MONTGOMERY, Ala. — An Alabama legislator has prefiled legislation that gives law enforcement more scope to obtain information from people they believe committed a crime.
Currently, law enforcement officers have the authority to detain those they suspect of committing a felony and request their name, address and a reason for their actions.
HB 34, sponsored by Rep. Ron Bolton, R-Northport, would make it a crime for someone to provide a false birth date to police or sheriff’s deputies in Alabama. It also establishes a penalty when a person refuses to provide personal information, such as a name and address, the reason for someone’s behavior and their birth date.
Currently, state law does not list penalties for refusing to provide that information to law enforcement.
“The request from law enforcement was that we add in the requirement to provide a date of birth, in addition to the name and address, because they had situations where they were encountering people with the same name, and they wanted to make sure they had the proper identification and had the right person when they were checking them,” Bolton said during an interview Tuesday.
Under the bill, a person giving a false birth date to law enforcement could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $6,000 fine.
Those who refuse to provide lawfully-requested personal information may be subject to a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.
Bolton’s bill adds another category of information that police officers and sheriff’s deputies are already allowed to request from people during what constitutional law experts categorize as a “nonconsensual encounter.” Multiple states in the country have regulations in statute that allow law enforcement to stop someone and request identification and additional information.
According to constitutional law experts, in a consensual encounter, one in which both parties agree to have a conversation, either side can refuse to speak and provide information.
However, for nonconsensual encounters, law enforcement may also stop and detain a person if they have reasonable suspicion of a crime.
“This one is known as a stop and identify statute,” said Tracey Maclin, a constitutional law professor at the University of Florida. “If the cops have reasonable suspicion to stop you, they can make you identify yourself and if you don’t, they can then arrest you.”
That set of rules applies if someone is in public and not within a vehicle.
“If they stop you in a car, they can only stop you if they have reasonable suspicion or probable cause that you have committed a crime or a traffic violation,” Maclin said.
If the incident is the result of a traffic stop, each state is slightly different, but Maclin said that law enforcement, at a minimum, have the authority to ask for a license.
The legislation that Bolton proposed also imposes a penalty for people who refuse to abide by the “stop and identify” statute.
The proposal has concerned some law professors that has the potential to violate people’s civil rights.
“This type of legislation is ripe for abuse,” said David Thomas, a professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University.
Florida has a statute on the books that allows law enforcement to intervene and detain someone that Thomas described as “resisting without violence.”
“That ‘resistance without violence’ doesn’t exist without there being another charge,” said Thomas, a former law enforcement officer.
In his hypothetical, individuals loitering in a public area where drugs are commonly sold, are seen by law enforcement who then try to detain them. The individuals then run away and are then pursued and detained by police.
“They have no charge,” Thomas said. “There is nothing that preceded that other than that person was being on that corner. What they come back with is they turn around and charge them with ‘resisting without violence,’ and the argument is that they should have never run from police. The reality is that I do not have to talk to you as a citizen if I don’t want to talk to you, unless you have a series of articulable facts that can put me in a position that can compel you to do so.”
The net effect is that the individual who was detained will have at least one charge stemming from the incident, irrespective of whether the person violated a law.
During incidents of officer-involved shootings, Thomas said, there are a series of steps that led to the incident that resulted in either injury or death.
“You have got to tell me how we got here in order for everything else that you did, in order for that to be legal,” Thomas said. “What often happens is that they will use that law as the reason for how they got there, and they will try and skip over the articulable facts, which are necessary for any of this to make any sense.”
All that a law enforcement officer needs, Maclin said, is a reasonable suspicion to require identification and take into custody those who refuse.
“The problem for most people is that they don’t know what the officer knows,” Maclin said. “If the officer comes up to you and says, ‘can I see some identification,’ and you say, ‘I don’t have to comply with that.’ The problem for you is that you don’t know whether he has got reasonable suspicion or not.”
This article originally appeared in the Alabama Reflector, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. It appears on FOX54.com under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
