American cops really, really love to ID people. They have an outright ID fetish. Most of them have an extreme "papers, please" attitude. This even though the United States is one of the few countries in this world where the police actually can't demand your ID willy-nilly for whatever reason they want. They need an actual reasonable suspicion of a crime that they can verbalize in order to lawfully demand your ID. Many are suspecting that this is not them just merely being tyrants (because the custom is oddly global, ie. the exact same in the entire huge country regardless of state, city, local customs, local government, local politics, etc.) Many suspect that it's a form of mass surveillance by the federal government (most likely the FBI).
The sad thing is that the vast majority of people don't know their rights in the country, and are too intimidated to refuse when cops demand their ID, even when there's literally no lawful reason for them to do so.
Sometimes cops trick people into giving their ID. As a perfect example, a young woman is involved in a traffic stop (and physically assaulted by a cop), and her father arrives, and the cop casually asks the father to show ID in order to corroborate that he indeed is the father. And what do you know, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and completely illegally, the cop checks for warrants for the father, which he had no legal right to do (and could be sued for). And what do you know, now the father's ID has been logged into the federal NCIC system, alongside time and place. So, once again, mass surveillance in action. The father had done absolutely nothing wrong, was not suspected of any crime whatsoever, wasn't even claimed by the cop of being suspected of anything, yet was tricked by the cop to surrender his ID for the cop to completely illegally run it into the system and "check for warrants". The father was very likely (at least at that moment) completely oblivious to this illegal action by the cop.
One way that you can sometimes see some cops try to illegally trick people into surrendering their ID is to confuse the person with a trespass.
Suppose someone is filming in a public place, and some nearby business calls the police because they don't like it, and the cops arrive and solicit a trespass. In other words, they ask the people running the business if they want that person trespassed. If they say yes (which is what most often happens), the cops will then go to that guy, tell him that he is trespassed from that property and, thus, need his ID. They will argue that in order to give him a formal trespass, they need his ID. After all, how else can they enforce the trespass?
Many people who don't know better are fooled by this and will, once again, surrender their ID without knowing that they legally don't have to.
That's because that's not how trespassing laws work. If they did work that way, it would make no sense. It would be a way to bypass the 4th Amendment protections against unlawful ID demands. Heck, if it worked that way, the cops could just hire some guy from the other side of the country, and whenever they wanted someone's ID, they could just call that guy, solicit a trespass from him, and then tell the person "you have been trespassed from this guy's home, I need your ID to enforce the trespass."
Because that's literally what they are doing in this case. It doesn't matter if the property is right besides them or on the other side of the country. There's literally no difference.
How it actually works is this: The cops can only demand your ID when they reasonably suspect you of having committed a crime. Being trespassed from a property is not a crime. You can't be charged with anything by simply someone trespassing you from their property. (It wouldn't make sense otherwise. If merely being trespassed was considered a crime, then any citizen could cause anybody to be arrested by simply trespassing them from their home.)
It becomes a crime if you enter or are inside the property and refuse to leave. That's when it actually becomes a crime of "trespassing". Merely being trespassed by the property owner is not enough (especially if you aren't even inside the property).
And, thus, since being trespassed is not a crime, the cops cannot lawfully demand your ID.
The fact that most American cops don't know their own ID laws is appalling.
Comments
Post a Comment