Correct: "never talk to the police" is a very online belief. I watch people talk to police all the time. People go out of their way to do it.

I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.

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BrenBarn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The fact that most people believe it's not good advice doesn't mean it actually is not good advice.

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tptacek an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm not making a normative claim about what your best strategy is to protect yourself from a police investigation, but rather a positive claim about ordinary people's attitudes towards the police, which are not (gesturing towards this thread) this.

	▲	Retric 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Meanwhile I’ve spent way too much time around people in real life on both sides of the isle that absolutely loathed the police. The general attitude seems extremely positively correlated with income, and the average American isn’t particularly well off.

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fzeroracer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Saying never talk to the police is an 'online belief' is frankly baffling.

There are multiple examples of prominent law professors bringing in ex-police professionals who all say the exact same thing: never talk to the police. If you spend five minutes around a lawyer they will say the same thing. If you ever end up finding yourself in legal turmoil it is the very first thing a lawyer will directly advise you to do.

People being stupid I don't think suddenly makes this advice terminally online. I was hearing it, in person, when I was in college over a decade ago.

	▲	tptacek 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most people simply don't see themselves as being in zero-sum contests with the police. If you are in such a contest, those videos you've watched are quite useful and important. But when there's a hit and run on your block, expect your neighbors to go out of their way to volunteer information to the police. I've read threads here where people have made impassioned arguments that you yourself should never volunteer information to the police investigating a crime such as a hit and run. The police will turn it against you and somehow make you the target of their investigation! Ordinary people out in the world do not think that way, and you will not succeed in making them think that way by showing them videos of lawyers explaining why the only thing you should ever say is "I do not consent to any searches and will not answer any of your questions". If you said that to a police officer doing a canvass in my neighborhood, people would look at you like a space alien. I think it's helpful to understand all this stuff when reading things about Flock. People on HN and in activist communities seem gobsmacked that all the Flock cameras haven't been taken down yet (in fact: ALPR deployments are growing, not shrinking). But they have wildly different priors about policing than the median resident of a muni with ALPR cameras.