Dont talk to the police - 5 Deadly Mistakes You're Making When Dealing With the Police

André Kirsten Attorneys is a criminal defence law firm of criminal defense attorneys who specializes in Criminal Law with our offices located at Bellville in Cape Town in the Western Cape.

When it comes to talking to the police the question is fairly simple. Do you want to go to jail or do you want to stay a free man or woman?

The choice is entirely yours but can be impacted by a decision that you are about to make in that final moment when the police approaches you.

In this video we are going to discuss that life-changing decision but we will also at the end of this video take you step by step through what you should do if the police were to approach you.

Now welcome to this video I am Andre Kirsten with Andre Kirsten Attorneys. I have 30 years specializing in criminal law as a criminal attorney experience and when it comes to talking to the police we know what we're doing. So let's get straight into it.

Now in this video we will be discussing the different ways in which the police could possibly end up in front of you and approach you and on top of that we will discover the seven most important reasons why you should never talk to the police.

If you stick around till the end of this video we will give you bonus steps on what you should do if the police approach you and steps that you can take to safeguard yourself and protect yourself against this very intrusive manner of ending your liberty abruptly.

Talking to the police may be one of the most life-changing events that you ever do. It could also be one of the biggest mistakes that you ever made in your life.

When it comes to talking to the police you probably may think to yourself oh you know what I want to be seen as being cooperative, I want to be seen as somebody who is not trying to prevent the police from doing their job. I mean after all I am a moral citizen, I'm a lovely person, just look at me.

Now before you think that you're too lovely let's discuss it from the perspective of the police and think about a couple of important things that you need to know when you're making this all-important life decision.

Now up straight we want to tell you that there is a whole host of things that can go wrong in this interview with the police and we are here to tell you today what can go wrong and in what way it can go wrong.

As a suspect you have a whole host of rights, it's mind-blowing how many you are you have but in order to exercise those rights you have to know what they are and for the purpose of this video there's two very important rights that you that you need to take knowledge of.

The one is your right to remain silent and the other one is your right to a legal representative at any point in time of a police investigation. Exercising those key rights at the right moment can make the difference between being a free man or woman or having your backside locked up in a place that you do not want to be in.

How It may come that the police wants to talk with you

So how may it come that the police come and talk to you? There's a couple of ways, there's actually many ways, but the three most common ways is:

Police received a complaint or a tip

number one the police have received a report that implicates your name and your number in the commission of an offence and the police want to talk to you about this.

They've got some pressing questions on their mind and they want to get the all-important answers from you, the person being implicated.

Search and Seizure

The next way the police can come and talk to you is that they are busy conducting a search seizure either at your property or at your vehicle and they want to ask you about the things that they are finding at your property.

Traffic stop or road block

Another way the police may approach you is in a roadblock. They've pulled you over on a roadblock, you are in your vehicle and now they're searching your vehicle or they want to ask you whether you've been drinking before you went driving.

It doesn't matter how you look at it, the same principles apply every single time.

So what has led to the police wanting to talk to you? Well first of all in the first scenario there was a case that was opened. You were implicated in an offence and they need to obtain information from you.

In the other scenarios the police has developed what we refer to as a reasonable suspicion that you may be implicated in a crime and they want to investigate further.

What you need to wrap your mind around is that the police officer who's standing in front of you being all pretty and nice is not there to discuss the results of last Saturday's fabulous football game with you. In fact no, he is there on an evidence-gathering mission and the evidence-gathering mission may end very badly for you if you start making the wrong decisions.

The actual discussion with the police, how they ask questions and why

Now the police standing in front of you trying to speak to you is a massive problem in its own and it's one that you must take extremely serious.

When the police approach you they are not going to tell you why they want to speak to you. They are not going to tell you what they know. They're also not going to disclose to you what other witnesses and complainants and people who lay charges against you told them. No, no, no.

The police is going to ask you questions and expect you to almost answer them while being blindfolded. You have no idea where these questions are leading to. You have no idea where and what the police is trying to get to while asking these questions.

So the police in doing this is using an age-old tactic of ambush and surprise you. Now the purpose of the police standing in front of you asking you questions is to gather evidence. Evidence against you.

The police is not your friend, and not there to help you

At this point, I want to focus and tell you that the police is not your friend. It does not matter how nice they approach you. It does not matter how pretty the smile. It does not matter any of those things. The fact that they're courteous and sweet to you does not mean that they're your buddy.

And if you want to really test drive this information I just gave you, tell that very nice police officer about a crime that you committed and you will see very quickly how that friendly face will turn to something completely sour and the handcuffs will come out.

And at that moment you will realize that this was not your buddy.

If you are thinking that your skillful reasoning and presenting your innocence may possibly help you to persuade the police that you are not to be implicated in this crime and that you have nothing to do with it, you're making a very big mistake.

In the 30 years that I have been doing this job, the number of times that a person who the police were convinced is involved in an offense and the police approached that person and spoke to him, the number of times that person managed to talk himself out of being arrested is almost zero.

