying to get me to explain why I wont talk to him. I would imagine the cop would ask follow up questions like "why are you being so defensive" and say things like "if you have nothing to hide then you should have no problem answering me" or "your resistance to my questions makes you seem suspicious" etc.
I want to just avoid that convo and be on my way asap.

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Sometimes innocent facts lead down a rabbit hole.

Not necessarily to get arrested, but to prolong a stop.

If a cop asks where you are coming from, and you say Dave & Busters, now he's going to ask if you've been drinking. Or may ask you to do field sobriety, etc.

And then you are at the somewhat subjective judgment of the officer if you are impaired (could be drugs not just alcohol).

So I agree with you generally, but never admit you are coming from a party, bar, restaurant, sporting event, etc., that serves alcohol, even if you weren't drinking. Although I understand tou drink like a Fish.

TheGoldStandard said:

Sometimes innocent facts lead down a rabbit hole.

Not necessarily to get arrested, but to prolong a stop.

If a cop asks where you are coming from, and you say Dave & Busters, now he's going to ask if you've been drinking. Or may ask you to do field sobriety, etc.

And then you are at the somewhat subjective judgment of the officer if you are impaired (could be drugs not just alcohol).

So I agree with you generally, but never admit you are coming from a party, bar, restaurant, sporting event, etc., that serves alcohol, even if you weren't drinking. Although I understand tou drink like a Fish.

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Makes sense. Good advice. And come to think of it, people often drink when fishing


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fishonjazz said:

I agree with that scenario more so than a cop pulling me over for speeding. In this scenario there is a dead body. I dont want there to be any chance that im involved in a murder case. In the speeding scenario im trying to think of the worst case scenario of me telling a cop im on my way home from fishing or something and about the worst think I can think of is that maybe I get let off with a warning or get a ticket.

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You say you're coming back from fishing. "Oh, where were you?" "Up at Fish Lake, I took some time off work." "Oh, where do you work?" "I work for Employment, Inc."

And suddenly you're under investigation because your boss was murdered at Fish Lake and everyone knew you two didn't get along. Or you did but you wanted a promotion. Or the rumor is that you were sleeping with his wife.

Are the chances of that scenario good? No, but that type of thing can happen, because you never know what the cop is looking for. They're looking for ANYTHING.

gandalfe said:

You say you're coming back from fishing. "Oh, where were you?" "Up at Fish Lake, I took some time off work." "Oh, where do you work?" "I work for Employment, Inc."

And suddenly you're under investigation because your boss was murdered at Fish Lake and everyone knew you two didn't get along. Or you did but you wanted a promotion. Or the rumor is that you were sleeping with his wife.

Are the chances of that scenario good? No, but that type of thing can happen, because you never know what the cop is looking for. They're looking for ANYTHING.

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Fish has his own lake?

fishonjazz said:

I dont think that statement is flat out wrong. I think that there are rare times that it is wrong but I think that most people not breaking any laws dont have to worry about it most of the time. So its usually correct imo. I dont know if there are statistics available but I would be surprised if the statistics showed that the majority of the time a person is not breaking any laws that they end up in trouble with the police.

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There are about 10 million arrests every year. Let's guess that this means 1 arrest for every 10 stops police make, so 100 million times police interact with people. Let's assume 15% are repeat stops of the same people. So we have 85 million unique interactions every year. This is 25% of the population with some contact with police every year. I don't think that's far-fetched really, although the statistics show you are far more likely to have this happen to you if you are a minority, so arguably a much smaller percentage of white people will be stopped. But even cutting that rate in half is still a 10% chance of having a run-in with police and least once in a year.

Granted this doesn't take anything into account regarding why they stopped anyone in general so it's obviously not definitive but it isn't crazy talk to think there is a decent chance of having some interaction with police.

For me personally the last time I was stopped by police was maybe 10 years ago for, of all things, having the light that illuminates the license plate being out. Pretty sure they were just probing. Maybe it was a slow night. Who knows?

fishonjazz said:

Makes sense. Good advice. And come to think of it, people often drink when fishing


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Or is it fish while drinking?

Last time I was pulled over was a few years ago at about 2 am. I was the only person on the road. As soon as he looked in the car, he practically apologized for pulling me over for making my left turn just a bit too wide. A white middle aged woman apparently wasn't what he was expecting.

I got the feeling he was bored and pulling over everyone that came by just to see if he could drum up some excitement.

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Last time I was pulled over, it was maybe 15 years ago. A good friend of mine and I were driving around on Christmas trying to see how many brick houses were still left in his neighbourhood. Apparently, that was suspicious. We were actually asked why we're out on Christmas. I pointed out that one of us is a Jew. I guess I could've said that the Catholic in the car has a grandmother whose surname is Hurwitz, but I suppose that was immaterial.

It seemed ridiculous at the time, but it seems even more ridiculous now. I was on a public road, obeying all traffic laws. They asked for my license and registration. Not sure what reasonable suspicion they might have had that my car wasn't registered or that I possessed no legal license to operate the vehicle.

