Does a private citizen in the US have the right to make a &quot;Contact the Police&quot; poster? Imagine the following hypothetical situation. Assume the location is in the United States. Mary had a credit card stolen by a suspect. The suspect used the credit card at a store. The manager of the store, Adam, saved video surveillance of the suspect making a high-dollar purchase using Mary's credit card. Adam also saved photos of the suspect entering the suspect's vehicle and driving away. Adam shared the photos with Mary. The police department assigned a detective to the case. After many unsuccessful attempts to talk with the detective, Mary has decided to stop calling the detective herself. Mary doesn't anticipate that the police will obtain the surveillance, pursue the case, or identify the suspect. What are Mary's rights in this situation? If Adam, as the store manager, were to allow Mary to hang a poster outside of his store, would Mary have the right to hang a poster with photos of the suspect? The paper poster would have the photos of the suspect, the police department phone number, and ask if anyone has seen the suspect. Can only the police make that kind of a poster? What are Mary's rights here? What legal doctrines are applicable, such as free speech, etc.?
There is no law against a person creating and distributing such a poster, to the best of my knowledge. However such a poster pretty clearly implies that the person shown is guilty of a crime, or at least strongly suspected. If the store somehow made an error, pulling the image of a person who did not use the stolen card or there is some other error, the person pictured might well suffer a significant loss of reputation, and might sue for defamation. Damages could possibly be significant. Such suits have, I believe, happened when surveillance photos were posted but there later proved to have been an error. Mary might wish to double check how sure the store is that the photos are of the person who actually used the stolen card.
In your example, there is nothing that indicates to me that there is a "particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of . . . criminal activity". If you have described the totalilty of the circumstances, the officer does not have the right to arrest or detain the individual. To your broader question about how specific descriptions must be in order to provide a basis for a stop, the assessment is based on the "totality of the circumstances". For example, an anonymous tip that "a woman would drive from a particular apartment building to a particular motel in a brown Plymouth station wagon with a broken right tail light [carrying cocaine]" was enough to warrant a stop. Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325 (1990)1 In contrast, the court "determined that no reasonable suspicion arose from a bare-bones tip that a young black male in a plaid shirt standing at a bus stop was carrying a gun." Florida v. J. L., 529 U. S. 266 (2000) The “reasonable suspicion” necessary to justify such a stop “is dependent upon both the content of information possessed by police and its degree of reliability.” Navarette v. California 572 U.S. ___ (2014) In any case, a crime must be part of the particularized suspicion. 1. This case focused on the indicia of reliability necessary for an anonymous tip to support a reasonable suspicion, but it is also an example of a degree of non-specificity in identification of a suspect.
england-and-wales Initially, one should comply with the officer's instructions as he has the power under statutory Stop &amp; Search powers to detain someone for the purpose of the search (discussed here). Failure to do so may be an offence. If, subsequently, one considers the search and detention was unlawful, the first port of call is to lodge a complaint with the relevant police force who - depending on the circumstances - may escalate the complaint to the Independent Office for Police Conduct IOPC. You can complain directly to the police/other organisation (see ‘Who can I complain about?’ below for a list of the other organisations) or via the IOPC. If you complain via the IOPC, your complaint will be sent direct to the organisation involved. They will assess your complaint and contact you about how it will be handled. The IOPC will not be involved with this initial assessment of your complaint. If the complaint is found to be valid, then any offence committed by not complying with the office would (in all probability) be overturned on appeal. As well as any compensation awarded by the court, the Chief Constable may consider making an ex gratia payment (mentioned here). Note that there is no obligation to do anything if the interaction falls within the Stop &amp; Account provisions.
In the U.S. there is no law that requires you to ever say a word to a law enforcement officer, and lawyers generally encourage you to minimize what you communicate to them anyway. I can't think of any situation where a request for information could not be demanded in writing. As a practical matter, in some situations you will probably be subject to some extra scrutiny and inconvenience: E.g., in a stop-and-identify situation, you could hand the officer a note saying, "Please make any requests for information from me in writing." The officer may infer that you have some disability, but if he does not (or discovers you don't) he may get irritated enough to subject you to harassment for "contempt of cop". Of course, if you can understand him, you are still required to obey an officer's lawful orders no matter how they are communicated. But "speak" is not a lawful order.
Generally speaking, ex parte communications with a judge (i.e. communications to which all parties to a case are not notified) are prohibited, both by law and as a matter of judicial and attorney ethics, subject to some narrow exceptions (e.g. applications for arrest warrants prior to the arrest warrant being carried out). Generally speaking, communications with the court (which is to say with judges or their subordinates) are made a matter of public record, and if the communication is about a particular case, all attorneys in the case must be given notice of it (if someone is not represented by an attorney, the notice goes to the defendant rather than their non-existent attorney). The attorney may then communicate the communication to their client, and generally speaking should communicate it to the client. I don't see anything in the question that suggests that this proposed communication would fall outside the general rule. But, the question isn't very specific and I wouldn't rule out the possibility that an exception might apply in a case with very unusual facts. Also, usually, a request to reconsider a sentence has to be made by a formal motion filed by the prosecutor or the defendant. Generally speaking, a third-party cannot file that motion unilaterally. A third-party or victim would usually only have input into the decision through the prosecutor's office. Third parties and victims are not generally permitted to file motions to reconsider sentences that have been imposed even in states with "victim's rights" statutes, but can publicly provide input to the court before a sentence is imposed, usually at the behest of either the prosecutor or the defendant. Furthermore, generally a criminal defendant has a constitutional right to not have a sentence made more severe after being sentenced the first time around. Reconsideration of a sentence once it is imposed may only be in the direction of leniency. Once a sentence is imposed, it can't be reconsidered to be made more harsh.
Assuming that the police have a warrant to seize your cell phone, the scope of what can be seized is specified in the warrant. It is not automatic that seizing a phone entails seizure of some or all online accounts (e.g. automatic backups, collections of passwords in a Google account) and it does not automatically &quot;freeze&quot; or block a person's access to their accounts including phone accounts. It's not that it is impossible to seize an account, it's that it is not automatic: it has to be in the scope of the warrant. Here is a collection of petition templates, asking the court to allow the seizure of various things for various reasons (mostly electronic), including access to bank accounts. If the police suspect that information might be available online after it has been deleted from a phone, they would need to include online accounts in the scope of the petition(s). There is even a template for &quot;give me everything&quot;, called &quot;Frankenstein&quot;.
In the scenario you described, you were both right: Police have no authority to demand that you leave a public space because you are photographing, nor does the government have the right to prevent you from photographing anything that is visible from a public space, including government facilities or employees. However, the police would likely have followed through on their threat to arrest you. In that event, any vindication for wrongful arrest and violation of your civil rights would only come (if ever) at the end of protracted and expensive litigation in the courts. (A plethora of examples is accumulated by watchdog groups like the ACLU and Photography Is Not A Crime.)
They aren’t treated differently In most jurisdictions, law enforcement requires a warrant to intercept/open/read the contents of physical or electronic correspondence. Similarly, in most jurisdictions, a warrant is not required to read the metadata: who is communicating with whom, how and when but not what. That is they can read what’s written on the outside of the envelope or the routing information of the email/SMS. Telephony is not correspondence because it is not the intent of the parties to create a permanent record. It is usually treated as any other conversation - if it carried out in a place and manner that the participants have a reasonable expectation of privacy it’s usually illegal to record it (electronically or by writing it down). If it’s said publicly, it isn’t illegal.