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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   30173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Not at all. Cops don't just learn facts from the air. They run background checks which take time to run, and are, frankly, difficult to read.

A person who not only doesn't speak English, but doesn't speak a language that a police station is likely to have an available translator for is going to have a long interaction just because a lot of that time is going to be finding a translator

If he needed a translator, doesn't that cast further doubt on the claim by the arresting officer "who wrote in his report that Lopez-Gomez said he was in the country illegally" that the interaction indicated Lopez-Gomez was confessing to a crime?

But doesn’t that cast further doubt on the suspect?

Everyone legally in the country being fluent in the lingua franca would be nice, but not speaking the lingua franca is not evidence of being in the country illegally.

It isn’t dispositive but it is evidence

Have you ever tried to have a conversation with someone who has little-to-no English language skills about something? It's entirely possible the dude repeated a combination of sounds back at the officer without really understanding what he was saying. Or that he was knowingly admitting to skipping border checkpoints.

It's entirely possible the dude repeated a combination of sounds back at the officer without really understanding what he was saying

To quote My Cousin Vinny, "I shot the clerk!?"

It's entirely possible the dude repeated a combination of sounds back at the officer without really understanding what he was saying.

That's my point.

I mean, if we were introducing that "confession" as evidence at a trial, you may have a point. What actually was happening when he was being held was he was in custody pending an investigation. This guys statements were basically the jumping off point for the investigation which eventually revealed he was a US citizen by birth. Its not like the police would have had that information available on a street corner when they were probably having trouble getting enough information on him to even run a proper criminal background check.

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