Arnold while I never said “5 seconds” I would venture to guess that whoever did was not meaning it literally by a stopwatch. But literally less than 30? Sure. Now ideally it could have gone like this:
Officer- “Who are you to this child sir?”
Citizen- “Oh. I’m her mother’s godfather. Helping out. Her Mom didn’t want her in daycare today because of that shooting having been near the daycare and …”
Officer (interrupting having seen enough that there is a ready answer and observed that the child does not seem in distress other than hanging onto the man’s leg and trying to pull him along, nothing suspicious here, better things to do, a donut and coffee still in the car, getting cold)- “Thank you sir.”
Maybe 10 seconds there.
His refusing to answer the question would have immediately raised a suspicious behavior eyebrow. But the exercising his rights alone is not sufficient grounds to do more or to offset what would have been the behavior of the child - which would have been to cling to the citizen in question. No behavior that would make one suspicious of an abduction in progress. Assessment is made. Yeah add 5 to 10 more for that.
As to your "should have … " - I was responding to your hypothetical dialog, the one that occurred after the officer let him go and he turned out to be an abductor after all. And yes, they defend their proper action by explaining how what was observable was not suspicious enough to detain further and that people cannot be detained for exercising their rights as the sole suspicious behavior. If hypothetically the officer behaved properly but the man turned out to be an evildoer after all.
I’m still more interested now in the other angle: If he refuses to affirm any relationship to the child then the child is on the street without someone who claims responsibility for her. An officer is in the presence of a two year old child who is without anyone who claims responsibility for or a relationship to her. That child must be taken into protective services:
Officer: “Yes sir, you are free to go. The child however is being taken to Child Protective Services as there is no one present who claims responsibility for her. Have a nice day sir.”
A little King Solomon-esque perhaps, but his leaving at that point would warrant a call to tail him at the least, otherwise he’d be very likely to cough up all identifying information including god-daughter’s cell phone number if possible.
But she’s not solving a case. She’s trying to determine if there IS a case. And yes, you get about 60 seconds for that because we’re all presumed to be innocent in this country. If she can’t see, touch, smell, hear or taste something suspicious enough to make her think a crime has been committed in those seconds, then there’s no case to be solved.
And the one thing you’re expressly *forbidden *to use as “suspicious” is the person exercising their constitutional rights. Not answering can **not **be used as probable cause in court.
Yes, this means some bad guys get away in the middle of committing a subtle crime. But we’ve decided that’s better than a system in which good guys get thrown into jail for looking at an officer funny.
Or, let’s look at the alternate situation: The grandfather gives the officer his identifying information, and asks the officer if he’s free to go. The officer sees no evidence that there’s a crime being committed, and so says yes. Both go about their business.
Or, let’s look at another alternate situation: The grandfather gives the officer his identifying information, and the officer asks him what his relationship is. He says that he’s the kid’s grandfather, and the officer asks “Can you prove that?”. Meanwhile, the officer has a check run on the guy’s information, and finds that he’s not actually the kid’s grandfather. Officer then detains and possibly arrests the grandfather for giving false information to the police.
It’s never a really good idea to lie to a cop. Even a little lie, like saying “grandfather” instead of “godfather to her mother”, or whatever the hell the actual relationship was.
Sure, rights have to be protected and in some cases rights have to be asserted.
I assert the man was unwise. Not “wrong”, not “stupid”, but unwise.
Pick your fights, especially if the cops are involved.
How would that work? Do the police have access the Vital Statistics all over the world, so they know exactly who his children are, and who their children are?
Besides, I have children, and nieces and nephews, who are no blood relation; I have in-laws who are no relation by marriage. If their is no legal common term for de facto relationship, people will use socially common term for the connection.
I once called the cops because a neighbor repeatedly blocked my driveway. I wanted to know what I should do to resolve the issue once and for all, whether the car could be towed, etc. Three cops showed up to answer the call. I told them I probably didn’t need all 3 of them to answer my questions, that it wasn’t a dire emergency. They said sometimes it just happens like that, like it was more of a coincidence that they all converged at once. We all ended up joking and laughing, had a very nice chat.
I’ve been following this thread for a while, and decided to have a look at what the actual legal situation is.
In this situation, we are missing a vital piece of information - namely, what exactly prompted the 911 call in the first place.
This isn’t a case of the cops stopping a random person on the street, but one of responding to a citizen’s call. We do not know what prompted that call.
Thus, I agree with you - merely standing on your rights is not, in and of itself, cause for suspicion; but that wasn’t the cause for suspicion in the first place. We don’t know what that was.
To hypothesize - say you observe an old White fellow dragging a screaming little Black girl out of a playground. You saw the girl playing there before but not with the old guy - you suspect he’s a stranger and you are witnessing an abduction. Alarmed, you call 911. By the time the cops show up, the girl is calm and appears happy. The guy refuses to say who the girl is and what his relationship with her is.
This strikes me as a different situation than simply accosting a fellow walking down the street. It may not appear to be different to the old guy, of course, but that is because he doesn’t know (and nor do we) why exactly the cops became involved. He’s lept to the conclusion that he’s being persecuted because of race.
In this situation, it is I think going to be a judgment call whether or not the cops take it further, based on the demeanor of the old fellow and his apparent relationship with the little girl. While “standing up for his rights” isn’t in itself cause for suspicion, that cause (whatever it was) may already exist - and the question is whether there is sufficient evidence to allay that suspicion, to demonstrate that the original suspicions were groundless.
“Probable cause” is necessary for an “arrest” but not for a so-called “Terry stop”. All that is necessary for a “Terry stop” is “reasonable suspicion”:
This is particularly true when the tipster’s information discloses a potential “emergency”:
certainly, a potential child abduction would qualify as an “emergency”.
