Quote:
Originally Posted by BearTitan
Members of this forum are a little overly sensitive to LEO knowledge regarding gun laws. There is a reason that most cops do not know the UFA front to back. That is because guys like us make up such a small percentage of the crime that the LEO's deal with.
I would wager that a traffic cop could identify 100 different moving violations. Also that a DEA cop could tell you which substances are illegal and which are not.
Like all of us, police are experts on the stuff they spend 90% of their time doing.....dealing with criminals. Cut them a little slack when they deal with you. They don't have the luxury of looking up every law on the web like we do.
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I'm just about the first guy to give the police a break, but I'm really starting to think more strongly that if you're in the business of arresting people for violating criminal laws, you better know what the law is when you make that pinch.
It's not all that hard to become a subject matter expert in a narrow slice of the law, criminal law, especially when the standard you are judged by is just probable cause. Sure, lawyers, DAs and judges are members of a learned profession that takes many years to master, but the stakes are higher and the standards harder once it gets to that level.
Once a cop makes the arrest, if it's not a valid arrest, the poor slob eventually released might have already lost his job for not showing up for work, now has an arrest record, and has to go through a lengthy and expensive battle to get the arrest expunged. Sure, he can sue, but that also takes time, money and energy. It's not a minor oops, I didn't know any better, type of mistake.
I'm not talking about arrests that a cop has good faith probable cause to perform -- looks like what somebody did is a crime -- make the arrest. I'm thinking, obviously, as in Pa. Patriot's situation -- if the cop is unsure about the law and the situation is stable (nobody is acting dangerous and they're willing to hang around for you to make a few calls to find out if they have to show ID, while they go back to their dinner) -- call somebody who knows. If you can't get a straight answer that something is illegal, you don't have probable cause that a crime has been commited because you don't even know if it's a crime. You don't arrest people and figure it out later. You figure it out and then arrest. If that means you might let somebody off who actually did commit a crime but you weren't reasonably sure it was, open a book and start learning so that doesn't happen again.
We're not talking about some esoteric law buried in the books. Bread and butter can a cop stop someone and demand ID. No. No gray area in that one. Can the cop arrest someone for refusing to show ID in those circumstances. No. Isn't that something we think most cops should know?
I'm open to other points of view because there are likely a myriad of uintended consequences resulting from this point of view, but for right now, I'm leaning strongly toward a simple requirement that nobody gets arrested if the police don't have probable cause to believe that a law has or hasn't been broken, and not knowing, at least in its most basic elements, what the law is under which someone is arrested would give me reason to conclude there could not have been probable cause.