We've blogged about this a couple times before. It is a good reminder - Never talk to the police:
He makes two points I especially appreciate.
The first is how with our adversarial system the police tend to take the side of the prosecuting attorney and are trying to help him. Their focus isn't justice, but winning the game.
The second is how the police themselves never talk to the police without an attorney. If they, who know the system well, don't talk with the police, then we should trust their example and also only talk with an attorney.
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I wish I'd covered this with my kids. My 15-year-old son went with some friends one night in April to watch a ball game, but they left and went into an abandoned building. They went up on the roof and jumped around, but didn't break anything while my son was there.
The police showed up because there were cameras either in the building or on the grounds. He told them to leave and acted like it wasn't a big deal. A few days later the police show up at his school and have him write a letter of apology to the owners and no charges will be filed. No one contacted us ever, but our son did tell us about it.
Now, just Monday (it's September, almost 6 months later) we get a summons to court and he's being charged with a felony and accused of breaking over $1000 of windows.
Now they have in his own handwriting that he was in there, and the lawyer said the police do that all the time. Get the kids to write a letter and then enter that in the file and use it against them. My son's reaction was "The policeman lied!" He can't believe that. What a great lesson: don't trust the police.
The lawyer said that if a person is over 14 years then the parents don't have to be notified, that way they can use the kids naivety against them.
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