I get that one of the roles of the police is crime prevention(it shouldn't be, really), but traffic stops and loitering laws and similar legislation are a stretch, at best.

JimLes said:

Last time I was pulled over, it was maybe 15 years ago. A good friend of mine and I were driving around on Christmas trying to see how many brick houses were still left in his neighbourhood. Apparently, that was suspicious. We were actually asked why we're out on Christmas. I pointed out that one of us is a Jew. I guess I could've said that the Catholic in the car has a grandmother whose surname is Hurwitz, but I suppose that was immaterial.

It seemed ridiculous at the time, but it seems even more ridiculous now. I was on a public road, obeying all traffic laws. They asked for my license and registration. Not sure what reasonable suspicion they might have had that my car wasn't registered or that I possessed no legal license to operate the vehicle.

I get that one of the roles of the police is crime prevention(it shouldn't be, really), but traffic stops and loitering laws and similar legislation are a stretch, at best.

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My bet is someone reported it.

LogGrad98 said:

My bet is someone reported it.

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A car driving around on a public street? How many reports a day must they get then?

JimLes said:

A car driving around on a public street? How many reports a day must they get then?

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A suspicious car casing the neighborhood on Christmas trying to find some place to rob. Context matters.

LogGrad98 said:

A suspicious car casing the neighborhood on Christmas trying to find some place to rob. Context matters.

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That's like saying the most likely explanation for a headache is a brain tumor.

JimLes said:

That's like saying the most likely explanation for a headache is a brain tumor.

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No, not at all. If someone calls in a suspicious vehicle the police will 100% respond and initiate an interaction with the people in the car. There are busy bodies all over the place who look at the world like it's full of threats and dangers and it's their job to stop it.

These are some of the worst types of encounters because the police are trying to prove a negative, that you are not up to something. You say you're just looking at houses, yep, that's what someone up to no good would be doing. In these encounters if you decide to be silent the police will almost certainly take that as some sort of indication that you're trying to hide something. There really isn't anything you can say other than I'm trying to find aunt Mildred's house at 2724 Maplebrook Lane and then have Mildred pop out of 2724 and wave you over. Short of that the police are going to feel like they need to know 100% that you're clear because if they let you go easily and you commit a major crime they feel like that will be worse for them than if they detain you for an hour and arrest you on some sort of BS that gets dropped.

bigb said:

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it either, other than reading one article when she was convicted. He had an outstanding bench warrant. If I remember correctly, he was at first compliant and then jumped back in the car. So to say it was over expired registration doesn’t tell the whole story. But it leads back into Gameface’s posts.
I see the point you’re making, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. I do think police have an obligation to enforce the law, even if they are stupid laws like a broken tail light or expired plates. If they’re not going to enforce those laws, why have them? Erase them from the books. I’d argue the roads become less safe. If I have no reason to fix my non functioning brake lights, why would I? It doesn’t affect me unless someone rear ends me. Then it’s their fault for not stopping.



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So why not adjust the law so cops weren’t responding to nonfunctional brake lights? I think it takes 10 seconds to think about how making cops respond to brake lights and expired registrations leads to unnecessary escalation and death. Why not have a social worker or a mechanic come and help the person out instead of pulling them over, exploiting the situation for gain, and potentially escalating the situation unnecessarily?

@Gameface you’ve had a bunch of good posts in this thread. One thing I’d like to point out, is why do we have to have special instructions for how to interact with police? The whole point that we have to have these instructions, tells us how messed up our law enforcement and judicial system is.

1. Police are incentivized to nitpick.
2. Police officers have too much power.
3. The judicial system incentivizes racial profiling. When looking for cars with problems, are you going to do it in Holladay or West Valley City? When looking to search someone, are you going to do it to well spoken white dude in a suit in Alpine or some Spanish speaking brown dudes in normal clothes?
4. When taken advantage of, who’s more likely to fight back (legally), an affluent person from north salt lake or a poor person from Taylorsville?

The structure we have in place gives the police far too much power to be judge, jury, and executioner and the system we have in place crushes the poorest among us. It happens all the time:

bigb said:

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it either, other than reading one article when she was convicted. He had an outstanding bench warrant. If I remember correctly, he was at first compliant and then jumped back in the car. So to say it was over expired registration doesn’t tell the whole story. But it leads back into Gameface’s posts.
I see the point you’re making, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. I do think police have an obligation to enforce the law, even if they are stupid laws like a broken tail light or expired plates. If they’re not going to enforce those laws, why have them? Erase them from the books. I’d argue the roads become less safe. If I have no reason to fix my non functioning brake lights, why would I? It doesn’t affect me unless someone rear ends me. Then it’s their fault for not stopping.



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There are many many laws that go unenforced. This was something I thought about a lot years ago. I came up with the term "selective law enforcement" based on the abundance of laws that are at the discretion of the police to enforce. To me this is a massive problem.

To the point of your post I agree 100%. We should only have laws that MUST be enforced. Police should be required to enforce ALL laws at ALL times.

Of course, that would mean trimming the law books massively and leaving only those things that we deem essential.

