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.
> 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.
They have also unusually high domestic violence rates. That is where the bit comes from.
This is first time I have seen the claim that firefighters have the same domestic violence rates as police. I have seen multiple studies on police vs regular citizens and police were more violent in all of them. I did not seen comparable numbers about firefighters.
The factors police have and firemen dont are a.) victim not being able to go to police, cause those are his buddies b.) training teaches cops to take and keep charge (escalating aggression until compliance is acquired).
The question in my mind is what people are expecting? What do they think this proves? Policing is a conflict focused job that involves violence so I wouldnt expect it to be the same as baseline to begin with.
I would caution against "just so" explainations. There are obviously lots of complex reasons and one can speculate a lot of stories one way or another.
> Policing is a conflict focused job that involves violence
Because of this, police officers should have plenty of experience (and training, but let's limit this to the US) with de-escalation and proportional response. The domestic violence rates should be lower among police wrt the general populace for that reason alone.
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.
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.
No, but online is where you see this advice being most commonly posted and repeated. Second-most might be in lawyer's offices, but a) most people don't interact with lawyers, especially not in the context of criminal investigations, and b) the lawyers themselves have a distorted view of this system, because they are almost always dealing with people who, for one reason or another, should not talk to the police.
Using "terminally online" for "the advice layers consistently give both online and offline but people don't follow" is, imo, using that term incorrectly. "Terminally online" is derogatory term which involves you doing or thinking something insane. If literal layers give that advice in their literal offices and wherever they go around, it is simply "rarely followed advice".
And I will also claim that layers have way less distorted view of the system then us, people whose view of the system is based on movies and rare cases that hit the news.
The context they make these statements is when you are a person of interest to the police, if you are just a witness to an event unrelated to you its different. But people mostly just say 'never' without regard of the situation.
Not that its always benign to do in cases like this, you can easily talk yourself into becoming a person of interest. Especially true if the officer happens to have a 'bad day' or is a bad apple, you can't really tell because the police keeps employing these people. An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
Surely there's more interesting conversation to be had here than just "your opinions about interacting with law enforcement are moot because I know people in my Chicago neighbourhood who disagree with them."
The main contention seems to be 'surely everyone knows you shouldn't talk to the police' and 'no, quite a lot of people believe the opposite, but it's not as common to see that belief online', with a bit of this being conflated with whether this belief is accurate or not.
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.
Okay, but "never talk to the police" is a normative statement, not a descriptive statement, so your contrast of it with a people's attitudes towards police is kind of apples and oranges.
>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.
This is a deeply masculine take, Zuck would be proud.
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.