[tptacek]

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.

[watwut]

> 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.

[tptacek]

So do firefighters.

[watwut]

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).

[s1artibartfast]

Nobody said "the same".

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.

[tremon]

> 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.

[s1artibartfast]

Police arent just trained to de-escalate. They are also trained to kill humans. This too has an influence who becomes a cop. You cant just cherry pick the factors you think would lead to lower DV and ignore the others.

do you mean they should be lower as a normative claim or postive claim? It is clearly flase as a positive claim, if the police domestic violence studies done in the 90's are still accurate.

[hollerith]

True, and also DV rates should be higher for the type of person who chooses a job where one of the requirements is to run towards danger.

[joquarky]

This site attracts ivory tower residents. Your comment is a great example of this.

Try growing up poor and see how your perspective changes on the police.

[fzeroracer]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[watwut]

> Most people simply don't see themselves as being in zero-sum contests with the police.

Yes, that is why they don't do it. It does not mean the advice is "terminally online". It is the advice coming from layers that deal with the system.

Layers saying those things, online and offline, are not terminally online.

[rcxdude]

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.

[watwut]

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.

[rcxdude]

I will point out that the original poster did not say "terminally online", but "very online". (oh, and "extremely online"). I don't personally feel that has the same kind of connotations.

[tptacek]

Category error. Points can be valid and salient mostly online at the same time.

Though: the validity of "nobody should ever talk to the police" is highly disputable. It assumes the only objective anybody would have in a police encounter is not being prosecuted. Prosecution is unlikely, and there are other important objectives.

[Hikikomori]

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.

[watwut]

> 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 true, the context I have seen it very much included being a witness who is not a person of interest to the police. It especially explicitly included that situation.

> 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.

That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.

[DFHippie]

You mean "lawyers", right?

[Teever]

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."

[rcxdude]

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.

[picofarad]

What's your source for the "no, quite a lot of people believe the opposite."? Is it a Chicago suburb?

[rcxdude]

I dunno, I didn't make that claim, I'm just pointing out there seems to be two different conversations happening in different participant's heads.

[lukan]

Multiple? I only ever see that one guy's video linked.

[BrenBarn]

The fact that most people believe it's not good advice doesn't mean it actually is not good advice.

[tptacek]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[tptacek]

The biggest complaint working class families on the west side of Chicago have about the police is that they're never around when they're needed.

[Retric]

Which is significantly less of a concern in wealthy areas. When fines are meaningless and police plentiful people’s attitude changes.

[tptacek]

I'm not talking about wealthy areas. I'm talking about working class areas, where residents complain (loudly and often) that there aren't enough police. There's a common online meme --- you didn't say it but you can feel it in the air on this thread --- that working class people see themselves in solidarity with people who commit property crime. That idea is really quite offensive, in addition to being dead wrong: in fact, the logic you're using here is much more potent with respect to crime, because working class people can't absorb e.g. the loss of their car with the ease that you and I can.

[joxdosba]

I don’t know, as someone firmly in the top 0.1% of taxpayers, most cops seem gleefully unaware of their place in life.

But perhaps that just reflects the public/private split when it comes to quality of services

[BrenBarn]

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.

[joxdosba]

>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.

This is such a widely known problem, I’m really surprised you’re not familiar with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officer-involved_domestic_viol...

“Never date a cop” is very common advice women will give to each other, has nothing to do with politics or being excessively online.