MD now has a “Castle defense doctrine”.
If, at 2 am, guys dressed in black who may or may not “claim” to be LEO break into my house, are they exempt from that law?
Our area has had its share of police impersonators kidnapping and raping lone women and I won’t pull over for a cop on a deserted highway.
I’d do what our law allegedly allows us to do; put on my flashers and drive to a well-lit, heavily populated place with lots of witnesses first.
Sitting at home, I don’t have that option and since I am involved in utterly NO criminal activity and therefore have no reason to expect cops in the dead of night, would I have the right to assume that black-clad people breaking and entering were an imminent threat to my safety?
The “plain cars” they use now have absolutely NO external ID and discrete internal lights that can be easily “faked”, if someone really wanted to.
One plain clothes cop we met while watching a bust go down was driving a shabby old Toyota and looked like a street bum.
Good disguise but possibly not a terribly wise one, considering he could ~easily~ be mistaken for a no-LEO criminal bent on mayhem.
My understanding is that a lot of home invasion robberies also go down like that, with the perps claiming to be the police in order to catch the occupants off guard.