The police are there in front of you to prove a case and obtain evidence in a case that they're trying to prove against you. Without you knowing this, there is almost nothing that you can do or say to persuade the police that you have nothing to do with this and that they must let you go.

The police instills in you a false sense of security. That false sense of security is brought about by giving you the impression that, no, we just want to clear up something or can you just make us understand this or that better or we need to establish certain facts from you.

By giving you a false sense of security, they make you think that you can talk your way out of this, but you can't.

It's an evidence-gathering mission which will result with the end result of you walking away there in the handcuffs. But they will never tell you this because if they tell you this outright, if they tell you that they're there to arrest you, you will not tell them the things that they are there to first get from you, the information they so desperately need.

So the take-home message from this is that you cannot make things better by talking to the police. You can actually only make it worse. So this time when the police approach you and they ask you questions, you will be the source of the information.

When they go to court, they will tell the court that the suspect told us this, the suspect showed us that, which makes it very hard for you to get out of that situation. If you had to do things like that, tell them information and show them things, even your lawyer at court is going to have a tremendously hard time to say, no, my client, that wasn't my client, no, it wasn't him that was saying these things, you guys are making a mistake, it's all a big misunderstanding.

That simply will not fly.

So What should you do with the police now Infront of you

So with all this being said, you cannot persuade the police that you are not a suspect and that they must not see you as a suspect.

The best approach for you would be to just keep quiet and let the police do what they came there to do. If that is to arrest you, then let that be.

If that is to obtain information to prove a case against you, then don't give it to them. Because that makes your chances in court so much better.

Lastly, I want to reiterate that the police will always do what they came there to do with you. And if that is to arrest you, they're going to arrest you. And you're not going to change their mind.

So let's just dive into this a little bit. So you may be sitting there and the police approach you and you think, you know what, it's me, I did this, I feel so bad, I want to take responsibility for this, let me just get all these heavy things off my chest.

Well, it's good and well that you want to get all these things off your chest, but there's a time and a place for this. You have to keep in mind that if you go and you now give the police all the information, all the confessions, all the admissions of your guilt, it will be duly recorded and it will be taken back to court to convict you with no benefit to you whatsoever.

There's a time and a place for these kind of admissions and the time and the place is in the court process where an attorney can negotiate a good deal for you.

Nobody in life gives anybody something for nothing. You're not going to give somebody a million bucks and get nothing in return for it. So why on earth will you go and give your freedom to the police and get nothing in return for it?

Make sure that when you give something as valuable as your freedom, that you get something very, very good in return.

If you feel you've got this heavy burden on your chest to take responsibility for something you've done, then rather negotiate a deal in which you get the best deal possible for your acceptance of responsibility of this case.

This is very important. You cannot negotiate such deals when the police is standing at your front door trying to arrest you or coming to inquire about a crime. That's not the time for this. If you have got all the intention in the world to take responsibility, then approach a lawyer and let it be dealt with through the lawyers.

Do not try and say this to the police. It just makes things worse.

Another important thing on this aspect is when we deal with you wanting to take responsibility is it's a negotiation.

Anybody negotiates from a standpoint of strength, not a standpoint of weakness. If you had to give away your greatest strengths to your enemy when the investigation or in this case the negotiation has not even started, then what you are doing is you are giving away your negotiation tools. You are giving away your strengths in your negotiation. There's nothing you can bring to the table that the prosecution doesn't already have. They already have your confession on videotape or on paper.

If you keep that confession, if you keep that acceptance of responsibility away from them, they don't have it yet, and you negotiate it in a deal, you'll get so much more for what you are about to give them.

There's quite a couple of things that you are not aware of and that you don't understand and that makes this kind of reasoning totally wrong.

The first thing is that when you go into a police interview, you are not conducting the interview. It is the police who is conducting the interview. The police are the one who is driving the questions and who is driving the direction of the questions.

So when the police speak to you, they'll start off by asking trivial little things, but those trivial little things will slowly but surely mark their way to the point where the trivial little things is heading in a specific direction and it's got to do with important little bits of info in the investigation.

They are busy trying to corroborate what other witnesses have told them, and you don't even know this. You will not know this because you don't know what they know, and they're not going to tell you what they know.

Now, the thing that always blows my clients' minds is when you tell them that if you make statements to the police that proclaims your innocence, it cannot be used to prove your innocence at court. It can only be used to prove your guilt.

So this is a really bad situation. You can only go wrong.

In a Situation like this, You cannot go right. One has to ask yourself, if that is the situation, why on earth would you want to speak to the police to begin with, if they can only use the negative of what you say, but they cannot (or will not ) use the positive?

So the take home from this point is you cannot win by telling them anything. You can only lose.

So the small little bits of information that you're telling the police will be used and corroborated with other witnesses. If you said that you were in a certain place, they will ask other witnesses if they can verify that. If somebody else tells the police something different from what you were saying, and trust me, this can happen very easily. You will find yourself in a situation that your version of events will be marked as being a lie.

The more of these little contradictions in your version that comes out, the greater the chance that you may find yourself inadvertently and quite innocently in the middle of a prosecution.

