I have heard frequently that if you ask an undercover cop ‘Are you a cop’ they have to answer truthfully. Now, I don’t buy this for a number of reasons. What is more interesting, is that one friend of mine said an undercover cop could ask ‘Can you get me high’, and that wouldn’t constitute entrapment (but saying he wasn’t a cop would).
Can you shed some light on this? I’m fairly certain about the ‘Are you a cop’ bit, but I’d like some clarification about how entrapment works. If I follow a cop doing 80mph (no lights, etc), can I get off the hook?
Surprise – undercover cops are allowed to lie. The old adage that you can ask a undercover cop “are you a cop” and find out the truth is absolutely bogus – at least according to a cop who called in to the KROQ morning show, and even a trivial amount of common sense.
When judging such issues, one simple method is to ask yourself: “if this were true, what would the result be, and does that match reality?” Here goes: if you could ask a cop “are you a cop” and he had to say “yes,” every criminal in the country would very quickly learn this, and it would be the first question they ask anyone they met, certainly before they did anything illegal. Being an undercover cop would quickly become useless, as there would be no way to hide one’s identity. Now – does this match reality? I leave that answer up to you.
Entrapment is a totally different issue. My understanding is it is entrapment only if a cop somehow persuades you to do an illegal act. For example, the police in the San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles area) opened up a “fencing” operation for stolen goods. They carefully kept track of their “customers,” and ultimately made many arrests. This was not entrapment because the perps (oh – cop lingo) were thieves regardless of the police department’s actions, even though fencing itself is illegal. However, if the police were to recruit someone off the street and ask them to rob a house, that would be entrapment. These are fairly black-and-white situations, but I suspect a lot of entrapment issues are not. There is probably a litmus test for entrapment, but I really don’t know what it is.
Now, the question of can an undercover cop ask you to get him high at least raises an interesting question: can you use a carefully constructed entrapment issue to deduce whether someone is or is not a cop?