Note that my statement is only in conjunction with you commiting a crime or violation, and the cop asking you for ID in relation to that. If there’s no offence, then the cop has no right to demand anything from you.
The officer must have a positive identification in order to process whatever steps he’s taking to deal with the offence. That identification can be you providing a government issued ID, it can be the officer taking you downtown for a more thorough investigation of who you are. What I really doubt it’s going to be is “Oh, you don’t have ID, guess I can’t do anything even though I watched you commit an offence, carry on.” or “No ID? I’ll just make this ticket out to the name you provided, Mr I. C. Weener.”
At best, you’re going to have to hope the cop thinks it’s an unimportant enough issue to not actually go forward with the identification, in which case, calling him a nazi isn’t exactly paving the way for that outcome.
Exactly. He doesn’t have the authority to compel you to produce an I.D.
Yes, he can take you downtown or whatever, if he decides it’s worth his trouble, but you don’t have to be carrying an I.D., so you don’t have to give him one, and he can only ask, not demand, it of you.
You belong to one of those old fashioned Phileas Fogg / Bertie Wooster type clubs? Awesome.
I wish we had something like that in L.A. Not for reasons of exclusivity, but just to have a place to hang out where you get to know everybody and feel comfortable. We have that kind of cohesiveness, more or less, in university, but once out in the adult world it usually doesn’t exist.
And the staff gets to know you and your particular preferences in a way that doesn’t happen in public restaurants.
What does this even mean? He doesn’t have the “authority” to compel you provide an ID, but if you don’t he can take you into custody and you spend the next few hours in the police station while they determine your identity.
Granted, he can’t make you produce an ID that you don’t have, but demanding something only means you have the ability to enforce the request, it doesn’t mean you have the power to alter time and space in order to make it come true.
After reading the additional information bob posted, I’m changing my answer. It sounds like the citation is for the wrong thing. Where I live, it’s possible to get a ticket for jaywalking. But this is a different country.
Yeah, it sounds like bob got the wrong ticket (from a little search, it looks like Toronto does indeed have laws against jaywalking - it doesn’t sound like the cop wrote the right offence on the ticket). In that case, fight the hell out of it, bob.
I don’t know about being legally required to produce current i.d. - there may be vagrancy laws that require it. Or not. I personally am not interested in finding out if Calgary still has vagrancy laws at 4 in the morning.
After reflecting a bit, I’m going to change my answer a bit: I still think the OP should own up to the jaywalking, but now I am compelled to add that I think there should also be a complaint filed at the police station against the officer. Although I think the OP could have handled himself better in the encounter (re: Nazi reference), the policeman absolutely had a higher responsibility to conduct himself with more professionalism than he showed.
So, bob, I’d urge you to pay the ticket and visit the police station to give a complaint. Maybe this officer has a history of unprofessional behavior – at least your report would start a record of it.
Toronto may have several of those imperial type clubs from bygone days, but the entertainment district that he speaks of is strictly bars and restaurants rather than an old boys social club.
For the out of town posters the city of toronto like any other city has police divisions , what the american folks would call precincts. Given the size of toronto, like any other major city it has what you would call a fort apache where the police would place the nuggets and the pogues , as well as the usual compliment of officers that are doing a tour of duty.
This division is known as 52 division and the entertainment district falls into its zone. Having been down there on weekends at the same time as the op has gotten off work , the majority of folks that are moving around are service staff, the homeless and the cops.
I am gonna guess that the op really got dinged for in the officers opinion , contempt of cop.
Having met many metro cops , some were paid duty bouncers , others were giving me tickets for speeding ,drinking in public , I can say that this guy was the bad apple of note, every one of them that I met in their official capacity was professional and competent, even if they were handing me a quota ticket.
What to do , ignore the ticket and dont bother paying it. If its not highway traffic , it wont affect getting your license renewed.
I think that he should have charged you under HTA Section 144(22), which prohibits crossing anywhere but in the marked pedestrian crossing, where such a crossing exists. IANAL but I suspect you could beat the ticket on this basis. If not, provide the judge with all the details and you may get a break - the fine is not $50, but “up to $50”, and the judge may reduce it if warranted.
bob_loblaw, my major concern here is that the cop failed to identify himself under circumstances where the you could quite reasonably be apprehensive of being mugged. The cop was either being stupid or possibly even hoping for a reaction that would justify a “resisting arrest” response on his part. You might want to put in a complaint with the TO Police Services Board.
The cop can’t drive you to your house and make you bring out your driver’s license. He can’t put you in jail for failure to produce the license. Either of those things would constitute ‘compelling’ you to produce your driver’s license, if he could do them. He can’t.
Subjecting you to administrative inconvenience isn’t enforcement. (Not sure the cops can even take you down to the station house, btw, without your consent or without placing you under arrest, but be that as it may.) Sorry.
In the case I mentioned, the officer has more than reasonable suspicion, he has direct evidence of a violation. If you have committed a violation, and the officer wants to pursue charges (of whatever type) you are not going to end the encounter without positively identifying yourself, unless the officer decides to end it.
I would be absolutely flabbergasted if an officer comes in and states positively that a pedestrian without ID is going to skate on a violation because the police do not have the authority to detain him until his identity is proven.
So let’s say the cross walk is 1/4 mile down the road (in many cases it can be over a mile), and I want to go to a store right across the street. Option 1: using my noodle and see if there’s any cars coming. Total cross time 30 seconds ro maybe 3 minutes if there’s alot of traffic. doubling for coming back total time 1 minute to to 6.
