Daniel, Thanks for stopping by and sharing your experience.

It’s interesting that you make a distinction between “intentional” crimes and the kind of thing Three Felonies a Day talks about, because the latter is always the sort of thing I imagine for myself — not committing a crime and trying to get away with it, but doing something inadvertently that turns out to get me in trouble.

That reflects my personal experiences. Almost every single traffic ticket and parking violation I ever received was for something I did by accident or that I didn’t even know I was doing.

Hi Jack,

As a former cop, I know that it doesn’t normally go the way it went for your friend. If someone has been caught red handed, then it ordinarily does the person no good to not talk, but it rarely helps and usually makes it worse. Your friend was lucky, and it turns out he was right, but he went way against the odds. (If you know a particular cop is decent, your chances of being given a break are a little better, but even then the decent cop might be with a hardliner cop and doesn’t want to look like a wimpy cop.)

Not talking is more important when the cops won’t find anything (such as the marijuana in your friend’s car) because they have no proof or when they have no authority to search unless you consent to the search, than when the cops have caught you red handed. If the police don’t ask you questions, its usually because they have all the proof they need. If the police don’t ask for your consent to search, they usually don’t need your consent.

Drag racing is considered a rather serious crime. Your friend was lucky.

Cops have figured out the ploy that if you admit to a minor crime, they won’t arrest you for a more serious crime. Drunk drivers often think, “If I admit to only “two beers” (and for some reason it is almost always “a couple” of beers or “two or three” beers), the cop will let them off “for being honest” or because they are too drunk to know that cops can usually tell when the driver had too much to drink and drive. What really happens is that the driver has just given evidence against himself or herself, and gets arrested anyway.

I am concerned more about those who value their constitutional rights and don’t intentionally commit crimes, than I am of the criminal who I hope talks themselves into jail. If you are a criminal that commits non-victimless crimes, I will still tell you you should remain silent (because waiving constitutional rights encourages the police to violate the constitutional rights of innocent people, and it rarely helps them to talk), but you are certainly free to talk and get what is coming to you.

See the book “Three Felonies a Day,” if you think you know you don’t commit any crimes.

In contrast, the son of a friend was pulled over while racing, and there was pot smoke in the car (from a passenger). He admitted to the officer what he had done, and the officer didn’t charge him for the racing, thanking him for being forthright. He was able to get the pot matter dropped, and avoided a huge fine. If he had played it adversarially from the start, I have little question that he would have been worse off. (Of course, it didn’t necessarily have to go that way either.)

Yup. As I’ve said elsewhere, a rule that is careful, precise, and comprehensive doesn’t do you any good at all if you can’t remember it.

Daniel, I don’t generally make a habit of poking sticks at beehives, so deliberately getting stopped at checkpoints is not something that appeals to me, although I can understand the point. And come to think of it, maybe asserting your rights in a relatively low-risk controlled situation like that is good practice for the time when they pull you over in a lonely industrial park at night and you’ve got three kilos of coke and an AK-47 in your trunk…

Unless you know for certain that you aren’t a suspect (yes, suspects are often innocent), don’t say a word to the cops except to assert your constitutional rights. The problem is that you might unknowingly be a suspect because you did nothing illegal (or didn’t know you did something illegal) such as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you didn’t know your evil-twin just robbed the liquor store that you just happened to be nearby when the robbery occurred. (I have personal experience with having an evil twin, well in this case he wasn’t evil, who could have implicated me if he had actually been a bad guy.)

Another time you might *opt* to talk to the cops, although sometimes a danger to your liberty or bodily integrity, is when, in a particular situation such as at a suspicionless checkpoint where you want to object to checkpoints as violating the Fourth Amendment. I do it a lot, even though I know it is risky. I deliberately go through the checkpoints to complain of how unconstitutional they are (note, the Supreme Court disagrees with me).

It takes courage to not talk to the cops because they effectively bamboozle most of us into thinking that “things will go worse for you if you don’t cooperate.”

I for one refuse to not exercise my rights because the cops will punish me for noncooperation. I do, however, quite often take more chances than most because I despise most police officers because they are the enforcement arm of a corrupt criminal justice system.