Posted on 03/20/2013 6:11:42 AM PDT by marktwain
Does Open Carry, in an Open Carry state, give police a reasonable articulable suspicion that a crime is occurring?
Cops can’t just stop you, frisk you, or demand identification from you. Terry v. Ohio decided that a police officer must have “reasonable suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime and has a reasonable belief that the person “may be armed and presently dangerous” before he can detain you. But does that change if you’re hanging out with a person who openly carries a firearm?
(Excerpt) Read more at ncgunblog.com ...
A good sign.
They can and do every day in Bloomberg's NYC
Some of the things that LEOs do are, without question, criminal and they openly carry.
“Some of the things that LEOs do are, without question, criminal and they openly carry.”
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Absolutely, there is no freedom of any kind when police can assume that a group of people are under suspicion of criminal activity because one of them is doing something that is perfectly legal. What is next, if I start wearing a fedora as my father and all his friends and coincidentally mobsters used to do will everyone around me be under suspicion? I have not heard of them frisking people for openly displaying gang tattoos. The intent seems to be to push as far as they can push to see just how much the people will put up with. Most of now have more to fear from law enforcement than from ANY OTHER criminals.
The key is to refuse their demands, ask if you’re free to leave, and then try to leave and make them stop you (because they will lie on the stand about your asking if you’re free to go). The key in this case was that it was very clear that it was not a voluntary encounter and that clearly no consent was ever given.
The advice at the end of the article is awful. Not because it is not something ideally you should be able to do, but because it will get you in serious trouble. Many ins and outs to it.
Asking “Am I under arrest?”, used to work, but the police have figured out a counter: “It depends on what you have to say to me.” Likewise, refusal to show ID laws are radically different depending on where you are.
A far better statement, *not* a question, is to say, “Please direct ALL statements and questions to my attorney”, and to not waver from that statement. In effect it is the civilian equivalent to “Name, rank, serial number, and date of birth” that soldiers are supposed to say when captured in battle by the (civilized) enemy.
The police will try to defeat your effort with all sorts of tricks and threats, but you must stick to your guns.
Again importantly, if a police officer gives you an order, you MUST obey, or you can be charged with “resisting arrest”, though you have not yet been arrested.
A common police trick is to order you to put your hands on your car or a wall, then stand behind you and ask you questions. If you remove even one hand, to partially turn around to face the officer when answering his question, you are “resisting arrest”.
A really awful paradoxical corruption of the law is just a few years old. A person was arrested, then read their Miranda rights. Feeling free to give evidence he assumed was inadmissible, he did so. So the police *released* him from arrest, used the information he had given them to gather evidence against him, then re-arrested him. And the court found in favor of the police.
An abhorrent corruption of the laws against self incrimination.
The only mostly sure way to protect your interests is to go through your attorney, and speak in a minimalist manner only after he has given you permission to speak.
Google it. NYC routinely does stop and frisk w/o probable cause and does so 100’s of thousands of time yearly. Bloomberg brags about it and shrugs off accurate charges that most of those stopped are black or Hispanic.
Sure, they do it, but it is still unconstitutional.
The fact that you should refuse their unconstitutional stop-and-frisk when they do it doesn’t mean that they don’t do it.
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