Across our college campus my buddy and I were walking around 1 a.m. We were underage, drunk off our butts, and just trying to get back to our Fraternity. A friend had organized a party in his dorm, and we had been drinking for hours. Suddenly, police stopped us. They separated us, and started asking where we had been, what we had been doing, why we were out so late, etc. I refused to answer any questions. I asked for a lawyer, asserted my right to remain silent, and simply stood there. My friend, on the other hand, was extremely nervous. He started answering questions.
Being afraid the police would find out about the underage drinking, he tried to hide that part of the story. The two officers took turns tearing his narrative of the evening apart. They kept repeating the same questions in different ways, aggressively pointing out every time his answers changed. They tried several times to ask me questions. I refused every time. What we did not know, until later, was that someone with a baseball bat had been smashing in car windows on campus. The actual vandalism had occurred miles from where we were, but even so, here were two guys just wandering across campus early in the morning…
Based on my friend’s babbling, the police decided that we must have been responsible and so they hauled us in. As they were getting the paperwork ready to charge us with vandalism, we got lucky. Fortunately for us, about 6 a.m. they caught the guy in the act miles away from where we had been detained. At that point, it was clear that we had had nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, by that time, my friend had already confessed to underage drinking and given up the name of our friend who had organized the party. He was so afraid of being charged with smashing up cars, that he would have given up his own mom if he thought it would help. The duty sergeant decided to let us go. We hadn’t had any alcohol on us when stopped. However, the police referred the matter to the University and we all wound up on academic probation for a year. Since I was a reservist, the military found out about the incident and….. Well, it wasn’t fun.
All this happened because my friend tried to withhold information from the police. That made them suspicious enough to ignore the lack of any other evidence and prepare to charge us with a crime we had not committed. What we were guilty of, underage drinking, wasn’t even what the police were investigating. They should never have even known about it. I never answered a single question. If my friend had done the same, we would have eventually simply walked away from the incident and had a good laugh over breakfast.
Unfortunately, my friend’s first reaction, based on his conservative upbringing, was to try and cooperate with the police as best he could. That is a reflex many of you reading this probably share. Either get out of that mindset right now, or risk becoming victims of the “new normal.”
For your own good, put your judgmental, middle-class Christian morality on hold for a minute. Growing up poor, I learned to deal with police in a different fashion than many of you. Early and frequent interactions with the law taught me that real life works very differently than the lectures in school safety class from “Officer Friendly.” Especially in the brave new world we are facing, please read and follow the advice in the next paragraph.
Don’t talk to police unless you are the one who called them for help. Even then, be careful. If detained by police, never answer questions, never consent to searches, never give the police the names of others or any information about them. Do not bring police into your home, if you can avoid it. Keep your business to yourself.
Always demand an attorney and teach your minor children to refuse to answer any questions without you present. That is vitally important, as police interrogate kids all the time if they can get away with it. Remember – you must verbally assert your rights as merely “remaining silent” is not the same thing. Even if you are innocent of what the police are investigating, providing too much information could land you in jail on something else.
Around the world, including some American states, there are curfews and travel restrictions. People are getting arrested and fined because they drove too far from home, or they were out too late without a good enough reason. Some areas, you can’t even leave your home at all, unless you have an approved excuse. Attending protests and other exercises of free speech have been criminalized in places that we usually think of as “free.” Even if you peacefully exercise your rights to speech and assembly, don’t think for a minute that will protect you. The fall out from the Capitol Hill “riot” is only just beginning. While those who entered the Capitol and/or assaulted police are criminals, those who peacefully assembled are not. But I can assure you, many people who attended the Trump rally in Washington will be lucky to only get doxxed and lose their jobs.
You may support the “thin blue line.” You may be a great person. You may never have had any trouble with the law. How wonderful for you! That can easily change going forward, and please remember – don’t talk to the police.
Even in your church, there are people who consider Trump supporters terrorists, whether or not they were even in DC. Aristotle Papanikolaou (Tweet below) holds an endowed chair at Fordham University. He is a big-time name in Greek Orthodoxy. He and his leftist cohorts think of conservatives / Trump supporters not as political opposition, but as evil people. The Atlantic article he retweeted said, “For the past four years, Donald Trump has been playing two roles: one as president, and the other as the rallying point for a coalition of theocrats, internet fantasists, white supremacists, and various other authoritarians who are in no way committed to peaceful transitions of power.”
Any of you with politically unpopular positions (such as supporting Trump and/or Christian morality) need to realize that your Church, your neighborhood, the Federal government, and your local police force are full of people who believe the same thing – you are not entitled to civil liberties because you are a dangerous, evil person.
