Why do cops make up funny stories when detaining people? In case cops are decent human beings, and these answers are true and the nature of their stop just does not allow them to truthfully tell their victims the reason for the stop, why do they make up funny stories about it like: In Texas: "What if you fall and die, we need to know who to send the body to" In Oklahoma: bicycles need to have same speed as the cars In Florida: "Someone called us saying that you may need help because you are riding your bike and it is so hot out here. (I am fine, can I leave?) No. Now that I made contact with you I have to ask for your ID. (Why?) Just to make sure you don't have an arrest warrant", In Skokie IL: "You look suspicious for you are jogging without jogging pants" (I was wearing casual wranglers pants) ..and many more Are they actually required by law to tell the detainee "a" reason? Why do they not just say "Sorry, but I can not tell you what the reason is"?
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."
It appears that Plummer v. State is still valid, but only in a very limited fact pattern. It is often quoted on the internet to justify the idea that a person may resist any unlawful arrest with force. That may have been true when Plummer was decided, and it was the clear holding of Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529 (1900) But Bad Elk is bad law today -- the wide adoption of the Model Penal Code starting in 1962 removed the right to resist a merely unlawful arrest. The right to use self-defense against excessive force by an officer remains, but is narrowly limited, and courts rarely find such resistance justified. In State v. Mulvihill 57 N.J. 151 (1970) The Supreme Court of New Jersey held: If, in effectuating the arrest or the temporary detention, the officer employs excessive and unnecessary force, the citizen may respond or counter with the use of reasonable force to protect himself, and if in so doing the officer is injured no criminal offense has been committed. However, the Mulvihill court cautioned: State v. Koonce, 89 N.J. Super. 169 (App. Div. 1965) held that "a private citizen may not use force to resist arrest by one he knows or has good reason to believe is an authorized police officer engaged in the performance of his duties, whether or not the arrest is illegal under the circumstances obtaining." (89 N.J. Super. at 184.) The opinion put to rest the notion that the common law rule existing in some jurisdictions, which permits a citizen to resist, even with reasonable force, an unlawful arrest by a police officer, was applicable in New Jersey. ... Accordingly, in our State when an officer makes an arrest, legal or illegal, it is the duty of the citizen to submit and, in the event the seizure is illegal, to seek recourse in the courts for the invasion of his right of freedom. The Mulvihill court explained the difference in the two csase by saying: Despite his duty to submit quietly without physical resistance to an arrest made by an officer acting in the course of his duty, even though the arrest is illegal, his right to freedom from unreasonable seizure and confinement can be protected, restored and vindicated through legal processes. However, the rule permitting reasonable resistance to excessive force of the officer, whether the arrest is lawful or unlawful, is designed to protect a person's bodily integrity and health and so permits resort to self-defense. Simply stated, the law recognizes that liberty can be restored through legal processes but life or limb cannot be repaired in a courtroom. And so it holds that the reason for outlawing resistance to an unlawful arrest and requiring disputes over its legality to be resolved in the courts has no controlling application on the right to resist an officer's excessive force. People v. Curtis, 70 Cal. 2d 347, 74 Cal. Rptr. at 719. The Mulvihill court further warned that: [A citizen] cannot use greater force in protecting himself against the officer's unlawful force than reasonably appears to be necessary. If he employs such greater force, then he becomes the aggressor and forfeits the right to claim self-defense ... Furthermore, if he knows that if he desists from his physically defensive measures and submits to arrest the officer's unlawfully excessive force would cease, the arrestee must desist or lose his privilege of self-defense. The court said that the duty to desist and submit if that would stop the excessive force is analogous to the duty to retreat rather than use force in self defense when this is feasible. The Nolo Press page "Resisting Arrest When Police Use Excessive Force" says: It’s rare that someone being placed under arrest has the right to forcefully resist. But in most states, if the arresting officer uses excessive force that could cause “great bodily harm,” the