Prompted by a movie, this is a GQ about police procedures.
I was watching a Humphrey Bogart film a couple of months ago. I don’t remember the name, but it’s the one where everything is his POV until after he gets plastic surgery to change his face.
There’s a scene where he’s in a diner, and a detective starts grilling him for no apparent reason. At least, not a very good reason. The detective thought Bogart might be up to something because he was out at night without a raincoat.
Did police used to just go up to people and start grilling them, even if they had no reason to believe a crime has been committed? Could people just tell them to mind their own business?
I think the film you saw was “Dark Passage”. If I ever saw it, it was so long ago I don’t remember other details.
I imagine it does happen occassionally. Say a redneck cop hassling a minority or a case of time urgency. A kidnapping for example, the police could be desparate to find a children quickly, so anyone that seems to act “funny” to a policeman might be verbally drilled. You should be able to just politely dismiss them, but in an actual circumstance, that might raise suspicions even more.
If the police have “reasonable suspicion” that you’re up to no good (engaged in criminal activity), they can stop you and question you. Reasonable suspicion is something less than probable cause but more than gut instinct. The movie predated the SCOTUS case authorizing so-called “Terry stops” by about 20 years – Terry v. Ohio , from 1968.
Now, in the real world, police can stop you any time they want for any thing they want. It’s only later when (a) you’re caught with the drugs and you want the drugs suppressed at your trial or (b) you sue them for violation of your civil rights that these issues come before the courts. So to answer the OP, while the cop may not have had a legal basis to question our hero, he likely would have done it (and gotten away with it) anyway.
I suspect the cop would have gotten away with a Terry stop, at least. The cop likely would have justified it by saying: he was out at night without a raincoat; it had been raining hard for a full day and everyone else had raincoats; he seemed jittery and nervous and wouldn’t meet my eyes; and he kept looking back at the cash register. So, your honor, based on my 20 years of police experience, I surmised he was casing the joint.
But like I said, the only reason this would come up is if Humphrey got caught with something and was seeking to suppress it in court. Then the legality of the cop’s initial Terry stop would come into play – if he didn’t have a basis to stop Humphrey and question him, what the cop got from the stop could be tossed out.