How &quot;risky&quot; it is if I lose my passport? Will police investigate how I lost it? I have some stamps on my passport that are not really good, and I don't want any of my family members to see it. Now, if I lose my passport somehow, and apply for a new passport, would I get a clean passport, without any travel history on it? Would police investigate if passport is actually lost, or is it carelessness or other reason for its loss? Any other thing I should worry about if I take this route?
Losing your passport is fine, happens all the time But that’s not what you are talking about, is it? You’re intending to deliberately destroy it. While destroying a passport is not a specific offence under the Act or the Rules, your proposed course of action is still illegal. The passport doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to India and deliberately destroying other people’s stuff is illegal. To get a new passport you would necessarily be lying and giving false information on a passport application is an offence. Of course, one wonders why your family are looking at your passport; just don’t show it to them.
The precise details (and citations) will vary with jurisdiction, so this answer deals only with principles. If you pick up and "take possession of" property belonging to somebody else, you are a thief. [Note that 'taking possession' rather than picking up to restore to the owner/correct place is what makes the difference, which is why in real life nobody who cannot prove your intention will take action; but your question explicitly concedes the point.] If the property does not belong to the supermarket, you are not stealing from them, but from the currently unidentified owner: this makes no legal difference. You might conceivably have a defence if you can prove that the owner has abandoned the property, whatever the definition of "abandoned" is in your jurisdiction (note that it is up to you to show this, and possibly that you knew it before you picked up the property). If it belongs to the supermarket, this cannot be true; if a box of matches has fallen out of someone's pocket, it might possibly be (whatever the laws are, it is very unlikely that they have ever been applied in such a trivial case, so there may be some uncertainty). in any case, the shop is undoubtedly allowed to throw you out, ban you from returning to their premises, and inform other shops and the police that they believe you to be a petty thief, based on their experience.
You don’t have to give your name or DOB unless and until the officer has described the offence they suspect you may have committed However, once this has been done, you must provide your name, your DOB, your address, and what you are up to if asked. See this handy summary from the Mayor of London. If you are arrested, you will be advised that you do not have to talk to the police but that failure to do so will count against you in court.
Name and date of birth are not sufficiently unique to identify a person. While name, date of birth, and place of birth do not have to be unique, either, it reduces the number of false positives. Also, date of birth is somewhat better known than place of birth for most people. Motorist: &quot;Sorry, officer, I seem to have lost my wallet. Everything was in there, ID, license, ...&quot; Cop: &quot;Tell me your name, date and place of birth, and I'll run a query if you do have a license.&quot;
What are the reasons/ legal requirements that the police might need my personal information, given that I had not been able to provide any further information/ witness testimony to the incident that they were investigating? The police in england-and-wales have a duty to undertake reasonable lines of enquiry and to carry out a proportionate investigation in to allegations of crime. No-one is legally obliged to answer house to house questions but, notwithstanding the honesty and integrity of the majority of members of the public, any information held by the police may need to be corroborated to identify or eliminate suspects, witnesses, evidential opportunities or other lines of enquiry. Also, if it is established that someone has no information that may assist the investigation this is recorded to prevent duplication of effort thus enabling the police to focus their resources accordingly. All the while complying with the relevant privacy and data retention legislation.
This is a deescalation tactic. By giving some ridiculous far out reason, the officer hopes to distract you from any combative or aggressive feelings you have about being stopped. You can do this too, if someone you think is getting progressively angrier might try and hurt you, bringing up something random forces their mind off their anger, even just for a moment. And sometimes, that's enough to avoid a conflict. As for the legality of telling you the reason, no they are not required to tell you the reason, as has been mentioned several times on stack exchange. If an officer says to himself, "I think this guy has crack on him because of X," and it's captured on his body cam, then he's covered. He can prove to the court that he did have reasonable suspicion to detain you, even if he later tells you, "I have a report of zombies in the area and I need to see your ID to determine if you have a death certificate."
A charge of Theft by Finding is unlikely to succeed, as by posting details of found property on the website Heathrow Airport have made a good faith attempt to find the owner. There might be some comedy value in suggesting Blackmail, but not much more than that. (You knew that one was tenuous.) There appear to be some grounds for arguing the "control" aspect of Criminal Conversion, and if you were to do that they may release your lost baggage to you in person or to your appointed agent. The problem is what would happen next. Heathrow Airport would have grounds for arguing that they had made a good faith attempt to return your baggage, that you had used their system to determine they had your baggage, but that you had chosen to avoid a nominal charge (less than £20, according to the website) to use that system. This would give them grounds to seek to recover the actual cost of storing, locating the owner, and handing the baggage over to them (likely to be more than £20), plus legal fees for recovery of cost (likely to be a lot more than £20). Their argument would be that they had incurred costs in attempting to return your baggage to you, and that it was your responsibility that you had refused an amount that is likely to be considered a reasonable fee for this activity. Short answer : It looks like there's nothing preventing you from pointing out a potential conflict, and it's a nice question for academic debate. But I wouldn't do it. Edit : If you've used the link to missingx.com from the heathrow.com website, you could also have been deemed to have accepted the charge ("if you want to reclaim your item") at point 4.
To be very straightforward, yes, a police department would very likely have records of their past interactions with you in the form of police reports. They cannot just throw them away because it's been scrubbed from your public record. They detail the interactions the police officer had with you. That being said, those records would not show up in a general inquiry into your record, because those records are meant to protect the officer and the department as a reference point they can go back to in case some dispute arose in the future. If a police officer really wanted to find them, they'd have to do a bit of digging for them. The difficulty in finding them would depend on what system the particular police department uses to store those records. Smaller departments may just file them in a cabinet somewhere, whereas larger ones may actually have their own searchable database. But a traffic cop out on the street is only gonna see what you're seeing at the DMV - nothing. There is also a formal NCIC database, but traffic violations would never end up in there. That is a national database that basically stores red flag persons of interest (think stolen vehicles, sex offenders, and gang members). Sometimes multiple departments within a state will share their information with each other, but a department's database is usually kept to that department only. Also keep in mind court records. The court case that had a violation removed under such and such conditions is still gonna be a public record. Those records would generally be available to a judge overseeing your case so if you repeatedly end up in court for the same thing, they're gonna know and they're gonna stop scrubbing it from your record or offerring certain options because you're clearly not learning your lesson. Many laws allow you to have one offense stricken per year and similar stuff like that, but that kind of stuff doesn't just permanently disappear. They have to keep record of it in order to know you've already had your once per year etc. Also a note about parking violations: not all of those are actually issued by police. If it was issued by a private firm then that is not something that would ever show up on your record. It would just be in a database somewhere with whatever private firm issued the fine. Those kind of tickets get sent to collections and hurt your credit score if you don't pay them, rather than affecting your driving record.