Does one have the power to order the police to provide them with a public defendant lawyer during a traffic stop, stop-and-frisk, or pretextual stop? When police stop and search a pedestrian, this is commonly known as a stop and frisk. When police stop an automobile, this is known as a traffic stop. If the police stop a motor vehicle on minor infringements in order to investigate other suspected criminal activity, this is known as a pretextual stop. Additional rules apply to stops that occur on a bus.[3]
No Besides this being clearly unworkable, the requirements for the state providing public defense attorneys include being in need (you will need to provide an affadavit or similar to the effect) and when the defendant is at risk of significant time of confinement. The 5 to 15 minutes of the traffic or Terry stop are not considered significant. Nor are the processing times of arresting you and taking you in. Trying to make the officer provide you with an attorney (or declaring you aren't doing anything without one) before complying with their orders may well result in your incarceration and subsequent assignment of a public defender.
"Police" that one would generally encounter in the US are local or state agencies, and the ordinary crimes you mentioned are matters of state law, so they would be reported to local or state police. (There are federal law enforcement agencies, but they only deal with specialized areas of federal law, and you wouldn't ordinarily encounter them in daily life.) On the other hand, immigration is a matter of federal law. The responsibilities of local or state police are governed by state law, and the federal government cannot compel state officers to enforce federal law. A specific state's law could potentially require state and local police to ask about people's immigration status and/or ask the federal government to check on the status of someone they suspect might be illegal. I believe a few red states have enacted, or are considering, such laws, though they usually deal with people stopped by police rather than people filing a report. Some of these laws have been challenged in court, and I am not sure which exact parts of which laws are still being implemented for each of those states. Most states do not have such laws.
Various cases heard by the US Supreme Court have established that an anonymous tip can indeed create reasonable grounds for probable cause, allowing the police to search and detain persons involved. For example, the case of Navarette v. California where a suspect was stopped on the highway after an anonymous tip was given to police - the court ruled that the tip established reasonable grounds for probable cause which allowed the persons to be stopped in the first place. The precedent set in that case would apply to the situation you are describing.
If you were moving "with the flow of traffic" but over the limit, you were still breaking the law, and the cop can choose which car or cars to stop on any basis or none (except ones forbidden, such as racial in the US). This is almost surely not a valid defense, not in any jurisdiction that I know of at least. If you can show that to slow to the speed limit would have actually been unsafe, you might have a defense, but that is going to be hard to get a court to accept.
The standard for stopping someone and requesting their ID under the limitations in the U.S. Constitution is &quot;reasonable suspicion.&quot; For example, if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that you are taking pictures for the purpose of a secure location for purposes of espionage, or to case the location for a future crime, reasonable suspicion is probably present and you can probably legitimately be asked for you ID. A creative and intelligent officer can almost always conjure up some reasonable suspicion in the situation that you identify to question you and demand ID. For example, she could state that no one else has taken a picture of that location in weeks and that is is very unusual behavior, that your demeanor or the time of day you were present doesn't seem to be that of someone taking a picture for artistic or journalistic purposes, that you seemed nervous, that a previous criminal engaged in similar behavior before committing a crime fourteen years ago, that a confidential informant (e.g. a nosy neighbor) advised him that there was someone engaged in suspicious behavior at that location, that she read in a police anti-terrorism bulletin that terrorist favor that model of camera, etc. The nature of the suspicion doesn't have to be shared with you until you challenge it in court. A dumb cop won't come up with any colorable reason, demands ID for a stated reason (&quot;before you have to do whatever I say&quot;) that is inaccurate, admits he has no reason to stop you in a conversation captured by a body camera, and doesn't come up with pretext after the fact before going to the court. In that case, the stop is a de minimis violation of your civil rights justifying a nominal damages award of $1 to you and your attorneys' fees and costs and maybe a consent decree ordering the agency not to do that in the future.
