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.
The court upheld Hiibel’s conviction. The part you’re quoting is in the part where they left open the possibility that there could be some crazy type of circumstances where revealing your name could, itself, form a link in a chain of evidence that the cops needed in order to convict you of some other different crime.
There is not, that I know of, any person ever in the United States who has ever been found innocent of failure to ID, or had their conviction overturned for some other crime or something, under the logic you’re saying. It was just a side note while they convicted the guy. Do you know of someone who’s ever gotten off due to this logic?
I said “might.” Not “would.”
You also said, “Since the officers were asking for a specifically named person, it might be within the guy’s 5th Amendment rights to refuse to identify himself. Would his not identifying himself as the person they were looking for make it so they couldn’t (shouldn’t) arrest him? Possibly.”
That “possibly” should have been written as “Absolutely the fuck not, and it would in all likelihood get him additional charges on top of what they were already arresting him for.” That’s why I said it was terrible advice.
“We got a report of a guy having assaulted someone here, you answered the door, so you’re under arrest”?
To be fair, the biggest mistake the guy made was answering the door at all.
No. “We’re looking for Ray so-and-so, because we have reasonable articulable suspicion that he committed a crime. Are you him? Can I see some ID?”
There is absolutely 0 scenario in which refusing to cooperate with that request will lead to a good outcome.
Kind of. Pretending not to be home might have been marginally helpful, or it might not. Once he determined that he was going to talk to them, though, I actually for real sort of mentally commended him for doing exactly what he should have done: He walked out of the front door, and then closed it behind him, thus having the interaction with the police without giving them any kind of wiggle room for some marginally-plausible reason to enter his home. That’s exactly the right thing to do.