No, Chris Lollie Wasn’t Required to Show Cops Identification

In January, Minnesota dad Chris Lollie was
waiting to pick his children up from school
when a police officer approached him. Though Lollie was in
a public building, he was allegedly sitting in a restricted area.
And despite him quickly moving on when asked, the officer also
wanted Lollie to identify himself—which Lollie politely refused to
do.

The officer pressed on, joined by a colleague. Ultimately,
refusing to show identification earned Lollie a round of Tasing and
an arrest for disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process.
Luckily Lollie caught the whole incident on video (watch it below)
and the charges against him were dropped. 

Since the video went viral last week, a lot of people have cited
it as evidence of the “arbitrary
harassment or brutality” certain Americans, especially people
of color, routinely face from police officers. This has prompted
the law-and-order loving crowd to counter that
if only Americans would blindly obey every law enforcement
whim, we wouldn’t have anything to worry about. I just came
across a particularly infuriating
example of this from CBS Minnesota, which answers the question,
“Do you have to comply when a police officer asks to see your
identification?” as so: 

“You have to produce your ID, especially under those
circumstances. They were called to investigate a suspicious person
call,” retired police officer Joe Dutton said.

Retired Golden Valley police officer Joe Dutton is a use of
force expert.

He says when officers are called out to investigate a suspicious
person it is their duty to find out who that person is and why they
are there.

Back it up a minute. Dutton seems to be referring to what are
known as “stop and identify” statutes. These laws, active in 24
states, authorize police to detain people and demand identification
under threat of arrest—but only
when officers have “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity.
Unless “being a black man in public” qualifies as
reasonably-suspicious behavior, I’m not sure how Lollie’s case
meets this legal requirement. 

According to our “use of force expert,” however, this doesn’t
matter: By initially refusing any random request for
identification, you thereby become suspicious. 

“When you start debating the police, and when you start becoming
non-compliant, you’re telling the police that you’ve got something
to hide and they want to find out what you’re hiding,” Dutton
said.

Dutton says officers have contact with hundreds of thousands of
people daily and most interactions end without the use of
force.

(…) In Chris Lollie’s case, Dutton believes if he had shown
his ID there would have been no use of force by police.

He does not believe Lollie’s race is an issue in this case. “It
would have happened no matter what the race of the individual was,”
Dutton said.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, say Dutton is right about the
race business. That does not make this any better.
Community cops should not have a right to stop anyone they want for
any (or no) reason and then use force against them if they refuse
to show an ID. That is not
constitutional policing, that is the mark of a police
state. 

And for the record:
Minnesota doesn’t even have a stop and identify law. The

24 states that do, in some form, are: Alabama, Arizona,
Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana,
Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri (Kansas City only), Montana, Nebraska,
Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio,
Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin.