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ID Requests from officers

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ztaylor

Junior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Texas

Is it legal for an officer to request ID from the passengers of a driver stopped for a moving violation?

Is it legal for an officer to request ID from a pedestrian not accused of violating the law?

Is a person violating the law by denying the officers request in either situation?What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)?
 


Antigone*

Senior Member
What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Texas

Is it legal for an officer to request ID from the passengers of a driver stopped for a moving violation?

Is it legal for an officer to request ID from a pedestrian not accused of violating the law?

Is a person violating the law by denying the officers request in either situation?What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)?
Is this homework?
 

ztaylor

Junior Member
No it's a debate between me and a few friends.

I told them it would not be out of the bounds of the law to ask for ID from all passengers in a vehicle during a traffic stop. I did agree though that it would or at least should be unlawful to request ID from someone not otherwise accused or associated with someone breaking the law.

Their point was that the only person who is required to provide ID is the driver of the vehicle, and that passengers are not.
 

cyjeff

Senior Member
in a stop, since all passengers are also detained along with the driver, the id's of those passengers may be requested and run.

Police cannot simply start asking people on the street for id without a reason to do so.
 

CdwJava

Senior Member
Is it legal for an officer to request ID from the passengers of a driver stopped for a moving violation?
An officer can ASK most anything he wants. Whether he has the lawful authority to compel it is something that would depend on the circumstances and state law.

Is it legal for an officer to request ID from a pedestrian not accused of violating the law?
See above.

Is a person violating the law by denying the officers request in either situation?What is the name of your state?
That depends on whether or not the person refusing to provide ID was detained or not, and whether or not TX has a law mandating that detained persons must identify themselves.
 

BOR

Senior Member
Z, here is some discussion on it. The thread concerned RI, PRE-Hiibel though.

Post Hiibel, whether in a car or on foot, in order for a person to be compelled to show ID, as you describe, they must be under investigation also.

OR if they are on parole/probation and part of the terms is they must tell an officer when asked, of course that is deifferent, sure they are not under investigation, but are on release status.


License Must Be Carried Even when Not Driving
 

CavemanLawyer

Senior Member
Passenger in a vehicle: If the vehicle is lawfully stopped then everyone in it is under detention. There is ample caselaw in Texas that justifies an officer in checking every occupant of a vehicle to determine whether they have any active warrants. The is also ample caselaw holding that an officer is justified in requesting your DL for this purpose because they do not have to take your word for it when you give your name and other identifiers. It is also a matter of practicality because it is so much easier to take four DL's with you to read back to dispatch rather then having to write down or memorize everyone's info. So under the typical traffic stop scenario, yes it is lawful to request someone's ID. Whether it is a violation to refuse to give it is another issue. There are several statutes under the transportation code requiring that you provide your DL but none of them apply to anyone other than the driver of a vehicle. The only other statute requiring production of a DL is the failure to ID statute under the penal code. Unless the person is giving FALSE information, the duty to provide ID only arises when the person is under arrest, not detention and certainly not in a consensual encounter. So if you are a passenger and are not under arrest then technically you cannot be charged with any crime for failing to provide your DL. If the officer has probable cause for any arrestable offense then he/she can arrest you and re-request your DL. Failure to do so at this point would be a Class B misdemeanor and could be enhanceable to a Class A if you are a wanted fugitive. So failing to give your DL is not going to get you charged under typical circumstances but what it does is give the officer very wide latitude to take additional measures to determine your true identity. By refusing to give the DL you have now given the officer probable cause to search your person for identifying information. There is also caselaw that holds that if an officer is permitted to detain you and take you back to the police station and run you through AFIS (run your finger prints through a database of people previously handled by law enforcement.) (caveat-this would be a last resort and reserved for people who either cannot be identified at all or whose identity cannot be confirmed.)

As for the person walking down the street, unless the officer has reasonable suspicion to detain them then it is nothing more than a consensual encounter and the person is not required to even talk to the officer much less provide their DL. If the officer has reasonable suspicion to detain the individual then they can take reasonable measures to discover their identity if the individual will not identify themself (ex: search for DL or run through AFIS.)
 

justalayman

Senior Member
Has anyone checked out the new AZ bill for "illegal" immigrants? Kinda scary...
I don't think so. What it does more than anything is compel the police to attempt to determine resident status if there is reasonable suspicion to believe the person in question is not legally here.

I do not see where it allows the police to do anything they couldn't before.
 

BOR

Senior Member
If the officer has reasonable suspicion to detain the individual then they can take reasonable measures to discover their identity if the individual will not identify themself (ex: search for DL or run through AFIS.)
You mean names are run through AFIS also and not just fingerprints??