In this case, we don’t know what the basis of suspicion was - but having been allerted by a 911 call, a guilty demeanor or other clues can, in a proper case, give rise to a sufficient “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity (child abduction) sufficient to trigger an inquiry short of arrest (though of course merely standing up for one’s rights is not in itself a “guilty demeanor” - but sweating, refusing to look officers in the eye, etc. may well be). Then, should that inquiry establish facts sufficient to establish “probable cause”, an arrest may follow.
In short, under US law the cops may well have had every right to ask their questions - depending on the content of the 911 call.
Absolutely! I agree 100%, and I’m not sure why you think we disagree (unless you just quoted my post because it was the convenient one.) Demeanor, body position, and the sweats are all *observable *things. They would clearly fall under “If she [can] see, touch, smell, hear or taste something suspicious enough to make her think a crime has been committed in those seconds, then [there is] case to be solved.” (negatives removed for clarity) In your scenario, she does see and smell something suspicious enough to continue, I agree.
But that’s moving the goalposts of the discussion: we’ve been arguing whether or not someone NOT ANSWERING a direct question about his relationship to the child is suspicious enough to continue. It’s not, because it’s a legally protected right. All those other things that you mention may ALSO be present, or they may not. If they are, then quite possibly a judge would rule that the cop was in the right, as your cites show. But they’re not what we’ve been talking about, nor do we have any way of knowing whether they were present in the scenario under discussion. To bring them into the discussion moves us well into the realm of hypothetical and away from the OP, since they weren’t mentioned at all. (In other words: “assuming facts not in evidence, your honor.”)
You are correct that we are mostly in agreement and I responded to your post because it was convenient - we do not disagree that simply “standing on one’s rights” is not, in and of itself, sufficient grounds for reasonable suspicion.
Where we disagree on, is what the OP is all about.
The issue in the OP, it strikes me, is whether or not the cops were justified either legally or ethically in doing what they did.
So far, in the many discussions on the issue, no-one to my knowledge has yet mentioned the legal framework other than in general terms. I may be missing it of course, but to my casual review no-one has mentioned the “Terry stop” principles, which I think are those in issue.
The OP stated:
To my mind, the cases reveal that the OP is mistaken in two of his assumptions:
there is indeed a “middle way” between a “consensual encounter”, which the public is “free to disregard”, and an arrest under US law.
Isn’t “articulabe suspicion” the phrase most often used when referring to a Terry stop? Less than “probable cause”, more than “a tingle in my spine”? I thought the OP alluded, obliquely, to Terry stops by using that phrase.
You are correct that we are mostly in agreement and I responded to your post because it was convenient - we do not disagree that simply “standing on one’s rights” is not, in and of itself, sufficient grounds for reasonable suspicion.
Where we disagree on, is what the OP is all about.
The issue in the OP, it strikes me, is whether or not the cops were justified either legally or ethically in doing what they did.
So far, in the many discussions on the issue, no-one to my knowledge has yet mentioned the legal framework other than in general terms. I may be missing it of course, but to my casual review no-one has mentioned the “Terry stop” principles, which I think are those in issue.
The OP stated:
To my mind, the cases reveal two issues raised by the OP:
There is indeed a “middle way” between a “consensual encounter”, which the public is “free to disregard”, and an arrest under US law.
That “middle way” is known as a “Terry stop”. The test is the lower one of “reasonable suspicion”, not the higher one of “probable cause”. In a “Terry stop” the police are entitled to ask questions concering both your name and what you are doing - they need not have “probable cause” for arrest.
The issue is not whether a person of race 1 walking down the street holding the hand of person 2 is creating either reasonable suspicion or probable cause; it is whether whatever was told to the 911 dispatcher created “reasonable suspicion”. We cannot simply ignore the 911 call for the purposes of the OP, because that creates a totally different scenario - one in which there was no 911 call.
We do not know of course what was told to the 911 dispatcher. So the answer to the OP must be that ‘depending on what was told to the 911 dispatcher, it would appear that the police acted properly’.
In summary, there is nothing on its face to indicate that the police acted improperly. They have the legal ability to do so (the “Terry stop”), but what we do not know is if they had sufficient facts told to them through the 911 call to raise a reasonable suspicion.
I offer somewhat of an apology. After poking about, a more positive connotation was found, essentially, "abundant".
Unlike my good will, the apology is limited since the common usage implies insincerity, lack of tact, a buttery or unctuous flattery- none of which apply to your posts here.
I was unaware of the word's ambiguity-
“It is important to recognize that common usage tends toward the negative connotation, and using fulsome as in the primary definition may lead to confusion without contextual prompts.”
My first thought on reading this was that this was ageism in action.
Somebody reported seeing an old man with a little girl and in these paranoid times suspected a paedophile.
Can you imagine the reaction if the the police had laughed this one off and taken no further action and it turned out that it WAS a bona fide case of child molestation?
The grandfather didn’t help with his non cooperation/martyr complex when he could have saved police wasting their time and get on with some real work and also saved his grandchild from what was a potentially scarring event.
I’m not being a hypocrite here.
I myself am a burly bloke,a little bit battered looking and could look like a yob to someone who doesn’t know me.
Once when going to work I passed a row of cars that had been broken into.
I stopped(Was cycling) and rang the police to report it and while I did so several cars passed by me.
Someone obviously thought that I was the culprit and also rang the police to report ME believing that I was the culprit.
I was actually told this by the operator while speaking to her.
I didn’t feel offended or get up on my high horse but was glad that there were people around who didn’t just pass by without doing anything when they saw what they thought was a crime going on.
Why not? Doesn’t fulsome mean generous, abundant, and well developed?
