Are cops required by law to have &quot;reasonable suspicion&quot; in order to detain a person? If so, do they have to inform the detainee about the suspicion? I was stopped while cycling on hwy 59 in Texas, about 50 miles south of Huston. Officer started asking me questions about my travels. I asked: "Have I done anything illegal? Officer: "No, but I need your ID" I: Am I being detained? Officer: No. I: Am I free to go? Officer: Hmm.. No. I: Do you not have to have a "reasonable suspicion" to detein me? Officer: No, I do not. I need to know who you are. What if a truck passes you by, and the wind draft pushes you into the ditch and you die. We need to know who to send the body to. I thought he was joking, and I started to walk away. Then another officer (ID 13378) came and said I had to show ID or he will arrest me. I gave him my ID and I was on my way quickly. My question is: Did the cops act illegally in any way there? Do they or do they not have to have a reasonable suspicion to detain people on the road? I love cycling my way to wherever I need to go. I comply even with what I consider illegal requests from cops, but it is getting aggravating after too many encounters. I wrote a few emails to the state, but no answer 😕 Edit: I tried ACLU and same, no answer, no reply. I tried to simply tell cops "NO, it's not ok" and I got arrested for obstructing an officer (I have a question about it here ) I tried cycling south of the US-MX border. That seems to have worked great :) If the answer is "no, the cops are not required to tell the detainee the reason for stoping" (which is counter intuitive), can someone back that up with an actual law or case law please?
If there is no reasonable suspicion of a crime having been committed or about to be committed, then there is no reason to seize you, and the Fourth Amendment "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated". Even if a state has a "stop and identify" statute, reasonable suspicion is a minimum requirement for seizing your person, even temporarily. Texas is not a state with an obligation to identify statute. I would not expect the state to be very helpful, given the facts as you report them. There might be others, such as the ACLU, who may be happy to discuss the particulars of your case. The police need to justify a stop in court, and not to the person being seized. I don't know if there is any case law saying that a false police statement to a detainee ("No, I don't have a reasonable suspicion") precludes claiming in court that there was reasonable suspicion, but it should at least make the claim of reasonable suspicion less credible. They do have to have reasonable suspicion, and they do not have to tell you what that suspicion is. OTOH if they are just harassing bicyclists, that would be illegal.
In the United States who has the authority and what is the procedure to determine if conduct by an individual is "illegal"? You are conflating several different ideas here, which is probably the source of your persistent confusion. 1) Actions are legal or not Illegal: Not authorized by law; Illicit ; unlawful; contrary to law The law sets out certain things that you must do (you must stop at a red light) and things you must not do (you must not drive under the influence). Sometimes actions fall into a gray area of the law, or aren't addressed at all, but if something is spelled out, then it's very clear whether the abstract action is legal or not. Running a red light is illegal. Driving under the influence is illegal. There are definitions and specified penalties for both. 2) A person may or may not be guilty of an illegal action Guilty: Having committed a crime or tort Abstract actions can be legal or illegal, but people commit crimes. When someone commits a crime, they are guilty of that crime. This is true whether or not they are ever prosecuted, or even if law enforcement knows who the guilty one is. If someone runs a red light at 2 in the morning on an empty street, it's still illegal and thus they are guilty of running a red - but no one will ever catch them. If someone is shot in the middle of the street, then someone is guilty of shooting them. Again, the shooter may never be found, but whoever they are, they are still guilty. 3) An individual may or may not be guilty of the crime of which they are charged. Charge: the statement of the alleged offense that brings a person to court If law enforcement (whether your local traffic cop or the FBI) believes that you are guilty of a crime, they can charge you with committing it. They may be right. They may be wrong. But the suspicion of having committed it is enough to charge you. To continue the traffic example: If an officer sees you running the red light, they can write you a ticket (effectively charging you) for doing so. They may or may not actually be right (it could have been yellow or malfunctioning, for example), but law enforcement has the power to charge regardless. 4) A defendant may or may be found guilty and convicted. Conviction: In a general sense, the result of a criminal trial which ends in a judgment or sentence that the prisoner is guilty as charged. Finding a person guilty by verdict of a jury. This is where the presumption of innocence comes in - the default assumption is that the accused did not commit the crime that they are being charged with, and it's the prosecutor's job to prove otherwise. If the accused is found to not be guilty of the crime, then they (presumably) didn't do it - it doesn't necessarily mean the crime didn't happen, just that this specific person didn't commit it. Alternatively, the defendant can be found not guilty for other reasons - the judge or jury can determine that the crime didn't take place, took place but was justified, or the defendant wasn't in their right mind at the time. On the other hand, if they are found guilty, they're convicted and sentenced to whatever an appropriate punishment is. TL;DR Whether something is legal is determined by the legislature when they pass laws. Someone who commits an illegal act is guilty of doing so, even if they are never charged. Again, this is determined by the legislature when they pass laws. People are charged with violations of specific laws by law enforcement. Defendants can be found guilty by the court system. In other words, only the courts can determine whether a specific individual actually committed illegal behavior, but the behavior is still illegal regardless.