If they do not give an ID/name, they are not compelled to give a FP either.
 

CavemanLawyer

Senior Member
You mean names are run through AFIS also and not just fingerprints??
I don't understand your question. AFIS is a fingerprint database. You print the person and run it through the program to try to match it up to a known individual that has previously been handled by the system. Maybe there are AFIS setups that let you limit the search by name. I've never used the system myself. Either way it is fingerprints and fingerprints alone that you are using as your input and return.

BOR said:
If they do not give an ID/name, they are not compelled to give a FP either.
Of course they are. The case-law is clear in Texas and probably federally that you have no expectation of privacy in purely identifying information such as your name or your fingerprints. You can't physically force someone to answer questions about their identity, the most you can do is charge them with a crime where applicable. But you can absolutely grab the person's hand and force their fingers against the touch screen of the AFIS, or for that matter stick their fingers in ink and take their print, IF you have lawful justification for it.
 
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BOR

Senior Member
I don't understand your question. AFIS is a fingerprint database. You print the person and run it through the program to try to match it up to a known individual that has previously been handled by the system. Maybe there are AFIS setups that let you limit the search by name. I've never used the system myself. Either way it is fingerprints and fingerprints alone that you are using as your input and return.
That was the Q, was there some systems that can run a name only.

Of course they are. The case-law is clear in Texas and probably federally that you have no expectation of privacy in purely identifying information such as your name or your fingerprints. You can't physically force someone to answer questions about their identity, the most you can do is charge them with a crime where applicable. But you can absolutely grab the person's hand and force their fingers against the touch screen of the AFIS, or for that matter stick their fingers in ink and take their print, IF you have lawful justification for it.
Taking a fingerprinint though IS a search. I don't see how it can be justified on scene, absent being on parole or such. Hayes v. Florida, citing Davis v. Mississippi clearly stated prior judicial authority is needed to compel a fingerprint if a person is not under arrest.

I know you said IF there is lawful justification, but that would take some exigent facts in my mind??
 

CdwJava

Senior Member
As a note, there are field deployable fingerprint scanners. Most run local prints for those local, county, state, and even federal agencies that have locally accessible print databases. AFIS takes longer and are not commonly run in the field, but can be.
 

CavemanLawyer

Senior Member
That was the Q, was there some systems that can run a name only.
The information is there in the database so there's no reason you couldn't search by name and pull up matching prints if they exist. Whether that function exists on current systems I don't know. I see AFIS run just about every day because they have it installed in the courts here, but I don't handle the software so I couldn't tell you. [ after reading CdwJava's post I'm pretty sure the setups in the courts are for a local database not AFIS. ]

BOR said:
Taking a fingerprinint though IS a search. I don't see how it can be justified on scene, absent being on parole or such. Hayes v. Florida, citing Davis v. Mississippi clearly stated prior judicial authority is needed to compel a fingerprint if a person is not under arrest.

I know you said IF there is lawful justification, but that would take some exigent facts in my mind??
I honestly don't see what either of those cases has to do with this fact pattern. Those deal with known individuals being compelled to give up their prints to be used as evidence against them. The cases hold that the prints should have been suppressed. The cases also hold that in effect there was no exigency because since the person is known, they can make arrangements to obtain their prints any time. Those cases conclude that the proper thing to do would have been for law enforcement to obtain a warrant since they had probable cause that a crime had been committed.

This is completely different than a situation where you are merely trying to identify someone who will not identify themselves. How can this not be considered exigent? You either ID them then and there or you release them and possibly never see them again. You literally have no way of ever furthering your investigation short of patrolling around and hoping to find them again, in which case you are no closer to id'ing them then you were before. You only need reasonable suspicion to detain someone and once detained there are any number of lawful reasons that an officer might have to need their name. If this is just a detention then there is not yet probable cause that an offense has been committed so a warrant is not even an option. This is also not the type of intrusion where the person is being subjected to a search that they can't avoid. In the cases cited they are taking his prints either with consent or with a warrant (if they had done it lawfully.) There is no way to avoid the search. In our situation the person can avoid the search at any time by just saying his name which the officer can then go and verify. Bringing someone in to AFIS them to obtain their ID does not result in any evidence to be used against them. There is nothing being admitted against them, nothing to suppress, unless the detention incidentally lead to a statement or some other evidence that was seized. It is a search and it is a detention and it is an intrusion, but it is not an unreasonable one under the right circumstances.

Tomorrow, if I remember, I will go through my S&S literature and try to pull a TX. case on this.
 
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