Criminal defense attorney here. Allow me to share with you my personal top ten “don’t do these when being arrested” moments, all of which I have personally had to deal with from clients.
- Don’t resist arrest. When the handcuffs come out, you cannot talk your way out of the situation any more; cooperate, and things will be much better for you.
- Resist the temptation to “explain yourself” to the officer on your drive to the station. They are recording you — and this can be used against you. Just be quiet.
- If you are being arrested for drunk driving, don’t refuse the intoxilyzer test. You will likely be much worse off for a refusal than a bad test number. Implied consent will screw you.
- Please remember to exercise your right to remain silent. There is nothing you can say that will help you in a meaningful way. Just stop talking.
- No one likes the guy who threatens to sue everyone in sight. Just request an attorney and stop talking.
- Routine booking questions don’t fall into the category of custodial interrogations, so please don’t refuse to give officers your real name. In many jurisdictions this can be a separate offense.
- For the love of all that is holy, do not use the following phrase when interacting with the police: “I’m drunk.” It is even less helpful when shouted at the top of your lungs.
- Do not, under any circumstance, ask the officer if he or she can “look the other way just this once” while holding out money in your hand.
- Sadly, most officers do not appreciate sarcastic remarks or observations about their weight or intelligence. Surprisingly, sentencing judges don’t particularly care for it either.
- Officers are not scared of attorneys. Don’t think that name dropping or threats of lawsuits will get an officer to leave you alone. Pro tip: it won’t.
I just read an answer from a criminal defense attorney. Although he’s a credible expert, I doubt that he himself has ever been thrown to the floor, pepper sprayed, cuffed, stuffed, and booked…
Here’s what happened. I picked up my daughter on a non-custodial day. It was not the brightest thing I’ve ever done. Add to that the fact that I had already had my first 5150, and you can see hit shit got bad fast.
I brought my daughter by her mother’s beauty salon. I didn’t like the fact that my estranged wife was allowing her boyfriend, a man I had never met, to pick up our daughter and spend hours alone with her. I told my soon-to-be-ex that I wanted to talk to her when she finished work, and that our daughter would be with me (most kidnappers don’t usually bring the child to the other parent’s place of business to demonstrate that they actually have the child, but I digress).
She called 911. And, all these years later, I can understand why, but still I submit that our daughter was not being kidnapped.
The cops were waiting for me when I got home. I was staying at my mom’s, and she told me that the police I had been by. I didn’t know that they were still watching the house. I decided to request a civil stand by. I was about to call my daughter’s mom, and since I knew she was hysterical, I wanted a police presence to make sure shit didn’t get any worse than it had already gotten ( I had no idea how bad it already was).
Again, kidnappers don’t call the police and alert them of their whereabouts. My dad was a sergeant of the SFPD for about 28 years before he retired. I had called the number so many times when I was a kid that I remembered it all those years later. I told the dispatcher my name, my address, and what had happened. He promised to send a squad car in the next twenty minutes.
As I placed the receiver down on the base, the door burst open and three cops walked in. My hand was still holding the phone. I looked at the cops, looked at the phone, looked back at the cops when it hit me; these are not my cops…
They surrounded me like three hyenas about to take down a water buffalo. One of them was salivating. I knew the look, and I knew that an ass kicking was imminent. The sergeant, an overzealous woman who stood about 5′2″, positioned herself in front of me. She spoke, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the memory of my father’s rants about affirmative action and how it had destroyed the department.
She placed her hand on my wrist. That was it. She never said, “You’re under arrest.” I think she thought I was crazy, and was trying to keep me calm. But, I’d been training in self-defense for decades by then, so I reflexively dropped my elbow to my side. I didn’t hit, kick, bite, or spit. I simply moved my arm.
“HE’S RESISTING!” She shouted.
“Resisting what?!?!” I demanded. But by then it was too late. The cops on either side crashed into me, and the physics of the melee caused them to bounce off me on either side. I had a moment to think that this is how a pinball feels when it’s caught between two bumpers and the score piles up, while the lights flash and the bells ring. And, I realized that I was the calmest person in the entire room.
When the cop on my right started banging on my leg, I gradually acquiesced. As my knee started to bend, he threw himself on top of me and caved me in on myself. He slammed me to the floor and my left arm was pinned behind my back.
“Give me your arm! Give me your arm!”
“I can’t. It’s stuck underneath me.”
“Give me your arm! Give me your arm!”
I wanted to give the guy my arm, but it was pinned, and I couldn’t move. And then the sergeant pulled out a can of pepper spray.
“I’M GOING TO SPRAY HIM!”
And she did. She placed the canister an inch from my eye while I begged for her not to spray me. And if you’ve never accidentally inserted a hot metal skewer into your eye at a cookout and felt your eyeball melt inside of your head, you have no idea what pepper spray feels like from an inch away.
And then I really lost my shit…
“YOU BITCH! YOU CUNextTuesday! YOU FUCKING LITTLE DYKE!”
She held the can nozzle so long that the two other cops began to gag. When one finally caught his breath, he put me in a choke hold. I almost went out, but he let me go in time to catch my breath. As I sat on the floor, beaten, cuffed, my eye smoldering in my socket, all I could ask was, “Why did you spray me?”
I don’t really have any intelligent answer as to what NOT to do when you’re being arrested, because by then it’s too late.
Far better never to get arrested in the first place…