arrestee has the right to defend him or herself. That’s because most states hold that an officer’s use of excessive force amounts to assault or battery, which a victim has a right to defend against. ... An officer’s use of force is “excessive” if it is likely to result in unjustifiable great bodily harm (serious injury). Most states consider whether a “reasonable person” under the circumstances would have believed that the officer’s use of force was likely to cause great physical harm (including death). If the answer is “yes”—if a reasonable person would have felt it necessary to resist in self-defense, and if that person used a reasonable degree of force when resisting, then the resistance is typically justified. But this is a very high standard to meet, such that courts hardly ever find that an arrestee’s forceful resistance was defensible. This article from policeone.com citing California law, says that forceful resistance to an arrest is almost never justified. It does agree that resistance to excessive force can be used; Section 693 requires that even if the officer were committing a public offense (crime), only that "self-defense" force that is sufficient to prevent the offense may be used. In other words, the subject may only use force to simply stop the assault/battery under color of authority and never any more than that. and says that: It is a rare circumstance when this assault/battery under color of authority actually occurs and an officer is charged, not because of some great law enforcement driven conspiracy but because it rarely happens. In short, Plummer is still valid, but limited to the fact pattern when the person being arrested is actually being subjected to excessive force likely to cause great bodily harm, or death, and only justifies sufficient force to prevent such harm. The lawfulness of the arrest does not matter, it the the danger caused by the excess force that justifies possible resistance. As a practical matter, if resistance is likely to escalate rather than prevent harm, it is highly unwise. When Plummer is cited, often with Bad Elk, to justify resistance to an unlawful arrest because of its unlawfulness, that is no longer valid law and has not been for decades. Note that is a person who is not a law enforcement officer (LEO) but who is pretending to be one, tries to make an "arrest" this would not be an arrest at all, but an assault or an attempted abduction, and the victim would be justified in using reasonable force in self-defense, although not excessive force. This is not the Plummer rule, but the normal law of self-defense. However any arrestee should be careful. Claiming that the arresters are impersonators when they are in fact plainclothes LEOs will not go well. If a reasonable person should have known that they were LEOs, there is no right to resist unless excessive force is used. Note further that if non-LEOs attempt to make a "citizen's arrest", not impersonating officers, the right to self-defence only applies if excessive force is used, or there is a reasonable fear of excessive force likely to cause great bodily harm or death. Basically the Plummer rule still applies. Also, all of this is a matter of state law, and while Plummer should be good law in most if not all states, the exact rule may vary by state. In 2012 a few US states retained the common-law rule that any unlawful arrest justified resistance, according to the Nolo page linked above. That may have changed, or may change when a case arises. The question does not specify a state, and a precise answer depends on the specific state.
For the record, factual impossibility is rarely a defense to a crime. In United States v. Thomas the court decided that men who believed they were raping a drunken unconscious women were guilty of attempted rape, even though the woman was dead at the time. In this case there is no facts that made the offense impossible to commit. The suspect clearly submitted a false prescription and obtained the drugs he or she wished to obtain. There is no impossibility. Instead the police officer, as the saying goes, has the suspect "dead to rights". This is not legal advice. Consult an attorney for that.
In short, no, that cant be a pardon for those police officers who would be now influenced to take more violent actions towards those they detain. Pardons are only applicable to past actions. You may be pardoned before charges are filed, but the actions must have already occured. Though I less certain about this, simply because Ive never heard such a thing proposed, I would also note that it is highly improbable that the actual statement he made - generic and during a speech - could everbe interpreted as an affirmative act intending to grant pardons to anyone who may act in that manner in the future.
"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.