I would support that legal system 100%. I would support a system where if a police officer sees a violation then it is their duty to respond and charge the perpetrator to the best of their ability and/or within reason.

Unfortunately we live under a system of selective lawn enforcement that allows for bias, ego, discrimination, etc., to influence who gets charged with a crime and when. It is an inherently unfair system.

The Thriller said:

@Gameface you’ve had a bunch of good posts in this thread. One thing I’d like to point out, is why do we have to have special instructions for how to interact with police? The whole point that we have to have these instructions, tells us how messed up our law enforcement and judicial system is.

1. Police are incentivized to nitpick.
2. Police officers have too much power.
3. The judicial system incentivizes racial profiling. When looking for cars with problems, are you going to do it in Holladay or West Valley City? When looking to search someone, are you going to do it to well spoken white dude in a suit in Alpine or some Spanish speaking brown dudes in normal clothes?
4. When taken advantage of, who’s more likely to fight back (legally), an affluent person from north salt lake or a poor person from Taylorsville?

The structure we have in place gives the police far too much power to be judge, jury, and executioner and the system we have in place crushes the poorest among us. It happens all the time:

Utah police can take cash and property from suspects, even if charges are never filed. Last year, officers seized items worth $2.5 million.

Police in Utah last year took more than $2.1 million in cash under a state law that allows officers to seize someone’s property — even if they have never been charged or convicted of a crime.

www.sltrib.com

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Well I have long advocated for a set of protocols that apply to police interactions. I think it's a boring thing to talk about and it gets technical so I think most of the times I've talked about it it has been ignored.

I think that there needs to be a national standard for traffic stops. What that means is that when a traffic stop is initiated there are standard actions that need to be taken by both the police and the citizen being stopped. The stop becomes a sort of a "dance" or a pre-choreographed series of actions that both parties are fully aware of. These series of actions both provide for the maximum safety of police officers and the civilians, as when everyone is following the protocols there is no justification for escalation.

Now not all traffic stops are created equally, so there would be certain signals the police would give that you are being subject to a more aggressive category of traffic stop. If that were the case you would have a more specific and more stringent series of actions you would have to take in order to be compliant with the seriousness of the stop you are involved in.

Without getting into the weeds, these protocols would be legal tools. If a person violated the protocols be it the officer or civilian, that would have real legal consequences. But for the civilian, if they failed to follow the protocols the police would enter their non-compliance protocols which would have elements of de-escalation and enhanced security for officers. The officers would inform the civilian that there have been deemed non-compliant with the protocols and the police would then move back, take action to prevent the vehicle from leaving the scene and wait until they had the manpower and preparation to take control of the situation with everyone's safety in mind. There would then be an attempt to get the people out of the non-compliant vehicle through verbal persuasion. Then those people would be taken into custody in as gentle and respectful a manner as possible if they follow the instructions given to them. Part of this non-compliance protocol would be the acknowledgement that one or more of the people being stopped might be having a mental health issue, or have an established mental health issue, or be intoxicated or otherwise unable to complete the normal protocols. So this is not just a way for the police to make this situation more precarious. This is something that would take expert guidance to create a situation where many criteria would need to be considered. First, that you have a nonviolent person who is confused or disoriented and needs to be put in a position where they are not a threat and therefore are not threatened by police. Again, experts need to establish the way this is done. Second, a person who is of diminished capacity, either through a mental health issue, a language barrier, intoxication, or something else. There needs to be a series of actions the police can take with maximum deliberation to safely take these people into custody. Third is a person being willfully defiant. These people should be identified as such and it should be made clear to them that they have entered a special status in the protocols as a dangerous person and steps should be made clear to them that they can take to exit that status. The most important part, if a person does not take steps to become compliant, is that the police action is according to a deliberate plan and that the series of actions they take maximize their own safety first and have the best possibility of taking the subject into custody without harm second.

I mean this is just the basic concept. I think a large developed nation like the U.S. should be able to make this happen so that the wild wild west police encounters that we see so often become a thing of the past.

The irony of this misogynistic ****er being shot dead by this hero, female cop.

I usually follow news pretty closely, but I missed this.

It's scary how mental people can become.

Wish there was an overall solution to this, but there's always has been, are, and will be lunatics that are far too gone for any help.

Scary.

The Thriller said:

So why not adjust the law so cops weren’t responding to nonfunctional brake lights? I think it takes 10 seconds to think about how making cops respond to brake lights and expired registrations leads to unnecessary escalation and death. Why not have a social worker or a mechanic come and help the person out instead of pulling them over, exploiting the situation for gain, and potentially escalating the situation unnecessarily?

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You’re absolutely right about the escalation. When it boils down to it, the cop’s job is public safety. That’s why it’s part of the Department of Public Safety.
As for your idea of a social worker doing it? Where are we pulling those social workers from? It’s not like there’s an abundance of them in public service. And a mechanic? Again, not a plethora of mechanics around on government payrolls. Are you going to hire a bunch of them to perform this? Where are you coming up with the funds? Not a chance in hell I’m voting for that tax increase.


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