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Comment by PopePompus | Hacker News Reader

Which is always true, at least in the US. The police are allowed to lie to you during questioning. They are allowed to claim they have evidence that they do not have. No amount of lying on their part will invalidate any "confession" they obtain from you. But if you even inadvertently tell the police something that is untrue, you can end up in prison for that, even if you committed no other crime. NEVER talk to the police, if there is any chance they suspect you are involved with a crime.

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I’ve never understood why the police needs to lie. In Sweden, the police is not allowed to lie but may however withold information or ”speculate” how the circumstances and evidence will be interpreted at trial. The prosecutors still win 90% of cases.

They should need to fix it then, so that the police are not allowed to lie to you (but are allowed to withhold information, or be deceptive, or lie when they are not on duty and don't have a police uniform), but you are allowed to tell the police untrue stuff as long as it does not constitute filing a false police report or accusing someone else of a crime that they have not committed, or a few other exceptions (e.g. abusing the emergency service).

Actually I missed a few things. Both sides should be allowed to do the following: Refuse to answer a question (except asking the police to see a copy of a warrant or their police identification (they can refuse you to touch their police identification though)), or claim to not know something or forget something (even if that is untrue). And if someone nevertheless says something untrue even in a way which is not permitted, if there is a reasonable chance to believe it would be inadvertent, then they are forgiven (and if they are the police, may be allowed to try again later (if the person they are interrogating is still a suspect), even though the first attempt at arresting them didn't count).

> Which is always true, at least in the US. The police are allowed to lie to you during questioning. They are allowed to claim they have evidence that they do not have. No amount of lying on their part will invalidate any "confession" they obtain from you. But if you even inadvertently tell the police something that is untrue, you can end up in prison for that, even if you committed no other crime. NEVER talk to the police, if there is any chance they suspect you are involved with a crime.

While police are allowed to lie, are they allowed to lie to you with regards to what rights you may or may not have? Naively, it would seem so but I'm not aware of any language explicitly allowing deceit on the part of police.

You're looking for the wrong thing. There's no language explicitly DISallowing deceit on the part of the police.

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