Even if they’re arresting the wrong person.
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Tell them your name. Show them your ID. Comply with their demands. Don’t run, struggle, or resist if they take you into custody. Never mind missing medical appointments, losing your job, no one being there to pick up your kids after school, being deprived of your medications while waiting in jail for your bond hearing, your family not knowing where you are, etc. etc.; you can sort all that out later. If you’re innocent, you have nothing to worry about. There’s never a reason not to cooperate with the police.
This thinking is brought to you after every wrongful arrest or police killing of a black person by law-and-order conservatives who’ve never been racially profiled or had someone kneel on their neck for 8½ minutes and can’t imagine what that’s like.
I understand their thinking. At Kyle Rittenhouse’s age (17), I was a Goldwater conservative. I’d read his book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” and was totally persuaded. Conservative philosophy seemed to hold all the answers to the world’s problems, because at that age, the world still seems uncomplicated. Good guys and bad guys. White hats and black hats. Good and evil. Everything goes in one box or the other. There’s no middle box. Gray areas and nuances aren’t visible yet at that level of life experience. And in those days, the only way a teenager could lay hands on an assault rifle was by joining the Army or Marines, and then only under intense supervision.
The idea of a 17-year-old taking an AR-15 to a riot would’ve struck everyone as crazy then. You wouldn’t see a President of the United States defending such a thing. America had demagogues in those days too (I don’t consider Goldwater one; only wrong about a lot of things, and perhaps right on some things), as it always does, but they weren’t that crazy, and they weren’t President.
Only the 17 and 18 year olds were taking guns to protests, only they were in the National Guard or army.
You are allowed to ask if you are free to go or if you are being detained. If free to go then go. Give them your name, but beyond that politely decline to answer their questions asking for an attorney. This is doubly true if you are guilty of something. Keep your trap shut to the cops and the folks inside with you. What you say can make you guilty of something.