It was a judicially tested question of law, so the officer’s training, rationality and intent is not relevant to whether he acted legally or not.
If a law has not yet been discovered, then it is possible (a teeny-weeny microscopic possibility approaching zero) for a court to find an officer’s conduct to be illegal but given the training, rationality and intent, not to toss the evidence gained by the officer’s well intentioned but illegal action. For example, the Canadian decision in R. v. Spencer, 2014 SCC 43 which isbeing discussed in another thread (and note that even then, Canadian courts are not as tough on such conduct as American courts tend to be).
My point is that you seem disinclined, at the outset, with crediting anything that does not either absolve the authorities or blame the victim. Your bias glows like a metal rod left in a blacksmith’s forge. That’s my point.
I’d actually argue that that exists anyways. The problem is, they are allowed to lie about their rationale, if I understand correctly. If not, they are definitely allowed to lie about what you are required to do.
Knowing what I do about the law, I would not have trusted any cop that told me I had to give them ID. I would do my best to follow Bricker’s advice and nothing more than what I have to.
I’m white, but just knowing what cops can do is enough for me not to trust them. You can’t inspire trust when you are allowed to lie in the very situations I need to trust you on.
There should be things that a cop cannot lie about (other than when undercover). That’s how you can gain trust, at least in those situations. It’s why I would trust that I’m going to get a real lawyer, because I know they can’t lie about that.
I’m a while male. But because my family is not of Italian descent, I learned to keep my head down and keep my mouth shut.
Frank Rizzo taught an entire generation of Philadelphians what power means.
That deeply entrenched distrust of all people NOT Italian-American, but most notably not white, persists to this very day.
One other thing. To reiterate my last post in here: If you need to fuck in public, be prepared to show your I.D. to the police.
Public fornication is illegal in California.
I am not a California lawyer but the issues surrounding a terry stop seems like something that would be well trodden ground. That UCLA clinic professor sounds like he is either misunderstanding the facts or misunderstanding the law. I thought we had agreed that the cops could not detain the woman in the first place under California law. They can chase her down the street asking her for ID all they want but they cannot detain her without probable cause of a felony or a continuing or dangerous misdemeanor. Or at least that is what I thought we had established.
So how can they arrest her for failure to produce ID even if it was with attitude?
Me, personally. No, I want to be the judge, jury and executioner but I wouldn’t trust anyone else with that power. I am entirely in favor of tyranny as long as I get to be the tyrant. But if I don’t get to be a tyrant I don’t want anyone else to be one either. So the compromise we have crafted to ensure that noone can be a tyrant is memorialized in the constitution and the bill of rights.
And the inevitable cost of that is going to be criminals getting off on technicalities and committing more crimes. And when those criminals commit those crimes, we chase them down and arrest them, but hopefully this time the arresting officer doesn’t fuck it up so we have to let him go again.
Now as a practical matter, detaining and arresting someone that turns out to be a wanted criminal does not result in the case being thrown out because of a lack of probable cause. Being a wanted criminal means that all the officer has to do is say “I thought I recognized him from America’s Most Wanted”
If a cop doesn’t know the law surrounding a terry stop then they shouldn’t be cops.
How uncommon is being called to a completed misdemeanor (that poses no threat to public safety) that you don’t know the rules about what you can and cannot do in those situations? How uncommon is it for someone to refuse to produce ID? I expect cops to be expert in the sort of thing they are likely to see on a regular basis.
In Watt’s case, the cop had no need to establish her identity to carry out his “investigation” (put in quotes because it’s doubtful he was trying to investigate anything). Neither did the cops in Lollie’s case. And yet their identities’ became the bone the cops would not quit trying to dig up. It was like the word “no” fucked all their shit up.
This is not some esoteric point of law. Its like an electrician not knowing how to install a fusebox and a bunch of EE’s coming along with differing opinions about how the electrician might best go about doing his job. Its something the electrician should know.
This is basic police powers issues. Terry stops. Probable cause. Arrest. This isn’t counting angels on the point of a needle.
After all the other stuff we have seen from guys like Hentor, wouldn’t we normally believe our own conclusions rather than rely on the authority of an “expert” unless the expert was particularly credible?
So you see some pictures of two clothed people and conclude that you can’t say for certain that they aren’t having sex so you just figure its a coin flip that these two people were having public sex in front of an office building? maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t?
I think the burden is on the people who are alleging that these two people were having public sex, don’t you?
I don’t know if you were merged into this thread but you can’t detain someone, even temproarily, for a completed misdemeanor that does not threaten public safety. The cops had no right to detain her so they had no right to demand ID. When they arrested her for not providing ID that she was not legally obligated to produce, they violated her rights.
Her husband’s account says that they kept asking him if she was really his girlfriend and the cops seemed to be insinuating that she was a prostitute. THATS where the husband’s statements about prostitution come from.