I have written before about the actual reason why American cops are so insistent about ID'ing you, and that actual reason is that it's not merely that they want to see your ID, but they have to enter it in their computer systems, which then gets logged in the NCIC, which is a massive computer database owned and run by the FBI.
Not that it required much confirmation, as it's already quite obvious, but in this video an American ex-cop very explicitly confirms that yes, they are indeed taught at the police academy to always demand people's ID and, particularly, to always enter it in one of their various computer systems that are directly connected to the FBI's NCIC system.
Two things, however, that he does not confirm or speculate about in the video, though, at least not directly:
1) The reason why they are so insistent in entering everybody they ever encounter into the NCIC, and
2) how come this is so universal across the entire country, the same thing being taught to pretty much every American cop everywhere regardless of state, city, town or whatever, regardless of whether it's a police precinct in a multi-million-citizen megacity or a backwater town of less than 500 people.
It should be very obvious that the answer to the first question is mass surveillance: The FBI wants to keep track of as many citizens as possible. After all, whenever cops enter people's ID into the system, it gets logged alongside, at a very minimum, time and place. This, of course, allows for massive surveillance: If they ever need to track someone, they have at least some history of where that person has been and when. They can see things like "last year, at this date and time, this person was in this city of this state". Heck, nowadays it may even be that they get almost exact GPS coordinates (assuming that the squad car has GPS and that gets automatically entered into the system.)
It should also be quite obvious what the answer to the second question is: I don't think there's any other explanation than that the FBI has sent and is sending memos to every single police academy and police precinct to teach cops to do this. I have not heard confirmation of this (and the ex-cop in the video doesn't confirm that either, probably because he doesn't know that first-hand), but I think it should be pretty obvious that that's what's happening, as it's hard to imagine any other reason.
The problem with this is that it's illegal. Or, at a very minimum, it's ethically and legally dubious because it's teaching cops to trick citizens into surrendering their fundamental constitutional rights.
Indeed, almost every state has ID laws that assert, to one degree or another, that a citizen cannot be demanded to present ID unless there's a reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime. This is a direct consequence of the 4th Amendment, which protects citizens' right to be safe and secure from unreasonable searches and seizures, and American courts have ruled time and again that this includes identification papers, and that demanding them without there being any crime is indeed "unreasonable" as meant by the Amendment.
But cops are explicitly taught to always, always, always demand the ID of people they interact with, and they rely on people not knowing their rights, ie. essentially tricking and intimidating people into surrendering their papers even if legally they wouldn't have to. And sadly, the vast, vast majority of Americans do not know this right or, perhaps even more commonly, are too intimidated and scared of authority to resist.
And, as the ex-cop in the video says, once your information is in the NCIC, it will remain there forever. It will never, ever be removed. Even if a court order is issued that your information has to be removed, it will most likely not be, as there are no mechanisms nor guarantees that it will happen, nor any accountability for the people maintaining the system, which is extremely secretive. (Heck, probably the vast majority of FBI personnel themselves don't know who is running and maintaining the NCIC. I wouldn't be surprised.)
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