Because of the Fifth Amendment, no one in the U.S. may legally be forced to testify against himself, and because of the Fourth Amendment, no oneโs records or belongings may legally be searched or seized without just cause. However, American police are trained to use methods of deception, intimidation and manipulation to circumvent these restrictions. In other words, cops routinely break the lawโin letter and in spiritโin the name of enforcing the law. Several examples of this are widely known, if not widely understood.
1) โDo you know why I stopped you?โ
Cops ask this, not because they want to have a friendly chat, but because they want you to incriminate yourself. They are hoping you will โvoluntarilyโ confess to having broken the law, whether it was something they had already noticed or not. You may think you are apologizing, or explaining, or even making excuses, but from the copโs perspective, you are confessing. He is not there to serve you; he is there fishing for an excuse to fine or arrest you. In asking you the familiar question, he is essentially asking you what crime you just committed. And he will do this without giving you any โMirandaโ warning, in an effort to trick you into testifying against yourself.
2) โDo you have something to hide?โ
Police often talk as if you need a good reason for not answering whatever questions they ask, or for not consenting to a warrantless search of your person, your car, or even your home. The ridiculous implication is that if you havenโt committed a crime, you should be happy to be subjected to random interrogations and searches. This turns the concept of due process on its head, as the cop tries to put the burden on you to prove your innocence, while implying that your failure to โcooperateโ with random harassment must be evidence of guilt.
3) โCooperating will make things easier on you.โ
The logical converse of this statement implies that refusing to answer questions and refusing to consent to a search will make things more difficult for you. In other words, you will be punished if you exercise your rights. Of course, if they coerce you into giving them a reason to fine or arrest you, they will claim that you โvoluntarilyโ answered questions and โconsentedโ to a search, and will pretend there was no veiled threat of what they might do to you if you did not willingly โcooperate.โ
(Such tactics are also used by prosecutors and judges via the procedure of โplea-bargaining,โ whereby someone accused of a crime is essentially told that if he confesses guiltโthus relieving the government of having to present evidence or prove anythingโthen his suffering will be reduced. In fact, โplea bargainingโ is illegal in many countries precisely because it basically constitutes coerced confessions.)
4) โWeโll just get a warrant.โ
Cops may try to persuade you to โconsentโ to a search by claiming that they could easily just go get a warrant if you donโt consent. This is just another ploy to intimidate people into surrendering their rights, with the implication again being that whoever inconveniences the police by requiring them to go through the process of getting a warrant will receive worse treatment than one who โcooperates.โ But by definition, one who is threatened or intimidated into โconsentingโ has not truly consented to anything.
5.) We have someone who will testify against you
Police โinformantsโ are often individuals whose own legal troubles have put them in a position where they can be used by the police to circumvent and undermine the constitutional rights of others. For example, once the police have something to hold over one individual, they can then bully that individual into giving false, anonymous testimony which can be used to obtain search warrants to use against others. Even if the informant gets caught lying, the police can say they didnโt know, making this tactic cowardly and illegal, but also very effective at getting around constitutional restrictions.
6) โWe can hold you for 72 hours without charging you.โ
Based only on claimed suspicion, even without enough evidence or other probable cause to charge you with a crime, the police can kidnap youโor threaten to kidnap youโand use that to persuade you to confess to some relatively minor offense. Using this tactic, which borders on being torture, police can obtain confessions they know to be false, from people whose only concern, then and there, is to be released.
7) โIโm going to search you for my own safety.โ
Using so-called โTerry frisksโ (named after the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1), police can carry out certain limited searches, without any warrant or probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed, under the guise of checking for weapons. By simply asserting that someone might have a weapon, police can disregard and circumvent the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches.
U.S. courts have gone back and forth in deciding how often, and in what circumstances, tactics like those mentioned above are acceptable. And of course, police continually go far beyond anything the courts have declared to be โlegalโ anyway. But aside from nitpicking legal technicalities, both coerced confessions and unreasonable searches are still unconstitutional, and therefore โillegal,โ regardless of the rationale or excuses used to try to justify them. Yet, all too often, cops show that to them, the Fourth and Fifth Amendmentsโand any other restrictions on their powerโare simply technical inconveniences for them to try to get around. In other words, they will break the law whenever they can get away with it if it serves their own agenda and power, and they will ironically insist that they need to do that in order to catch โlaw-breakersโ (the kind who donโt wear badges).
Of course, if the above tactics fail, police can simply bully people into confessingโfalsely or truthfullyโand/or carry out unconstitutional searches, knowing that the likelihood of cops having to face any punishment for doing so is extremely low. Usually all that happens, even when a search was unquestionably and obviously illegal, or when a confession was clearly coerced, is that any evidence obtained from the illegal search or forced confession is excluded from being allowed at trial. Of course, if there is no trialโeither because the person plea-bargains or because there was no evidence and no crimeโthe โexclusionary ruleโ creates no deterrent at all. The police can, and do, routinely break the law and violate individual rights, knowing that there will be no adverse repercussions for them having done so.
Likewise, the police can lie under oath, plant evidence, falsely charge people with โresisting arrestโ or โassaulting an officer,โ and commit other blatantly illegal acts, knowing full well that their fellow gang membersโofficers, prosecutors and judgesโwill almost never hold them accountable for their crimes. Even much of the general public still presumes innocence when it comes to cops accused of wrong-doing, while presuming guilt when the cops accuse someone else of wrong-doing. But this is gradually changing, as the amount of video evidence showing the true nature of the โStreet Gang in Blueโ becomes too much even for many police-apologists to ignore.
