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.

  • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 hours ago

    Tl;Dr please read the PDF I linked. It will explain how interrogations work a lot better than I am capable of. And it won’t yell at you.

    Part 1

    I read your initial paragraph and didn’t see anything even remotely resembling “this is why” or where logically your argument came from.

    To be honest, I thought we were on the same page about the cops being baddies, but on different pages about what to do about it, especially since you said you were looking to post in an anarchist community.

    you have to realize that you wrote me an initial message with “All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions” “a worthless piece of shit.” “No they aren’t” “No you fucking don’t” “it’s terrible advice” and so on.

    Yes, there was lots of swearing. That does not diminish my point. In fact, it enhances it, because it increases the chance of it being understood by the widest possible audience, and it underscores the importance of the message. It also forces the reader to practice confronting their beliefs, which in the real world are going to resemble my first post more than a perfectly typed theoretical tome.

    I.e., just because someone is yelling at me doesn’t mean that what they’re saying is wrong. And this is something that really takes practice, to learn to listen even when someone is being up in your face, because I might just be “that wrong” or even stepping on someone’s toes in a way I don’t understand. For this reason, I really appreciate contemporary anarchist essays for being upfront and confrontational.

    Let’s take these one at a time.

    All cops are bastards, always, everywhere, forever, no exceptions

    If you want, replace “bastards” with “baddies” and this is exactly what I want to communicate.

    Why are cops ever the baddies? Because

    • They enforce the will of the capitalist class. More plainly: they work for the rich; your interests come last. In the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the cops do not have to “protect and serve.” Even if they are taken at their word, even the pretext of law enforcement, namely to enforce the law as it is written, gives away the game: they enforce the law as it is written without regard for the ethics or effects of those laws.
    • The few times that ordinary people do benefit from police interactions, these are not part of the function of the system. For example, sometimes cops will “not see something” if they’re trying to be nice. For example, if a homeless person is living under the overpass, an individual police officer might decide to leave the homeless person alone instead of giving them a ticket for loitering. Now in my view, this is, morally, the absolute bare minimum. But from the perspective of the police department, this is a (small) dereliction of duty, because the homeless person can be found to be breaking the law, yet the officer refused to enforce the law.
    • The proof is in my personal experience, the experiences of everyone I’ve ever known, the people to whom I have listened to (comrades or otherwise!), my experience following the news daily (usually NOT from anarchist or even anarchist-sympathetic sources!), all the statistics about police I have ever seen, all the true crime slop I’ve watched, hell even C.O.P.S. made the cops look bad to me, and all the books and articles I have ever read on the topic. And look at what the cops openly and proudly focus on: harassing the homeless, prosecuting drug addicts, harassing sex workers, deporting migrants, silencing protests. And that’s just what they’ll brag about.

    Why are the cops everywhere baddies? Because they are baddies in every country, because all states exist to prop up the interests of the locally powerful people, and the police serve the interests of their local state. This is, in my view, a fundamental pillar of contemporary anarchist thought, and I can refer you to literature for a better justification if needed.

    Why are cops always baddies? Because being a police officer is defined by membership in a police department, because the powers and protections police officers get are at least mostly effective as long as the officer is in good standing with a police department, including when off-duty.

    Why are cops forever baddies? Because:

    • At some point, they did not exist. But if they never existed and someone created them right this very second, I would still be able to argue based on the cops’ own stated purpose that they are the baddies.
    • When they were created, they were branched out from slave-catching patrols. Slave- catching is evil because it violates the principle of autonomy, which is again a pillar of anarchist philosophy. So they started off evil.
    • As modern policing grew into what it is today, the blatant disregard for autonomy has not really improved, as evidenced by the existence of prisons, jails, and police killings. So in the recent past and present, police have been evil. This is supplementary to the discussion above.
    • If we keep doing policing like we do now, then it would still be an evil institution. But if we changed it, then the change would really have to be so drastic that it would simply be something else entirely, because the police are such a fractally evil organization.

    Why are there no exceptions? Because cops are a subset of the set of baddies, and this is because, as discussed above, cops are evil because their function is evil. So the only way for a cop to stop being evil on account of being a cop is to stop being a cop. And when individual police officers do something good, they do it in spite of being a cop, often in flagrant dereliction of their duty to uphold the law as it is written.

    “a worthless piece of shit.”

    I very carefully worded that to make it clear that I am calling the police worthless pieces of shit.

    Which I am. And they are. They’re actually a lot worse than shit, because shit can be useful as fertilizer. The police, on the other hand, keep our species from reaching its full potential.

    “No they aren’t”

    Yes, that’s one of the points I want to make. That was in response to “(The police are) there to solve real problems.” My issue really was with the word solve. In case it was unclear: yes, the problems are real, and i do not mean to trivialize them. Furthermore, their pretext for being there will likely be to solve the problem. But they are not there to solve the problem. Solving the problem is a pretext for reestablishing control of the situation in a way that is palatable to their paymasters. In rare cases, for example stopping serial killers (which, from watching hundreds of true crime documentaries, which are notoriously pro-police: they are terrible at doing!), these interests line up with the interests of the people, but considering how many people have their lives ruined or ended by police for property crimes, crimes of poverty, drug crimes, antisocial crimes (i.e. pissing in the street), it is clear to me that this is the exception rather than the norm. That’s what I desperately need to communicate.

    “No you fucking don’t”

    This was in response to the bit about talking with the police. In the guide I linked, there is a huge section about how the police ask you all sorts of innocent, easy questions to butter you up for hard ones. You really should not talk to the police almost ever. Talking to the police is not a equal exchange. The cops have all the power, and they will use whatever psychological and physical means that they can to fill up their case files.

    Saying “no you fucking don’t” was crucial to demonstrate how seriously dangerous a choice that is to make. If I had said “no you don’t”, that would have betrayed how important this point is.

    “it’s terrible advice”

    Again, that’s the point I wanted to make. I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying that because I think it needs to be said. If you told me “you should plug your fork into the outlet” with complete sincerity, I would tell you “that’s a terrible idea, don’t do that” because following that advice could be fatal. I would rather see you alive and upset at me than dead by listening to terrible advice. And then once the fork is down, I will gladly infodump about why it is a terrible idea to fuck with electricity. But in that moment, I need you to put the fork down. Similarly, I need you to not collaborate with the cops in the future. Lives are at stake. At least after whatever incident you’re going through in the present moment since I acknowledge it might be too difficult to reverse course.