On Wednesday, September 9th, Students for a Just Society hosted their first event: Know Your Rights, a workshop dedicated to understanding our civil rights. The workshop was led by trial attorney Justin Moore who served as a prosecutor at the Dallas County District Attorney’s office prior to establishing his private practice which focuses on civil rights and partnered with civil rights advocacy app Reyets. The two main takeaways are: always stay silent, and become a fact-finder.
The first main takeaway seems easy to say when you are not being confronted by the police. It’s easy to sit in your childhood bedroom, listen to a zoom call and think “I can absolutely stay silent around the police,” but it’s not always that easy. Police officers, while doing their jobs, can become increasingly aggressive and threatening, so our initial gut response may be to get emotional, try to explain ourselves or the context, or attempt to deescalate the situation, but any of those actions may lead to more aggression or be seen as evading arrest. At its worst, your words can be twisted and used against you in court for charges you may not even know you're implicating yourself in. It is law enforcement's job to enforce the law, not to empathize with your side of the story, so your take on the situation can wait until you've been cleared.
The second takeaway from this workshop is that everyone should become a fact-finder when interacting with the police. This is especially true for bystanders, so if you see a police interaction taking place, take a step back, pull out your phone, and make it extremely obvious that you are filming the interaction. It is important to first take a step back to show that you are not trying to interfere with anything, and it’s just as important to make it obvious that everyone is being filmed. Justin reiterated that the goal whenever the police confronts you is to not get convicted, so the more “facts” there are to show that you did everything correctly, the better. A video can sometimes provide the public and a courtroom with an objective account of what happened between law enforcement and a civilian, so recording an interaction while it's happening can be more important than you may realize at the time.
I personally have never interacted with the police; I have never even been pulled over, so this workshop was pretty much all brand new information for me. I never learned anything like this in my 12 years of public school education, nor did I learn this in my undergraduate justice class, but thankfully I have learned it now. The app Reyets that helped to put on this event can assist in carrying out all the lessons I just learned. It has sections with common questions so you can quickly see what your rights are in any given situation, and it has a camera built into the app, so whether you are watching a police interaction or are interacting with the police yourself, you can quickly access everything you need. In a perfect world, I would not need to have this app or spend my Wednesday night learning about my rights. We are not in a perfect world, and most of us still have plenty to learn about our rights. Let's hope more workshops like the Know Your Rights Workshop and apps like Reyets can keep teaching us more and more about what we should already know.
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