You can be under arrest before you are handcuffed and the police officially read you your rights. The problem from the citizen perspective is that there is no bright line test that tells you whether you are under arrest, and the courts can find that there was no arrest at a point where the suspect was handcuffed and confined to the back of a police car (United States v. Bullock, 632 F.3d 1004) – you can be merely "detained" for an investigatory stop while in cuffs. One test that might be used is asking if you are free to go about your business. A reasonable person could decide whether they were under arrest by the nature of what the officer says. For example, if he says "It would help us if you could stand over there" or "...if you could sit down", it is reasonable to conclude that this is an urging but not a command. On the other hand, if he says "Sit down, now!", it is unreasonable to think that that is a mere suggestion or plea, it is an order. There is no specific Arizona law that says when police can order you to do something, nor is there a specific law saying that force may only be used in such-and-such circumstance. There generally are guidelines for police conduct, and the guidelines tend to grant much leeway to officers (until it gets to be a recurring problem and the guidelines are changed). An example is Seattle, whose police manual reduces the question to the statement that "An officer shall use only the force reasonable, necessary, and proportionate to effectively bring an incident or person under control, while protecting the lives of the officer or others". But this does not say whether one must obey police orders. In Oregon v. Ruggles the court sympathetically notes that Whether a particular police order is “lawful” is frequently a complex question involving some of the most vexing and intractable issues in constitutional law. For example, a police order such as “Stop!” can be an unlawful seizure of a person under Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution, depending on whether the order is accompanied by a sufficient show of authority and the officer who issues the order is subsequently found to have lacked reasonable suspicion to believe that criminal activity was afoot. But Oregon has a statute, ORS 162.247(1)(b), requiring you to obey a lawful order by police. The court found that you don't have to know whether the order is lawful. Arizona has a related statute, ARS 13-2508 where resisting is defined as intentionally preventing or attempting to prevent a person reasonably known to him to be a peace officer, acting under color of such peace officer's official authority, from effecting an arrest including the means of "Engaging in passive resistance" (which is "a nonviolent physical act or failure to act that is intended to impede, hinder or delay the effecting of an arrest"). Arizona law frames the resisting crime in terms of "effecting arrest", which is different from what Oregon law says: (a) Intentionally acts in a manner that prevents, or attempts to prevent, a peace officer or parole and probation officer from performing the lawful duties of the officer with regards to another person; or (b) Refuses to obey a lawful order by the peace officer or parole and probation officer. But even if an individual in Arizona is not chargeable with resisting arrest for failing to sit (because the officers were not effecting an arrest), that does not mean that police cannot order you to sit – it just means that it's not a separate crime to fail to comply.
I'll use Washington state as my source, but laws will be similar in other states. RCW 9A.76.020 outlaws obstructing a law enforcement officer, which this would be: it is a gross misdemeanor. In using lethal force, you would have committed first degree murder, under RCW 9A.32.030. There is a defense that can be used, per RCW 9A.16.050, that homicide is justified when: In the lawful defense of the slayer, or his or her husband, wife, parent, child, brother, or sister, or of any other person in his or her presence or company, when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished. Law enforcement officers have access to justifiable homicide defenses as well under 9A.16.040, for example (b) When necessarily used by a peace officer to overcome actual resistance to the execution of the legal process, mandate, or order of a court or officer, or in the discharge of a legal duty or (c) When necessarily used by a peace officer or person acting under the officer's command and in the officer's aid: (i) To arrest or apprehend a person who the officer reasonably believes has committed, has attempted to commit, is committing, or is attempting to commit a felony The outcome of the case would hinge in part on whether the officer's arrest and use of force was lawful. To take two extremes, if the guy on the ground had just killed a dozen people and was aiming to rack up another dozen kills, the officer's arrest would almost certainly be held to be legal and his degree of force justified. Your personal belief that the suspect was compliant and unarmed might be refuted by the facts. On the other hand, if the guy on the ground had slept with the officer's sister and the officer wanted to rid the world of this vermin, then the arrest and force would almost certainly be held to be not legal. It can be legal to use deadly force to resist unlawful arrest. See John Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529, where the court held that if a party resisted arrest by an officer without warrant, and who had no right to arrest him, and if, in the course of that resistance, the officer was killed, the offence of the party resisting arrest would be reduced from what would have been murder, if the officer had had the right to arrest, to manslaughter The court also said where the officer is killed in the course of the disorder which naturally accompanies an attempted arrest that is resisted, the law looks with very different eyes upon the transaction when the officer had the right to make the arrest from what it does if the officer had no such right. What might be murder in the first case might be nothing more than manslaughter in the other, or the facts might show that no offense had been committed. This ruling has been somewhat eroded, in US v. Simon: We recognize that law enforcement officers are frequently called on to make arrests without warrants and should not be held, so far as their personal security is concerned, to a nicety of distinctions between probable cause and lack of probable cause in differing situations of warrantless arrests. It is for this reason we believe that the force of John Bad Elk has been diminished The upshot of this is that (assuming no warrant), leeway is granted to officers in assessing probable cause (I'm not sure anybody really knows at a general conceptual level what constitutes "probable cause". The court seems to imply that the remote hearsay used as the basis for the arrest would not have been sufficient for a warrant, but it was "reasonable grounds" for believing accused had committed a crime). Your premise that the officer is about to shoot would have to be substantiated by some fact, such as a declaration "I'm gonna kill you". Otherwise, your belief that the officer was about to commit unjustified murder would itself be unjustified. With better fleshing out of the circumstances, you could manufacture a justified-homicide scenario.
