Police in the US also exercise significant amounts of pressure and intimidation to get people to talk and essentially criminalize themselves before a lawyer ever gets involved. [...] I think they can flat out lie to you about what your rights are, and all of these things start adding up horribly under the stress of being in custody or facing charges.
Not only in the USA, and they not only can, but will lie to you, not just about your rights. And worse.
The case of Ulvi Kulaç (alleged murderer of a 9 year old girl) was big in media when it turned out that the mentally handicapped man had been pressed into a false confession based only on the testimony of a criminal "witness". Guy spent 10 years in prison until the revision court ruled that he was innocent.
A similar case happened here some 15 or 16 years ago (that was a 11 or 12 year old boy). I refused to undergo a mass screening. Why? Well for one reason because I was innocent, and I don't want to be treated like a criminal when I'm innocent.
I was lucky enough to have the perfect alibi (I had been working in a hospital in Saigon at the time of the murder), so I was pretty sure that no real charges could possibly be pressed against me. Thus, I didn't really risk crumbling under the pressure. But even so, the amount of pressure (or should I say "abuse") was massive.
Sure enough, police did break the law, and they lied about it. The guy in charge denied talking to my neighbour. It's funny how my neighbour got the impression that police asked him whether he had seen me sneak after children. After all, that didn't happen! I'll not go into detail about other things they did (it's long past, and it wouldn't lead anywhere).
On the paper, you are innocent unless there is hard evidence against you, but in reality, they can just do whatever they want and later deny it happened, and that's it. Nothing you can do. The police man bluntly told me at one time: "Well, you have the possibility to prove that you are innocent, and we'll stop".
That's just the point, though... you
don't have to prove that you're innocent, and you shouldn't. It's your constitutional right, and it's your
duty to defend that right, little as you may.
At the same time, that very same police does next to nothing to catch real criminals. Which is of course not their fault, but the fault of this pest of '68 judges. I can see why police is the way they are, it's out of frustration.
Because whenever police does what they
should do, like in the prominent case of Gäfgen, they are punished for it (In that case, the guy had kidnapped and murdered a boy, he was guilty as can be, was caught getting the money and frankly admitted the kidnapping. He refused to tell where the boy -- who was assumed alive -- was to be found. So police came up with some threats, until he led them to the corpse. Police got big abuse for that.). So yeah, I can kind of understand why they're not very motivated risking their lives for nothing. But still... doesn't make it better for you when you're innocent.
Nonetheless, I'm aware that I live in paradise here, comparatively... in the USA you can call yourself kind of lucky if you arrive at the police department alive at all, and if you aren't put in a cell with 15 gang members who beat you up.
