A Boring Dystopia

Reasonable suspicion of a crime. You need to say the whole thing.

The number of cops that thinks "I've got reasonable suspicion of you being suspicious." Has always been too goddamn high. You need reasonable suspicion OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY. Being suspicious isn't a crime. Being black or Latino in a subway station isn't a crime. Even stop and identify laws need to be based in reasonable suspicion of a crime because the 4th amendment demands it.

Sigh. The responses you got really dishearten me. We really are moving fast to a binary world where everything is good or bad and any opportunity for nuance is thrown out the window.

You are of course 100% correct.

Good cops? You mean the ones that stand and watch the bad cops?

There are no good cops.

Well good thing there are no good cops 🅰️©️🆎

Not anymore.

"Reasonable articulable suspicion", is the official way of saying that.

"A good explanation" is very undefined. The police has to have reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime, and they have to be able to articulate, ie explain that said reasonable suspicion of having committed a specific crime.

They just make it up all the time though, but most of the cops don't even seem to know the law. They just do what other cops do. And never have to take responsibility for breaking the law.

So the 4th amendment of the US Constitution, which outlines the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, protects people from being forced to verbally identify or show documents of identification without reasonable cause, among other things. What that has been interpreted to mean by the SCOTUS is that, while they can always request ID without it being a lawful order, a request you can deny without consequence, any policy or state/local ID law that requires identification upon officer request without any other reasonable cause is unlawful. In other words they cannot demand id for no actual reason nor punish you for failing to ID without said reason.

At minimum, they need "reasonable and articulable suspicion" of a real crime that has happened, is happening, or is about to happen, in order to legally require you to ID yourself in every state, district, and city in the country (with the exception of if you are driving a car and get pulled over for a lawful infraction, you must provide your license to prove you're allowed to drive the vehicle). "Reasonable and articulable suspicion" means that there are real facts that can be pointed to that a reasonable person would deem as a likely indication of crime, not hunches or racial profiling. Some states have higher levels of requirements in order to ID someone, but none can have lower requirements.

BUT, the unfortunate and infuriating truth is that they do not need to actually explain their reasonable and articulate suspicion to you at the time, which ultimately means that they dont have to have it until they justify it to the court much later. They could be just demanding it for no reason unlawfully. Or they could be demanding it because they just saw you pick pocket someone, or someone pointed you out as someone that threatened them, or you match the description of the person that just broke a bunch of windows nearby. All of those things qualify at reasonable suspicion allowing them to ID you in places where that is the minimum requirement. Even if you did nothing wrong, you could still match a description but aren't the right guy, or they thought that saw you do something unlawful but were actually mistaken. It doesn't matter. They still have reasonable suspicion unless you somehow factually dispel that suspicion. If you do not dispel that suspicion (maybe because they didn't even explain their reasons in the first place) and they demand ID, you can be lawfully required to present it even if you did absolutely nothing wrong and don't have a clue why they are asking at all.

In other words, if they demand ID and don't explain why, there's functionally way to discern at the time if the demand is lawful or unlawful even if you have committed no crimes. So you either comply or go to jail and argue your case in court later, regardless of the truth. And btw, even if they had absolutely no reasonable suspicion to lawfully demand ID at the time, they can just lie to justify it. If the lie is not demonstrably shown to be a lie by other evidence, it's assumed to be true. So... enjoy your "freedoms", I guess.

Or a man with a gun kidnaps you.

I think it depends on the state? But from what I know in at least some states you don't have to do so unless there's reasonable suspicion of some crime having been committed. IANAL.

As an individual, its probably easier to just show ID, but as a society its a bad idea to let this become the norm. Because the next step is just checkpoints.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_checkpoint#Military_use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_checkpoint

Very authoritarian. You shouldn't have to justify your existence, the government should be the ones with the burden to prove you did something wrong, you shouldn't need to prove your innocence.

Are you required to always carry ID in your country?

…it soon became evident that this net was cast too wide for any private agency. Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends—people residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this matter: "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."

• Upton Sinclar, The Profits of Religion (1917)_

They know they're being racially profiled and didn't feel like playing along and making life easier for the cops.

Because people want to be left alone without being harassed for no reason by dirty cops looking to increase their arrest stats and get more promotions.

It's awful not being left alone. For example, I know someone on lemmy who was viewing this sublemmy, didn't do anything, got banned, and was so upset he actually died. The point is, people should be able to be left alone and do what they fucking want people being assholes.

As others have said we are not required to provide ID unless there is a cause. Stopping 2 people without stating why means no cause and they have the right to say no and it should end with ok have a nice day, but our rights are tested more and more. Some good news is its generally an easy case for a lawyer to pickup and win meaning they could get a payout from the city. The sad news is generally nothing will be done about the cops who abuse their job and cause the tax payers more money in lawsuits that should never happen.

When assessing the degree and quality of liberty in a country, one of the factors considered in academic political science is the requirement of personal identification by law enforcement. It use to be a trope of Hollywood cinema that takes place in the Eastern Bloc (Warsaw Pact countries) that ordinary citizens and abvious tourists were routinely harassed by law enforcement for their papers, a stark reminder that here in the states you can even cross state lines without identifying yourself.

It's getting more interesting as law enforcement is pre-emptively collecting biometric data on school kids and other vulnerable demographics.

Currently wending through state courts is the controversy of using biometric data to identify suspects, which may be regarded as an unresobable search from which we (all, citizens or otherwise) are supposed to be protected, according to the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

In this specific incident, the NYPD is notoriously racist and aggressive, so this may be contempt of cop while black As the adage goes, you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride. This assures these young men will have a bad week regardless of their guilt of any wrongdoing.

It's literally a fourth amendment right. I'm not cool with any of my rights being infringed upon. No one should be ok with this.

We are not. And I can describe having a spine for you, but I can't have a spine for you.