Where are all the posters who are trying to assuage their guilt for their own inaction by telling you why you're wrong and defensively calling you a keyboard warrior? Is this even Lemmy?

In England, it's necessary to provide name and address when arrested, but, it's illegal for the police to arrest just to find out your name. But of course, how difficult is it for them to make up some asinine BS excuse?

Yeah actual laws as written don't matter.

This is fascism; the cop regime. They dont know or care about the laws, everything is vibes, and courts up to and especially the supreme will back them on this.

Good cops? You mean the ones that stand and watch the bad cops?

Well good thing there are no good cops 🅰️©️🆎

Sigh. The responses you got really dishearten me. We really are moving fast to a binary world where everything is good or bad and any opportunity for nuance is thrown out the window.

You are of course 100% correct.

There are no good cops.

So the 4th amendment of the US Constitution, which outlines the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, protects people from being forced to verbally identify or show documents of identification without reasonable cause, among other things. What that has been interpreted to mean by the SCOTUS is that, while they can always request ID without it being a lawful order, a request you can deny without consequence, any policy or state/local ID law that requires identification upon officer request without any other reasonable cause is unlawful. In other words they cannot demand id for no actual reason nor punish you for failing to ID without said reason.

At minimum, they need "reasonable and articulable suspicion" of a real crime that has happened, is happening, or is about to happen, in order to legally require you to ID yourself in every state, district, and city in the country (with the exception of if you are driving a car and get pulled over for a lawful infraction, you must provide your license to prove you're allowed to drive the vehicle). "Reasonable and articulable suspicion" means that there are real facts that can be pointed to that a reasonable person would deem as a likely indication of crime, not hunches or racial profiling. Some states have higher levels of requirements in order to ID someone, but none can have lower requirements.

BUT, the unfortunate and infuriating truth is that they do not need to actually explain their reasonable and articulate suspicion to you at the time, which ultimately means that they dont have to have it until they justify it to the court much later. They could be just demanding it for no reason unlawfully. Or they could be demanding it because they just saw you pick pocket someone, or someone pointed you out as someone that threatened them, or you match the description of the person that just broke a bunch of windows nearby. All of those things qualify at reasonable suspicion allowing them to ID you in places where that is the minimum requirement. Even if you did nothing wrong, you could still match a description but aren't the right guy, or they thought that saw you do something unlawful but were actually mistaken. It doesn't matter. They still have reasonable suspicion unless you somehow factually dispel that suspicion. If you do not dispel that suspicion (maybe because they didn't even explain their reasons in the first place) and they demand ID, you can be lawfully required to present it even if you did absolutely nothing wrong and don't have a clue why they are asking at all.

In other words, if they demand ID and don't explain why, there's functionally way to discern at the time if the demand is lawful or unlawful even if you have committed no crimes. So you either comply or go to jail and argue your case in court later, regardless of the truth. And btw, even if they had absolutely no reasonable suspicion to lawfully demand ID at the time, they can just lie to justify it. If the lie is not demonstrably shown to be a lie by other evidence, it's assumed to be true. So... enjoy your "freedoms", I guess.

"Reasonable articulable suspicion", is the official way of saying that.

"A good explanation" is very undefined. The police has to have reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime, and they have to be able to articulate, ie explain that said reasonable suspicion of having committed a specific crime.

They just make it up all the time though, but most of the cops don't even seem to know the law. They just do what other cops do. And never have to take responsibility for breaking the law.

Considering a lot of the NYPD straight up said they'd resign if he became mayor, I think he's got a pretty good chance of bringing change if he really wants to

as far as i am aware, the mayor is the commander in chief of local police and also determines their budget

Reasonable suspicion of a crime. You need to say the whole thing.

The number of cops that thinks "I've got reasonable suspicion of you being suspicious." Has always been too goddamn high. You need reasonable suspicion OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY. Being suspicious isn't a crime. Being black or Latino in a subway station isn't a crime. Even stop and identify laws need to be based in reasonable suspicion of a crime because the 4th amendment demands it.