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.

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.