Option 2 your method: travel to the cross walk, wait for it to run it’s cycles, walk 1/4 mile back. So about 18 to tweenty minutes, 36 to 40 minutes both ways.
Which makes more sense? A couple minutes, or over a half hour? (hint if you say a half hour you’re a complete moron) I could see a jay walking ticket for walking out in front of traffic or otherwise impeding, and endangering it, but ticket for crossing the street? That fucked up.
I don’t know about Toronto, but my cousin is a Montréal city cop, and he has told me (while crossing a street in the middle of the block) that as long as you are 50 metres or more from a controlled cross walk, j-walking rules don’t apply. I don’t know the exact technical wording of the law (by law?) though, but I am definitely inclined to believe him! And if one day it turns out to be wrong… well, I know his name, badge number and his address and phone number.
Actually, any corner where a sidewalk would extend across the road is a crosswalk. All you need to do is cross at the corner, where drivers expect pedestrians and will have a better chance of not creaming your ass and then living with the guilt of having hurt someone who was acting like a dick and crossing wherever they pleased regardless of the law. I’m talking about Calgary and, I imagine, most other large centres. If you live in Armpit, Arkansas, you might not have sidewalks and jaywalking laws, and this discussion really isn’t about your situation.
In Ontario, the police can only stop and question a person against that person’s will if the officer has articulable cause, meaning that there must be some actual facts pointing to criminal involvement.
R. v. Dedman [1985] 2 S.C.R. 2 (Supreme Court of Canada), per Dickson C.J.: “short of arrest, the police have never possessed legal authority at common law to detain anyone against [their] will for questioning, or to pursue an investigation”.
R. v. Simpson (1993) 79 C.C.C. (3d) 482 (Ontario Court of Appeal), per Doherty J.A.: “I do not, however, read the words of Martin J.A. in Dedman [as cited by Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Dickson in dissent] as holding that the common law power of the police never extends to the power to detain an individual in the course of a criminal investigation unless the police have the power to arrest that individual. I understand the passage to state that the desire to question or otherwise investigate an individual does not, in and of itself, authorize the detention of that individual. In other words, there is no general power to detain whenever that detention will assist a police officer in the execution of his or her duty. To deny that general power is not, however, to deny the authority to detain short of arrest in all circumstances where the detention has an investigative purpose.”
Articulable cause for investigative detention was developed in the USA, in cases such as Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S. Ct. 1868 (1968). Doherty defined articulable cause as: “[A]constellation of objectively discernible facts which give the detaining officer reasonable cause to suspect that the detainee is criminally implicated in the activity under investigation.”
Since there was nothing to suggest that the OP was involved in anything illegal, the officer had no right to compel him to stop, to lay his hand on him, to compel him to answer questions, to compel him to produce identification, to arrest him, or to threaten to take him in to the police station for resisting arrest.
The matter under discussion is a charge under Ontario’s (not Alberta’s) Highway Traffic Act, which applies across the province from Toronto (a city that makes Calgary look rinky-dink), to frozen lakes in the north-west that are only provincial highways for a month or two each year when they connect communities that are tiny and remote.
I lived in Toronto, Oakville and Burlington for many years. Regardless of whatever laws there may or may not have been, J-walking was the norm. Once I found myself in Edmonton when the Oilers won the Cup. Based on what I would have expected in Toronto, I was expecting something between boisterous revelling and a riot. Instead, the main drag in Edomonton was filled with pedestrians walking up and down the street, with those heading in one direction in one lane, and those heading in the other direction in the other lane. I was in awe, for I had never seen a crowd that organized. The next day I noticed that no one J-walked – not one single J-walker all day. Remembering the odd behaviour of the crowd the previous night, and thinking of zombies, I was scared, so I rented a convertible and drove to Whistler. Since then I have wondered if folks in the cities in Alberta are really zombies, or if they simply are far more concerned about J-walking than folks in Ontario.
This is, of course, presuming that there is a crosswalk at the end of the block, marked for pedestrian use. If that is the case, the officer may very well have marked your ticket incorrectly, which gives you an easy out, but he may have been correct that you were crossing illegally.
The latter. I never gave a thought to jaywalking until I moved from Ontario (GTA, more specifically) to Alberta. The car-pedestrian laws and the jaywalking laws out here are odd to an Ontarian, and zealously enforced.
I’ve been trying to find the online Alberta statute dealing with this, but unfortunately, the Alberta Queen’s Printer is more interested in selling me a statute than showing me one. Anyway, Muffin, you’ll have to take my word for it–featherlou is quite correct as to her interpretation of Alberta law in this situation. Every unsignalled street corner is regarded as a crosswalk, any pedestrian standing at the corner is assumed to be planning to cross, and (here’s the kicker for Ontarians), all traffic must stop to allow the pedestrian to do so. Jaywalking is indeed illegal; signs warning against it are on downtown streets, and seeing a cop write a jaywalking ticket for a pedestrian is a common occurrence in downtown Calgary. But as you and I both know, Muffin; and which featherlou should note, things just do not work this way in Ontario. Which is where the OP ran into trouble.
I’ll be back in Toronto in late June to visit some friends. I’m kind of looking forward to not having to stop the car just because a pedestrian is standing at the corner, and to walking across Yonge Street any damn place I feel like it–assuming no traffic is coming, of course. Because I sure can’t do those things here.
Calgary – cars stop for pedestrians at crosswalks.
Toronto – pedestians j-walk.
Montreal – cars aim for j-walking pedestrians.
Seems to be a cultural shift as one moves across the country (but I’m not sure how BC having four-way uncontrolled intersections fits into all of this).