You have to remember that how the police looks at this is a little bit different from you. When the police looks at aspects that you told them that's not truthful, they will say, well, if you're lying about this, what else are you lying about?

When the police approach you, they're trying to establish a couple of key important things.

The first thing they're trying to establish is your role in the crime itself. The next important thing they're trying to establish is whether you've got any possible alibi. Towards the end, the police try in the investigation to exclude any possible defenses that you may offer against this case.

So everything that you say to the police will then be followed up and corroborated and checked and double checked to see whether everything adds up and it is as you say. Contradictions that the police may find with other witnesses and other pieces of evidence like cell phone records or credit card slips or whatever that may be will then be utilized and be given to the prosecution to cross examine you if you ever take the stand in court.

You will then be confronted with this different version of events that you told the police, which by that point, the prosecution will say it's all lies. The sole purpose of all of this is to make you look like a liar and to say to the court that this accused person is a big fat liar. Nothing that he says can be believed. Therefore, he must have committed the crime. Please don't take any of his versions of innocence serious at all.

Another important point is that nowadays with interviews with the police and even the police running around the streets, there is video recording going on. Police in the streets are wearing desk cams. When police will have an interview with you, they'll have a camera running and they will record everything that you say. So it makes it very hard for you to, at the latest stage, come and say to the court that I didn't say this or I didn't say that or it's all a big misunderstanding because they can play that video and the court himself can then see exactly what you said and in what context it was said.

Video evidence in this regard is almost impossible to dispute. And will result in a conviction if you had to admit to the crime or give the police evidence that implicates you in the crime while during such an interview, which is video recorded.

Of course, first prize for the police is actual evidence that proves that you are involved in this crime. But for second prize, the police will very happily take any information that you give them that may be discredited at the latest stage or that they already know can be discredited by witnesses they already spoke to and will show you a big fat liar.

While speaking to you, the police is trying to find evidence which prove the crime or prove that you are a liar. They're always working both angles at the same time. And to be able to understand why the police is doing this is that the police sees everybody as a suspect.

The police will continue to think that you're a suspect until such a time as that the evidence shows to the police that you're not a suspect and that there is no other conclusion but that you're not involved.

On this point, I want to stress that evidence that shows emphatically that you're not involved is sometimes very hard to come by. It depends on the set of facts of every case. But it can be very hard to get that kind of evidence. If there's evidence that shows that you've been lying to the police but there's nothing clearly pointing to your innocence, you may find yourself in a prosecution.

When the police approach you, everything you say is compared to other witnesses, is compared to forensic evidence, is compared to all kinds of other documents and evidence that the police may find to establish whether what is true and what is a lie And can you be believed?

It is extremely difficult for you to know what the police know, and in the investigation stage it's practice for the police to not let you know what they know, and also not to give you any indication of where their questioning is going.

You only find out that things have gone wrong when the handcuffs come out. What you tell the police is not evidence, but can be used against you. This is quite a complicated thing to explain to clients, and it deals with the different rules of evidence, and the rules against self-corroboration, etc.

The short take-home of this is, if you tell the police you didn't do it, it means nothing in court and cannot be used. If you tell the police something that goes to the negative, like you did do it, or here's the murder weapon, or anything that can be used to show your implication in a crime, then those evidence can be presented by the police. That can be dragged off to court, and can be used against you.

This last rule is probably the most mind-blowing of it all, because if you realize that things you tell the police that count in your favor will be discarded, and things you tell the police that does not look good for you, that will be used, and this is how it works, it makes it totally clear that speaking to the police is just an all-around bad decision.

Many times our clients contact us, they've gotten wind of the fact that somebody has laid a charge, and problems are heading their way.

So what should you do? Our advice would be to go see a criminal lawyer and discuss the situation with them, we say this for several reasons.

You want to establish a personal relationship with this criminal lawyer, you want to make sure that you and this person understand each other, and you also want to get some advice on how to deal with the situation and with the police approaching you.

In such an instance, once you've got this relationship set up, and you've got the attorney's all-hour number, you can now contact this lawyer if the police arrives at your doorstep in the middle of the night, and you can then get assistance at the police station before any interrogation takes place, or before you give the police anything that acts against your detriment.

It also, in addition to that, acts and gives a calmness of mind, and the assurance that there's somebody that's standing out there, and somebody who's out there to assist you, and who will take good care of you if there's a problem that arises.

If you did not have that advantage of having an attorney, or the time to speak to an attorney beforehand, then the next important step is, if the police pick you up and arrest you at home or anywhere else, ask a family member to contact an attorney to come and see you at the police station.

And what you need to keep in mind is that until such a time as you've spoken to your lawyer, and you are fully advised as to what to do and what not to do, you just keep quiet.

If there's no family member to contact a lawyer, and nobody has brought a lawyer to you, and you are finding yourself in the police cells, then you tell the police when they want to speak to you, I do not want to talk to you, I want a lawyer. Can I have a phone, and can I call a lawyer?

Then you speak to this lawyer, and you tell him everything, and get advice from him before you make decisions that can impact your freedom forever.