This all seems like very good advice when you are, or may be, a suspect. How about when you are a potential witness? For example, "Did you see anyone around your neighbor's house last night?- Someone broke in and we are investigating"

If no one answered questions like that, it seems to me that it would be much harder to catch any bad guys.

This could be a case where the prof's opening reason "it can not possibly help you" is true for you personally, but is not true from a societal perspective.

Of course, you should help out the cops if you are not a suspect. We're talking about ways to not help the cops build a case against you. I've called the cops plenty of times and I've helped out in a few investigations where I knew some stuff they didn't. But when you get pulled over, you can assume you are the suspect.

I have one local cop who is notorious for little tricks of the trade. E.g., he pulls someone over for "careless driving," a term of art giving him carte blanc to invetsigate anything from DUI to whatever will allow him to poke around and mess with you. He'll say things like go stand by your car. ..suspect complies and leans against the car while waiting. Then if he is trying to prove a DUI based on his observations he will testify "He was so intoxicated he had to lean on his car for support in standing." If you're wearing a baseball cap normally, he will tell you to turn it around while he is administering field sobriety...on the video you look like a peckerwood wearing a hat backwards. Or when administering a PBT on the side of the road he will gradually pull it away so you appear to be leaning forward/staggering on the video.

If you are pulled over with flashing lights and a person approaches your car with a gun, nightstick, taser, a PBT and a badge, you can bet he is not there to do you any favors. His investigation of you began the second he saw you coming down the road.

Back to the video...while the law professor and the police chief were from two different perspectives, the chief reinforced everything the professor said.

I still hate myself for ever agreeing to do a field sobriety test. Cop let me go, but I was an idiot or agreeing to help him collect evidence against me. Never again. And no, you don't have to put your baseball cap on backwards. Just keep asking him to call his supervisor to the scene and/or if you're free to go. I'll take a speeding ticket any day over what else could happen by playing cops' legal gotcha games.

Ah, this is the other point that my NY Trooper friend made... apparently (and keep in mind I have no legal training whatsoever) there is a clear division (legally) between the field interrogation (how are you doing tonight sir?) and being detained (stand outside of your car while we await the arrival of the dog), and making the jump from one to the other requires greater burden on the officer, i.e. they had better have a clear reason to detain you. Can someone with greater legal prowess shed some more light on this issue?

The point of asking if you're free to go or are being detained is to start the clock. Generally, they need a pretty good reason to keep you more than 20 min. after you utter those words. If you're amicably playing along with their reindeer games, then you're gonna have a hard time playing that card in court. As soon as the stop goes beyond something reasonable like speeding and you think the cop is fishing, that's when you ask if you're free to go. I'd keep doing it to make sure it's recorded on his dash cam.

Basically an officer can make a brief, non-intrusive inquiry as to your i.d./activity. Beyond that he must have reasonable suspicion that a criminal violation has occurred to go any further. Even more to detain you (seizure) or search you.

SCOTUS has recently ruled that a stop for a routine traffic violation does not give authority to search you/your car.

And thus the motto to live by: FTP.

OK, I have had a number of run ins with the law, some were my stupidity. Not a big deal when you are being stupid. But I just had an incident the other night on base with a little rat.

I was on base and just left the commissary. I needed to make a phone call and decided to have a smoke at the same time. So like I normally do I look for a place where my bad habit will not bother someone. It was the end of the aisle I was parked on of the large pretty much empty parking lot. So I scoot on out there and park my big ole truck across some stalls. Now keep in mind there is not another car anywhere near me within 150 to 200 meters.

So up comes one of our rent a cops. Young wise a$$ as it turns out to be. I am on my phone and wave to him. He stops and yells out that I need to move my car. I say "what do you mean" . He yells out that I need to park in a slot. So the whole situation becomes apparent when he looks to the other rent a cop and starts laughing. So, knowing where I am, I ask him if he is serious. He restates his order. So being the type that I am, I move the car and get his car number, take photos of the parking lot and note the time. There is no doubt the little turd is jacking me up.

Now there is poetic justice in this. I don't normally like to where my rank but this POS deserved it. So I call his watch officer, his captain and let them know that the little turd was abusing his power. I identify myself as "Captain" and as the COS of a Regiment and tell them that I do not like being put into a position that I have to flash my rank. I also tell them this little turd has a power trip going on and that he has no common sense. AND what really concerns me is this is my base and what is he doing to my young sailors, i.e. if he is jacking up O6's for no reason he is jacking up Seamen Recruits. I did not let it go and the little num nuts gets a day on the beach as we do not need to deal with the HR issues if in the Opinion of the CO the turd is violating the contract. If felt good and I think that the POS learned a lesson that Two can dance that dance. I have seen him on the base and he stays clear of me, but the real damage was done to the POS. I can see him when he needs help and gets none, so much for serve and protect.

