>> The guy is simply doing a job and making his job as easy as possible is the best way for the both of you to separate and go your own ways without anybody’s toes getting stepped on.
I would maintain that all the citizens involved had their toes stepped on from the moment the cop started demanding IDs without probable cause of a crime having been committed.
There are so many non-verbal and semantic communications that police officers pick up on that can lead them down the path of “finding” probable cause that I wouldn’t venture to make a judgment call unless I was onsite. One thing that sets cops off is seeing young persons holstering a weapon to show off or at least giving that appearance, particularly when that person may not appear to have the level of maturity to know when to use the weapon or not. You have to take into context that the officers are often ex-military that were in for a bit and then received police officer training / firearms training / use of force on top of that so they’ve had quite a bit if training with firearms while that “young snotty nosed punk got an open carry license to carry a firearm in just half a day”. Yeah sometimes (often) its about ego but there are some valid points there. I’ve been through 4 rounds of pretty intense firearms training (lasting anywhere from several weeks to several months at a time) and I would say a half a day of training isn’t nearly enough to deal with a life or death situation. Just my .02...
But it does seem that officers need a little more training on constitutional laws nowadays if nothing more to keep their jobs or their police departments from being sued.
Your argument seems to boil down to “they should have to be better trained to exercise a Constitutional right.” I strongly disagree. And this completely ignores the aspect of Terry stopping those without guns simply for being in the company of those who did.
If they were unholstering and truly brandishing their firearms, that is an issue. But that doesn’t seem to have been the case here, and speculating on something like that when nothing indicates anything of that sort went on, merely to give excuse to the cop for his questionable actions, isn’t much of an argument. The point here is that law-abididing citizens, as these appear to be, shouldn’t be subjuct to being detained, and IDs demanded of them, for no reason other than someone saw them open carrying and got the vapors, and called the cops on them.