The answer by @A.fm. isn't wrong, but it also is unduly optimistic. In my experience, in real life, people are more likely to lie when they are under oath than when they are not under oath, and law enforcement officers tend to be particularly good at lying on the stand because they testify frequently in court cases. In almost all places in the United States (and most foreign jurisdictions), in a pure battle of credibility in the eyes of a judge or jury between a law enforcement officer and an individual citizen charged with a crime, the law enforcement officer's account is going to be found to be more credible (beyond a reasonable doubt) about 90% of the time or more, unless you have a majority-minority jury or an outlier extremely liberal judge or the law enforcement officer has a personal involvement in the case (e.g. it involves a family member of the officer). The likelihood that it will be resolved one way or the other does depend significantly on race and social class, however. The credibility imbalance is still great and favors law enforcement, but not as extreme, when it is between an unrelated third-party witness and a law enforcement officer. In the absence of hard evidence or a law enforcement insider witness willing to testify in your favor, it is almost impossible to win a credibility contest in a case like the ones you suggest. One important step an attorney can take, however, is to seek discovery on any prior instance in which the testifying officer has been disciplined for untruthfulness or had his testimony in court found to be untruthful. This will usually be fruitless, but levels the playing field to closer to 50-50 if you get lucky and received such evidence. Such a request also provides a means of collateral attack on a conviction if the law enforcement officer has a history of untruthfulness that wasn't disclosed by the prosecution after such a request is made by a defense lawyer. So, what does protect you? Mostly the desire of the bosses of law enforcement officers (who are ultimately politicians, mostly local politicians in the United States) to see the law enforced in a non-corrupt manner and the fear of a law enforcement officer that he or she might be found to have lied using physical evidence unknown to him at the time (like a secret recording of an interaction). Law enforcement officers usually don't have much to gain from lying (although this equation changes a law when police department can receive assets seized in civil forfeitures that they are involved in) and usually they want people who are "bad guys" to be in jail to protect "good guys" although they aren't always very concerned about the means by which they achieve these ends. Of course, "usually" is a weasel word here and there are many exceptions that crop up in real life (e.g. when police have engaged in misconduct and want to protect themselves from the consequences of that misconduct). The other obvious solution (so common that in certain eras of U.S. history there were travel guides targeted at African-American motorists to help they carry out this approach) is to avoid places with police who have historically been corrupt. The United States has a uniquely bottom heavy law enforcement structure. Something on the order of 95% of law enforcement officers are employed by local governments or are otherwise tightly constricted geographically (e.g. rangers in national or state parks). And, even the small number of state law enforcement officers are heavily concentrated doing traffic enforcement on major state and federal highways. Similarly, lots of federal law enforcement agencies are broken up into geographic divisions some of which are known to be more corrupt than others (e.g. there is more corruption in the border patrol on parts of the border with Mexico than on most of the border with Canada). So, if you want to avoid the risk of encountering bad cops, stay away from places that are known to have bad cops. The solution may seem like a "cop out" (sorry, pun intended), but it is actually a pretty unique feature of the American law enforcement system. Most countries (e.g. the U.K., South Korea, Russia, Japan, Spain, Mexico, France) have a much more centralized law enforcement bureaucracy, which is fine when the people are the top are scrupulously non-corrupt, but which also makes it much easier for the rot of corruption to become geographically widespread and hence unavoidable from the point of view of an individual citizen. In contrast, in the U.S., even in the most corrupt of times (e.g. the Prohibition era), there are almost always many jurisdictions where law enforcement is not corrupt and corrupting the entirely system is much more difficult than in most countries.