My dad was in the Air Force so I grew up on base. When I started driving one cop seemed to have it in for me. He gave me a ticket for 26 MPH in a 25 zone. If I got two tickets I could not drive on base. I drove 20 MPH on base after that. The second I was off base I would floor it to red-line.

The day I left home for good I really wanted to see that cop. I was thrilled to see him standing next to his truck real close to the gate. I did a doughnut on base right in front of the gaurd shack and left. I have not been back to Maxwell AFB since. I have always figured he re-upped waiting for my return.

In the early 1970s a local bully became a local PD. He was routine PD bully & A-hole etc. Even other cops don't like him.

One midnight-8am shift he is cooping under the water tank during a 15-20F winter night. It's a fav hang out as it's on "off-limits" to the public. I'm working inside in the water purification plant and notice who's my neighbor tonight.

I fire up another pump and water well and overflow the tank on his patrol car. In 30 seconds his car is an ice cube. The dirt around the area is now a slush frozen slippery path to exit. There is only one place in town that this could ever happen. He has to return to HQ with his cubed car. He was the rant joke for a very long time.

Whether he knew it was me or not didn't matter. Retaliation was not an issue.

That sounds like a scene from a movie. If it isn't it should be. A classic of the old addage, "truth is stranger than fiction."

what is a day on the beach?

I'm going to say that means he was suspended for a day, but I could be wrong.

It means he got a day suspension from the base and probably not paid by his contractor boss.

R/

Nope you are spot on, its an old Navy term.

Police stop more than 1 million people on street

NEW YORK – A teenager trying to get into his apartment after school is confronted by police. A man leaving his workplace chooses a different route back home to avoid officers who roam a particular street.

These and hundreds of thousands of other Americans in big cities have been stopped on the street by police using a law-enforcement practice called stop-and-frisk that alarms civil libertarians but is credited by authorities with helping reduce crime.

Police in major U.S. cities stop and question more than a million people each year —a sharply higher number than just a few years ago. Most are black and Hispanic men. Many are frisked, and nearly all are innocent of any crime, according to figures gathered by The Associated Press.

And the numbers are rising at the same time crime rates are dropping.

Ronnie Carr's experience was typical: He was fumbling with his apartment door after school in Brooklyn when plainclothes officers flashed their badges.

"What are you doing here?" one asked, as they rifled through his backpack and then his pockets. The black teenager stood there, quiet and nervous, and waited.

Carr said the officers told him they stopped him because he looked suspicious peeking in the windows. He explained that he had lost his keys. Twenty minutes later, the officers left. Carr was not arrested or cited with any offense.

"I felt bad, like I did something wrong," he said.

Civil liberties groups say the practice is racist and fails to deter crime. Police departments maintain it is a necessary tool that turns up illegal weapons and drugs and prevents more serious crime.

Police records indicate that officers are drawn to suspicious behavior: furtive movements, actions that indicate someone may be serving as a lookout, anything that suggests a drug deal, or a person carrying burglary tools such as a slim jim or pry bar.

The New York Police Department is among the most vocal defenders of the practice. Commissioner Raymond Kelly said recently that officers may stop as many as 600,000 people this year. About 10 percent are arrested.

"This is a proven law enforcement tactic to fight and deter crime, one that is authorized by criminal procedure law," he said.

The practice is perfectly legal. A 1968 Supreme Court decision established the benchmark of "reasonable suspicion" — a standard that is lower than the "probable cause" needed to justify an arrest.

But in the mid-1990s, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner William Bratton made stop-and-frisk an integral part of the city's law enforcement, relying on the "broken windows" theory that targeting low-level offenses helps prevent bigger ones.

Street stops started to go up, and overall crime dropped dramatically in a once-dangerous city.

Last year, New York police stopped 531,159 people, more than five times the number in 2002. Fifty-one percent of those stopped were black, 32 percent Hispanic and 11 percent white.

Not all stops are the same. Some people are just stopped and questioned. Others have their bag or backpack searched. And sometimes police conduct a full pat-down.

David Harris, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on street stops, said few searches yield weapons or drugs. And the more people are searched, the more innocent people are hassled.

"The hit rate goes down because you're being less selective about how you're doing this. That has a cost. It's not free," Harris said.