In Australia and the UK, countries with similar legal systems to ours, citizens have been investigated and even arrested for social media posts. Think such things can’t happen in America? Think again. In 1918, at a time when our constitutional order was much more robust than today, the Democrats gave us the Sedition Act which made it a felony to criticize the government. More than 2,000 American citizens were arrested and prosecuted pursuant to the Sedition Act before Republicans, victorious in both houses of Congress in the mid-terms, could repeal it. That is just one example of criminalizing dissent. There are many more marring our 240+ year experiment in self-rule. Not only can such things happen in America, they have happened in America.
Last year a domestic terrorism bill died in Congress. The bill or one like it will be reintroduced. Biden has said it is a major priority. The bill will target “white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.” Remember the article quoted above? The government will get to define what is and what is not “white nationalism” and “white supremacy,” so you attending a rally for a Congressman who supported Trump, your social media posts in favor of a “color blind” society, criticizing Nancy Pelosi, making a contribution to the “wrong” organization – almost anything falling under the rubric of “right-wing” politics could end up earning you a visit from the police. Depending on how that goes, you could face some serious trouble.
And please don’t make the mistake of thinking that being a person of color will help the situation. Because of “internalized oppression,” you don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist. Plus, you can be guilty even if you did not knowingly do anything wrong. Remember, providing material support for “domestic terrorism” is also be a crime, and that concept can be interpreted very expansively. Even innocuous conversations with a friend who gets into trouble could drag you into a world of hurt.
The police and/or federal agents may approach a situation as “asking for your help.” As a good citizen, you will likely fall into that trap. Don’t do it. Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove. Think twice about posting on social media or attending protests, and never talk to police without a lawyer present. For now, we still have the right to remain silent and every single American should be prepared to exercise that right in every single law enforcement interaction.
You will not talk yourself out of a ticket. You will not talk yourself out of an arrest. You will never be able to successfully lie or mislead the police. They are trained interrogators that trap suspects into contradictions even when the suspects are telling the truth. If you make someone repeat the same story over and over again, that person will inevitably start to slip up. Once he or she starts altering / shading the story under duress, no matter how slightly, then perjury may be on the table. Remember General Flynn? You can be completely innocent, but still suffer consequences because you inadvertently misremember details.
Any evidence against you is made infinitely worse once they have you on tape answering questions.
So don’t talk to police. Want a lawyer’s advice? Please watch this video from Regent Law Professor James Duane in which he tells you all the reasons why you should always exercise your Fifth Amendment Rights. This video is a few years old, but it is more important today than when it was first filmed. Please share it and this article with everyone.
Exercising your rights is not anti-Christian. Exercising your rights is not immoral. You are not lying if you are not talking.
Christians are the most persecuted group of people on Earth. As the new world develops, even publicly advocating for Christian morality could become criminalized. Do not believe we are immune in America because we have a Constitution – the government has violated it more than once. You could easily find out the hard way that you have run afoul of a new “hate speech” statute you did not even know existed.
Watch the video. Share the video. And don’t talk to police.
Vladimir is a member of the OCA who has been active in fighting for civil liberties for many years.
[…] story posted that is worth reading, regardless whether you are Orthodox, Christian or not, is “For Your Safety – Never Talk to Police!” Yet their most recent post titled “Exemptions to COVID Vaccines for Orthodox Christians” is […]
To the Editors:
‘Live not by lies’ Aleksander Solzhenitsyn counseled us – “So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood—of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one’s family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies—or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one’s children and contemporaries.” –
The Gulag Archipelago An Experiment in Literary Investigation Vol I II; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Chapter 4 The Bluecaps pgs175-178
“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others.”
“From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept:
virtue triumphs, and vice is punished.
We have been fortunate enough to live to a time when virtue, though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed
to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn’t raise its voice.
However, no one dares say a word about vice. Yes, they did mock virtue, but there was no vice in that. Yes, so-and-so many millions did get mowed down-but no one was to blame for it.
And if someone pipes up: “What about those who. … ” the answer comes from all sides, reproachfully and amicably at first: “What are you talking about, comrade! Why open old wounds?”21 Then they go after you with an oaken club: “Shut up! Haven’t you had enough yet? You think you’ve been rehabilitated!” In that same period, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals
had been convicted in West Germany.22 And still we choke
21. Even in connection with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the retired bluecaps living on pensions objected because the book might reopen the wounds of those who had been imprisoned in camp. Allegedly, they were the ones to be protected.