Police may not arrest you without probable cause, and the existence of probable cause is evaluated “at the moment of the arrest.” Beck v. State of Ohio, 379 U.S. 89, 96 (1964). Therefore, police may not “look for after-the-fact justifications for [seizures] that would otherwise be impermissible.” United States v. Hughes, 606 F.3d 311, 316 (6th Cir. 2010). In Beck, for instance, the defendant was arrested because he had a prior record of illegal gambling and because an officer had heard &quot;reports&quot; about him doing something that was never specified. When the officer saw the defendant driving, he stopped him and searched his car, but found nothing. He arrested him anyway, and when they got to the jail, they found betting slips in his pocket. He was convicted under the local gambling ordinance based on that evidence, but the Supreme Court reversed the conviction: The constitutional validity of the search in this case, then, must depend upon the constitutional validity of the petitioner's arrest. Whether that arrest was constitutionally valid depends in turn upon whether, at the moment the arrest was made, the officers had probable cause to make it — whether at that moment the facts and circumstances within their knowledge and of which they had reasonably trustworthy information were sufficient to warrant a prudent man in believing that the petitioner had committed or was committing an offense. However, if they want to arrest you for Crime A but only have probable cause to arrest you for Crime B, they may arrest you on that offense, and doing so may quite easily give them the time or access they need to gather additional evidence on Crime A. This is why so many large drug busts start as turn-signal violations.
What law in the U.S. governs when you need to pull over for a traffic stop? Specifically, Massachusetts? Refusal to submit to a police officer, Mass. Gen. Laws Ann. ch. 90, § 25 (2016) governs. The relevant part reads: Any person who, while operating or in charge of a motor vehicle . . . who shall refuse or neglect to stop when signalled to stop by any police officer who is in uniform or who displays his badge conspicuously on the outside of his outer coat or garment . . . shall be punished by a fine of one hundred dollars. What about a police standing on the side of the road, waving you over? (perhaps at a speed trap) If the police officer is on a uniform and displays his badge, probably. What about a police just standing on the side of the road, looking at you? Assuming the police officer doesn't "signal" you to stop, you would be okay under this statute. Whether he is legally justified in asking you to stop is a separate issue outside the scope of you question. Bottom Line: Someone who doesn't want to run afoul of this law should stop whenever they think a police officer is pulling them over.
Yes to everything. Justified use of force is assault / battery / homicide (as appropriate). "Assault" means that a person has placed someone in fear of their life or person. "Battery" means that a person has physically struck someone in some way. "Homicide" means that a person has killed another human. None of these definitions speak to the legality of the action. You are right about the example being assault. Justified use of force is de facto legal. Assault, battery, and homicide are normally crimes, but the justifications for using force carve out exceptions. If the circumstances fit within the justification, the person using the justified force has not committed a crime. (Generally speaking, the person targeted by said force has.) If the situation you describe fits within the laws of justification within the state (and to be fair, it probably does), then your co-worker is right about the actions being perfectly legal. Police are picky about what they investigate, and prosecutors are picky about what they charge. If it's 100% clear from the evidence that you were justified in your use of force, prosecutors will (typically) not press charges, and so police will not bother with an arrest or further investigation. It's really not worth the time and effort for a case that has 0% chance of producing a conviction. However, if the police and prosecutors have some doubts (e.g., they think your force was excessive and therefor not justified), they can still press charges. Being charged with a crime does not mean you have committed a crime. And vice-versa. Justification is an affirmative defense against charges of assault / battery / homicide. An affirmative defense does not mean "I confess to the crime but have a really good excuse." It means that you admit to certain facts that would normally be beneficial to the prosecution, but claim additional facts that either mitigate or make you innocent of the given charges. In the case of justified force, you are admitting to the action of assault, but claiming innocence. When making your defense, your theory of defense must be internally consistent. You cannot admit to a fact when convenient and deny it when it is inconvenient. "I was in Santa Fe at the time, and anyway, Sam did it," is an example of a self-consistent theory that gives multiple reasons to acquit. That's good, because the jury only needs one reason that gives them pause, and now you've got two chances at that. "I was in Santa Fe at the time, and anyway, he was threatening my life," is not internally consistent. If you argue justification, you explicitly declaim any alibi. This situation is more dangerous, because your defense rests entirely on the credibility of the justification. But if you argue an alibi, you implicitly declaim any justification. So building your defense on things the prosecution can disprove is much worse than taking an affirmative defense of justification.