When officers make a stop, they are required to fill out a form, including the time and location of the stop and why police were suspicious. Age, race and whether the person was frisked are also recorded.

In Philadelphia, stops nearly doubled to more than 200,000 from 2007 to 2008. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter deployed an "aggressive" stop-and-frisk policy in the year since his election in November 2007 and overall crime has dropped.

In Los Angeles, where Bratton recently stepped down as police commissioner, pedestrian stops have doubled in the past six years to 244,038 in 2008. The number of people stopped in cars is higher.

About 15 percent of the stops resulted in arrests in 2002, compared with about 30 percent in 2008, according to an analysis of the data by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Several other major police departments do not keep street-stop statistics or do not release them. Chicago police refused to release numbers to the AP. Boston police say they do not keep the records. The New Orleans department is not required to keep statistics on race and pedestrian stops.

RAND, an independent research agency hired by the New York Police Department to analyze street-stop data in 2007 after public outcry, found little racial profiling. It said the raw statistics "distorted the magnitude and, at times, the existence of racially biased policing."

The NYPD continues to monitor the issue, but after the RAND analysis, officials agreed that large-scale restructuring was unnecessary.

Kelly has warned against more simplistic data reviews.

"There are 8.4 million people in New York City. That number swells to more than 10 million every work day. Police are responsible for more than 800,000 summonses and arrests annually based on the higher standard of probable cause," Kelly said.

"Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that we make 500,000 or even 600,000 stops based on the less stringent standard of reasonable suspicion."

Civil liberties groups also complain because New York police keep a database of everyone stopped — innocent or not. That makes them targets for future investigations, said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Los Angeles was forced by federal mandate to release data on street stops — including the race of those stopped — starting in 2000 after a series of scandals. The city government promised to adopt scores of reform measures under federal court supervision.

The LAPD was released from the federal decree in July, but a report last year by the ACLU in Southern California showed that blacks were still nearly three times more likely to be stopped by police than whites.

"The initial defense was: 'Because we're over-policing higher crime neighborhoods, they're predominantly populated by people of color, and that's why,'" said Peter Bibring, an ACLU attorney in Los Angeles.

But an analysis done for the ACLU in 2008 by Yale law professor Ian Ayres accounts for differences in crime rates and still shows minorities are stopped much more.

Some people who are stopped file lawsuits against the city and speak out publicly. Most just accept it.

In Harlem, George Lucas changed his route home from work to avoid a stretch of Seventh Avenue, because he kept being stopped by the police.

"The inconvenience of walking out of my way still saves me the worry and frustration about being stopped," said Lucas, 28, director of a nonprofit.

It's so common in some areas that community groups have begun offering classes on how to behave when stopped.

Courtney Bennett of the nonprofit New York City Mission Society says he regularly hosts groups of 30 men, of all ages, who feel powerless because they are stopped routinely for what they say is no reason. Carr recently attended a similar meeting for teens at another nonprofit called The Door.

Bennett is also a member of the Order of the Feather, a black fraternity that mentors young men and promotes community service. At a recent initiation ceremony in Harlem, it did not take long to find dozens of people who said they were stopped by police.

"You see these guys? They're normal guys, you know? Regular dudes," said Paul Hawkins, 22. "They've all been affected by it somehow. They were stopped, or someone they knew, or their dad or whatever. And they're not, you know, criminals."

Agree and would have done the same if for no other reason than this should not be happening and if he is doing it to officers, then you can imagine what he is doing to the grunts.

Hope he learned something from it...

BIL was witness to 2 very bad drivers finding one another. A guy on a Harley, showing off for his buddies as he pulled out of a gas station and a young guy "in a hurry" both hit head on.

BIL had it happen right next to him as he was making a left turn. He jumped out of the car to help the biker who died from head injuries moments later. (no helmet)

Turns out the guy in the car was high on Cocaine and both drivers had driving records pages long.

SIL was driving and both gave a statement to the police in an effort to help.

6 months later there is a knock on SIL's door and the police officer from the accident scene is there and gives her a improper left turn ticket.

Lawyer is hired, court case is set to get the ticket dismissed. This is huge, now they are being implicated in the death for the motorcycle rider.

Long story short, ticket was thrown out and SIL's insurance company paid $25K in payoff money to the Bikers widow. (They were in the process of a divorce) Widow's atty demanded a full financial disclosure from SIL and BIL, which was funny they are negative.

They took to $25K.

All this because he stopped to help. He vowed to me he will never stop to help nor will he give a statement to police ever again. No matter what he saw.