22. Meanwhile, in East Germany, nothing of the sort is to be heard. Which means that there they have been shod with new shoes; they are valued in the service of the state.
with anger here. We do not hesitate to devote to the subject page after newspaper page and hour after hour of radio time. We even stay after work to attend protest meetings and vote: “Too few! Eighty-six thousand are too few. And twenty years is too little! It must go on and on.”
And during the same period, in our own country (according to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court) about ten men have been convicted.
What takes place beyond the Oder and the Rhine gets us all worked up. What goes on in the environs of Moscow and behind the green fences near Sochi, or the fact that the murderers of our husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way for them as they pass, doesn’t get us worked up at all, doesn’t touch us. That would be “digging up the past.”
Meanwhile, if we translate 86,000 West Germans into our own terms, on the basis of comparative population figures, it would become one-quarter of a million.
But in a quarter-century we have not tracked down anyone. We have not brought anyone to trial. It is their wounds we are afraid to reopen. And as a symbol of them a11, the smug and stupid Molotov lives on at Granovsky No.3, a man who has learned nothing at all, even now, though he is saturated with our blood and nobly crosses the sidewalk to seat himself in his long, wide automobile. Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not?
What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world? In the German trials an astonishing phenomenon takes place from time to time. The defendant clasps his head in his hands,
refuses to make any defense, and from then on asks no concessions from the court. He says that the presentation of his crimes, revived and once again confronting him, has filled him with
revulsion and he no longer wants to live.
That is the ultimate height a trial can attain: when evil is so utterly condemned that even the criminal is revolted by it. A country which has condemned evil 86,000 times from the rostrum of a court and irrevocably condemned it in literature and among its young people, year by year, step by step, is purged of it.
What are we to do? Someday our descendants will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the million~ and then with devoted concern we tended the murderers in their prosperous old age.
What are we to do if the great Russian tradition of penitence is incomprehensible and absurd to them? What are we to do if the animal terror of hearing even one-hundredth part of all they subjected others to outweighs in their hearts any inclination to justice? If they cling greedily to the harvest of, benefits they have watered with the blood of those who perished?
It is clear enough that those men who turned the handle of the meat grinder even as late as 1937 are no longer young. They are fifty to eighty years old. They have lived the best years of their lives prosperously, well nourished and comfortable, so that it is too late for any kind of equal retribution as far as they are concerned. But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them into a “swan dive,” nor keep them on sleepless “stand-up” for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls in iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage-we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on
trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly:
“Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer.”
And if these words were spoken in our country only one quarter of a million times (a just proportion, if we are not to fall behind West Germany), would it, perhaps, be enough? It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be
prosecuted and what constitutes that “past” which “ought not to be stirred up.”
We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the
surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the ”weakness of indoctrinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.
It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!”
Here is the text of a prayer, according to tradition composed by Patriarch Hermogenes in this dark period of Russian history, known later as Time of Trouble. Perhaps this prayer was read in Moscow churches in October 1606, when the enemy approached the very walls of Moscow and the Patriarch blessed the people for three days in a row to fast and pray in repentance of hearts.
O Lord God Almighty, look upon us Thy sinful and unworthy children, who have transgressed before Thee, and have angered Your goodness and provoked Your righteous wrath, shed Your loving kindness on us, who have fallen deep into sin. See, O Lord, our infirmities and spiritual afflictions, know the corruption of our minds and hearts and the poverty of our faith, our falling away from Thy commandments, the multiplication of discord in our family, and the division and strife in the Church, You see our sorrow and grief proceeding from sickness, famine, floods, fires, and civil strife.
But, O Merciful and Man-Loving God, enlighten, instruct and have mercy on us, unworthy ones. Amend our sinful life, put an end to divisions and discord, gather the dispersed, unite the contentious, give peace and prosperity to our country, deliver it from discord and misfortune. O All Holy Lord, enlighten our minds with the light of the Holy Gospel, ignite our hearts with the flame of Your grace and direct them to the fulfillment of Your commandments, so that All-Holy and glorious name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit may be glorified in us, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Doxa to Theo, John D.
Local donut molesters don’t answer anything now unless it is major.
Record amount of gunfire at midnight on New Years even after the wise council of Karens said no shooting.
Karens calling about someone with a mean look on their face or an opinion unlike their own caused this state of affairs along with the hopey changey messiah’s war on the police.
In a traffic stop always answer I have no idea why you stopped me because any other statement is a confession.
If you get hauled in and they offer a sheet of paper draw a middle finger outline.
Only respond to questions that your counsel tells you to answer and if you have no lawyer then say nothing.
VERY good advice, now more than ever.