Yes, you should talk to the police

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a new bill into law Thursday barring police from lying to underage kids during interrogations. From a report: Commonly used interrogation tactics, such as promising leniency or insinuating that incriminating evidence exists, are banned when questioning suspects younger than 18 under the new law, which goes into effect Jan. 1.

Many of the commenters were persuaded a popular video on Don't Talk to the Police, where a law professor advises never talking to the police under any circumstances.

This advice is so bad that I wonder whether the professor is serious. His main argument is that there are a few obscure cases where a criminal gave an alibi that inadvertantly revealed details of his crime that were later used to convict him.

I have been questioned by police dozens of times in my life, and there is not one where I would have been better off invoking my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. There have been many where failure to explain myself would have gotten me arrested.

A famous example is the Black Harvard who got arrested for breaking into his own apartment. He could have avoided arrest by politely explaining himself.

You might say that he shouldn't have to explain himself. But how else can the cops do their jobs? They don't know who lives where.

Most people do believe that cops have to tell the truth. This is especially true of kids, as teachers and others brainwash them into following authority. Cops lie all the time. Undercover police operations depend on it.

Here is what happened in South Africa, where the Black former President refused to be questioned:

The explosion of violence followed the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma on a charge of contempt for refusing to appear before the Commission of enquiry into the wholesale looting of the state which took place under his presidency. ...

However, once the rioting and looting of shops and hijacking of trucks on the highway began, with the police clearly scared and ineffective, word rapidly spread that you could go “shopping without money,” creating huge excitement among the ranks of the millions of poor and unemployed Zulus ...

They flocked in huge numbers to the shopping malls and began to loot them. Quickly the spree spread to Johannesburg, home to many more Zulus — though many others joined in. It was a whole-of-community thing: most of the looters were poor and on foot but not a few arrived in cars, sometimes very expensive cars. Some even came with vast trailers to haul away freezers, fridges, and cookers. Huge queues of cars swamped the freeways, all heading for the malls, and other forms of criminality blossomed—protection rackets, attacks on and thefts from other motorists, anything that offered a quick buck.

In a sense this had been coming for a long time. When the ANC was first elected in 1994 ...

That was when the Whites gave up power, and let the Blacks take over. The only mystery was how long it would take for civilization to collapse.