In Ohio, if the statement misleads or is intended to mislead and has relevance, it can be
Falsification or Obstructing Official business.
The Fed’s have eliminated the “Exculpatory No” doctrine, so your Jurisdiction/State may or may not honor it?
Not exactly. You may want to just shut up instead of lying.
If I ask you if you have any sharp objects in your pocket before a lawful search, and you say no and I end up pricking myself of the needle in you pocket, I can charge you with both Obstructing and battery to a peace officer.
Moderator Note
Dial it back quite a bit, please. This is GQ. Stick to the facts, and attack the post, not the poster. Take the accusations of lying to the Pit if you must, and do not tell others to shut up in this forum.
:rolleyes: You’re kidding me, right? Did you read the context of my post by reading the previous posts?
I was advising that during a police encounter it is better to shut up [remain silent] rather than telling a lie to an officer.
I was not telling DrDeth to shut up, I was not calling DrDeth a liar.
There was nothing inappropriate about that post.
Your bad!:smack:
Yeah, it seemed pretty clear to me that he was telling the “hypothetical liar to the cops” to shut up, not DrDeth.
Whoops, my bad.
Someone reported it as an accusation of lying, and with that bias in mind before I even read the post, I obviously misunderstood.
My apologies. Carry on.
I agree with Bill Maher on this. Cops are too focused on protecting their own safety. They should be trained that it is public safety they are to protect, and civil liberties they are to respect. This obviously makes the job quite a bit more dangerous, but if they cannot abide that, it’s not the military: they are free to quit and seek a safer vocation.
In Virginia, at least, it is a crime to “knowingly and willfully make any materially false statement or representation to a law-enforcement officer or an animal control officer . . . who is in the course of conducting an investigation of a crime by another.” Va. Code 18.2-460. This is generally interpreted as requiring the lie to be made by someone other than the suspect. See Atkins v. Commonwealth (“By its plain language, subsection D only applies to a false statement or representation made while the officer is investigating a “crime by another,” which necessarily means a crime committed by someone other than the person making the false statement or representation.”).
So, if the cop asks you whether you have drugs in the car and you lie, then I don’t think you have violated the statute because you are the one whose criminality is being investigated (all references to you are not intended to imply you personally).
I’m not questioning the veracity of what you wrote. I believe you. But I am astounded that making everyone get out of a vehicle during a routine stop is legal and routine.
I am even more astounded that making a driver rotate in his seat so his legs are outside the car and his car door is open can be legal and routine. What if the driver says he has a bad back and it would be painful and perhaps injurious to follow this apparently legal order? What about the cars whizzing by? Aren’t they likely to tear the door off the hinges?
It’s perfectly legal on both. Though I’m sure if someone had a physical reason not to it’s taken into account.
If you’ve been reading you’ll remember that neither is something I do. I think it’s safer for both the occupants and me if they remain in the vehicle. Especially when a motorcycle is involved.
And most officers I know feel the same. But there are a few that make everyone get out and sit on the curb or stand near the right front corner of the car. I understand some of the reasons they have for doing it, I just don’t happen to agree.
I was watching a Cops-type show last night and wanted to get your impression of this scenario. We’ve done it in the “openly carrying assault-type weapons” threads, and I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, and if it is I’ll take it elsewhere, but I think it is keeping with the spirits. Here is the scenario:
A guy is opening carrying an AR-15 in a city area and there is a report about it and about five cops show up. The guy starts his spiel about how open carry is legal and the cops have no RAS to stop him, that they are thugs, is he free to leave, etc.
The officer very politely explains that he does not know what type of weapon that the man is carrying and that as it looks identical, at least from a distance, to an illegal fully automatic M-16, and he has a RAS that the man is illegally in possession of a fully automatic weapon.
After about a minute of bitching back and forth, the officer makes the man put his hands out to his side while the officer takes the rifle, unloads it, inspects it, verifies that it operates semi-auto only, politely declares that his RAS has been dissipated, hands the rifle back to him and tells him that he is free to go.
The segment ends with the man walking away and bitching that this was not RAS as there are vanishly few full auto M-16s around and that the mere possession of an AR-15 cannot rise to RAS.
What say you? I am undecided at this point as the officer makes a decent, yet not entirely convincing to me, argument.
I would say the above scenario fails in the “R” portion of RAS. There are so few full-auto M-16s that it is unreasonable to think that the man was carrying a machine gun. Even if it were an automatic rifle, where is the reasonable suspicion that the man doesn’t possess the tax stamp allowing legal ownership? I suspect the interaction was technically legal, but it surely also represents de facto harassment and suppression of rights.
Not reasonable, but anyone open carrying a AR15 around in a city area is a jerk, so I have no sympathy.
Holstered sidearm? Sure, fine, if he really wants to.
It’s absolute crap. Is that officer at the local range checking everyone’s rifle? The AR is an immensely popular firearm. Unless he could clearly articulate that he could observe a selector switch it is a bad stop.
Kind of reminds me of the stories I have heard about officers detaining open carriers so they could check that their weapon is not stolen. I don’t know how often that has actually happened, but if it happened once it’s too much!
I have brought this up before on these boards:
Every now and then, usually around Christmas, you’ll hear stories about cops pulling people over on public roads to give them a gift card. No traffic violation involved. It’s either to give an Xmas gift to someone driving a junky car, or as a reward for being observed following traffic laws.
But it happens on public roads involving a full stop, lights and siren.
Myself and other officers I’ve discussed this with cannot fathom With no RAS of a violation HTF are these not illegal seizures?
If any department around here tried this the DA, if not the State Attorney General would shit.
I do not think the police have a reasonable suspicion to think it is a fully automatic gun. As mentioned fully auto M-16s are very rare among the public and AR-15’s are common among the public.
That said the Supreme Court has gutted the 4th amendment over the years and have given very wide latitude to the police when it comes to them deciding who they can stop. Put another way, if this guy complained his way all the way to the Supreme Court over this I’d be willing to bet he’d lose and the court would allow that stop.
I dunno…police in places like the UK somehow manage to not keep killing criminals they are after and I do not think British police are victims more often than US police.
And FTR on the list of most dangerous jobs in the US police officer ranks as #18 so, while not “safe”, it is not especially dangerous either. I think they can manage ok without being so quick to “protect” themselves.
You would be wrong in all your assumptions. The more typical situation is that the driver or passenger has a handgun, which is far easier to hide and used in the confined space of a vehicle. And the person with the gun is more likely to start shooting when the officer either steps up to the driver’s window, or when the exchange turns from “do you know why I stopped you,” to “would you step out of the vehicle please.”
Yeah, I’m just waiting for one of these to backfire, like when an officer pulls someone over thinking that the driver would be a nice person to give a gift card to and once he gets to the driver’s window he finds the driver drunk, the floor board filled with liquor bottles and a dead body in the backseat gutted and stuffed full of cocaine with machine guns in each hand.
When it gets to court it is pretty clearly an illegal seizure and the evidence would have to be suppressed. The driver probably gets to keep the gift card as well.