This should read 'refusing to show ID is not a crime in the limited scope ruled by a US federal appeals court. This decision also only applies to Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.'
Don't take legal advice from websites. Even ones that regularly report on legal matters.
License to violate the law by police officers. I wonder if the police officer would have had the unconstitutional request if Wingate was not black. Joe Bide and Congress could easily limit or remove the extreme qualified immunity the Supreme Court has accorded to government officials.
“The only downside to the ruling is that the deputy was granted qualified immunity for Wingate's arrest. Under that controversial doctrine, state officials are routinely shielded from civil liability if their actions were not explicitly condemned in a previous court decision. "Until today," the 4th Circuit said, "no federal court has prescribed the constitutional limits" of the ordinance Fulford cited. Thus, "a reasonable officer could infer—albeit incorrectly—that the [Fourth Amendment's] requirements did not apply."
>I wonder if the police officer would have had the unconstitutional request if Wingate was not black.
The article didn't mention his race and I don't think it's relevant here. This is a part of the country where the cops do this to everyone because they're used to getting away with it.
I read the whole article thinking "this sounds like a typical northeast Virginia jack-booted cop that's used to trampling on people's rights".
lol - it's not just limited to Virginia; I've found cops in most urban areas to be far more likely to display these sorts of tendencies than more rural areas.
The more cops there are in the workplace the more they dominate each other's social circles and the more removed they become from the communities they're policing.
This is among the reasons I think, at least for urban areas, breaking up centralized local law enforcement agencies and distributing law enforcement functions to smaller LE units embedded within other relevant agencies would be a sensible abuse-mitigating reform.
It would take an act of Congress to do this. An attempt to do so (likely, there are already bills to do this--there are tons of bills every session that are filled and dead on arrival) would run against major push-back.
Taking away or rolling back the protections of qualified immunity would not be easy under any definition.
Don't take legal advice from websites. Even ones that regularly report on legal matters.