Does said police department have any obligation to ID, investigate and detain / arrest the false caller? No. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 US 748 (2005). Usually, police do investigate, but that is a matter of department policy and political expectations, not a legal obligation to do so.
How far can one go to defend him/herself from an unreasonable search and seizures, in the same sense of one defending him/herself from an unlawful arrest? Not very far. Basically all you can do is try to talk the officer out of it. He thinks he sees evidence in sight... If the police officer reasonably believes that there is evidence of a crime in plain view, then the officer can proceed to seize the evidence. If the property owner tries to use force to prevent the seizure, then the officer can arrest the property owner. ... the property owner ... highly believes there is no possible way he could have seen the evidence from outside his property. It doesn't matter what the owner believes (unless the owner can somehow convince the officer before the search). What matters is what the court believes. But the owner cannot bring the matter to court before the officer enters the shed. If the officer insists on entering the shed and the owner can establish in court that the officer couldn't see the evidence and that there was no other lawful basis for a warrantless search or seizure, then the evidence will be inadmissible. The owner might also be able to prevail in a civil suit for the violation of civil rights, but the bar for such a suit is very high, so the likelihood is very small.
The legality of the stop may be somewhat up in the air, but it would seem that the vehicle is not in the Texassure database, so it is reasonable to think that the person driving is not insured, and therefore is breaking the law. And that is all that is required: that the suspicion is reasonable. Until someone makes a sufficiently persuasive legal stink about this, it is probably a legal stop. This article gives some legal discussion. One applicable case is US v. Broca-Martinez, a Texas case where a person was pulled over for being "unconfirmed" w.r.t. the insurance database: the court held that this was a reasonable suspicion. Thereafter, a charitable interpretation is that you misunderstood the request in providing your sister's information when he asked for your license and insurance: but you are expected to understand that when they request your license and proofs of insurance, they mean you the driver, and not the car owner. That they is even more suspicious, although I understand your confusion. At your hearing you cane explain why you didn't comply with the first officer's request, and the judge may they chalk this up to a simple misunderstanding rather than intentional deception. The problem is that you are expected to know – whether or not you've ever been pulled over before – that you have to provide license, registration, and proof of insurance. You will have a hard time making it believable that you didn't understand what the officer told you and what the law requires.
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.
england-and-wales NO Unlike some other jurisdictions, there is no requirement for an officer to have &quot;probable cause1&quot; or suspect an offence as the police can stop a vehicle for any reason under section 163 Road Traffic Act 1988: (1) A person driving a mechanically propelled vehicle on a road must stop the vehicle on being required to do so by a constable in uniform or a traffic officer. (2) A person riding a cycle on a road must stop the cycle on being required to do so by a constable in uniform or a traffic officer. (3) If a person fails to comply with this section he is guilty of an offence. There is no associated power to search the vehicle or its occupants but under section 164 and section 165 the driver must produce inter alia their licence, name, date of birth, address, insurance details and other relevant documents as the case may be. Note that although vehicle stops can be random, police officers are subject to the public sector equality duty under section 149 Equality Act 2010 and not permitted to stop a vehicle solely based on the occupants' protected characteristics. 1The term &quot;probable cause&quot; is not used in the UK, but roughly equates to somewhere around reasonable suspicion / reasonable belief
The police officers themselves are covered by Qualified Immunity - to put it briefly, a government official acting in their official capacity in a discretionary act (as in, they have some discretion in whether/how they carry out the act) is immune from suit so long as they pay reasonable deference to relevant law. In the case of the police, so long as the search or seizure itself is reasonable (either because there is a warrant, or because they had probable cause), they can take appropriately destructive measures to carry out their duty. Even if the search or seizure is later found to have been unreasonable, an officer may still have Qualified Immunity unless their action violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which reasonable person would have known" (Harlow v. Fitzgerald). However, a search/seizure doesn't give the police license for arbitrary destruction, whatever they do has to be reasonably pursuant to the legal search/seizure. For example, if a suspect is barricaded in a house with a gun, they can knock down doors, windows and walls to apprehend them. On the other hand, that does not mean the officers can then break open safes to try and find evidence - once their probable cause for the entry is fulfilled (apprehending the suspect), they need to get a warrant to do more than a plain sight search of the house. Warrants will specify what items are being searched for, so even with a warrant the police have to take reasonable measures to carry it out - an example of an unreasonable measure would be to tear into walls in order to try and find a stolen bicycle. On the other hand, tearing into walls could be justified if their warrant included searching for drugs from a dealer, where it is not uncommon to hide them in the walls. States and the Federal Government enjoy Sovereign Immunity from suits in most cases. There are some exceptions, but none would apply in this case so long as the general policy of the police department was not illegal or unconstitutional. However, county and city governments do not enjoy Sovereign Immunity and state governments and the Federal Government often allow suits against them for negligence from their actors, so someone injured by unreasonable police action can usually try to recover damages from the officer's department.