Don't Talk to Cops

July 21st, 2008 at 8:32 pm · DrHGuy · Aha! Items · No Comments

The DrHGuy Self-protection Seminar

One can consider the videos that follow the scholarly follow-up to an earlier Heck of a Guy post, How To Beat The Rap If You Are A Suspect On Law and Order, which I’ve excerpted below:

Anyone familiar with the bevy of crime shows that dominate the TV schedule these days realizes that the erstwhile good guys (e.g., the police and the prosecuting attorneys) succeed not only because they are heroic, hardworking, and streetwise but also because they routinely and expertly use tactics of ambiguous legality and dubious morality to capture and convict suspected evil-doers (AKA Perps, AKA Creeps, AKA Scumbags, … ). Such devices are justified by the authorities assigning all suspects to one of three categories:

Guilty But Not Yet Convicted
Guilty But Not Convictable Because Of (Some Combination Of) Stupid Laws, Spineless Judges , Idiot Legislators, Or Slimy Defense Lawyers
Not Technically Guilty But Should Be Convicted Anyway

The observant viewer will also note that, incredibly enough, the designated criminals on these dramas fall for the same investigatory and legal maneuvers every week – even though these scenarios, with a full explication of the underlying strategies, have been repeatedly broadcast on TV, day and night, for years.

Why do these otherwise wily, often brilliant individuals, who have the intrinsic advantage of a willingness to cheat, lie, and mislead and, one assumes, some aptitude for and experience with these skills, fall prey to the interrogators’ ancient, clichéd tricks? One wonders if, hidden away in Idaho perhaps, the big networks and major cable stations maintain colonies of potential criminals living in quasi-Amish mode, isolated from television, movies, and videos, until tapped to commit and be convicted of a crime? Or do Sipowicz and his comrades in blue preface their Miranda warnings with the query, “Have you ever seen me on TV,” only arresting suspects who respond in the negative?

Sample recommendations from that post include

Regardless of the strength of my alibi, I will resist the apparently universal impulse to respond to the accusations with a sneering “Prove it” or its even smugger variation, “You can’t prove a thing,” either of which economically provides the authorities with both an implicit confession of guilt and a motivational challenge.

Nor will I resort to the sarcastically intoned “Is that supposed to scare me?” after a cop or prosecutor has made an obviously scary threat. In any case, I suspect that Lennie et al, being detectives after all, might pick up a clue that I was frightened when I fainted, developed total body tremor, or became incontinent.

If the District Attorney threatens to prosecute one of my loved ones, whom he knows to be innocent, in order to coerce my confession, I will remain loyal to that individual and visit him or her as often as permitted by the prison rules.