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New Research Supports the Notion That There’s No Such Thing as a “Consensual” Police Encounter
By Justin Peters | Posted Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013, at 3:55 PM
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police officers can briefly detain and search a person if they have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that he or she is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a crime. But cops need no such reasonable, articulable suspicions to engage people in consensual encounters: interactions that a reasonable person would feel free to decline or terminate at any time. Ordinary people are free to stop and talk to strangers, the thinking goes. Why should police officers be denied the same privilege?
And yet, as I’ve written before, a consensual police encounter is often anything but. Cops have guns, and handcuffs, and the power to arrest you or make your life difficult if you are rude or uncooperative. If a cop asks for a moment of our time, most of us will automatically give it, even if we know that we technically have the right to refuse.
This seems obvious, if you think about it. But there hasn’t been much research done to substantiate the theory. A new article in the Florida Coastal Law Review attempts to fill that gap. The article, titled “Testing Judicial Assumptions of the ‘Consensual’ Encounter: An Experimental Study” (it’s not yet online), provides some evidence supporting the contention that consensual police encounters are often less consensual than they seem.
Authors Alisa L. Smith, Erik Dolgoff, and Dana Stewart Speer engineered unexpected encounters between 83 undergraduate students at a “medium-sized, southern private university” and various campus security officers, who were instructed to approach the students and request a conversation in which they would ask for the students’ names, identification, and reasons for being on campus. The security officers did not openly state that the conversation was voluntary. But Smith and her co-authors note that if “at any point during the encounter a participant ignored, walked away from, or raised questions about the encounter, security was instructed to do nothing or advise the passersby that they were under no obligation to comply.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/08/15/alisa_l_smith_police_encounters_new_research_supports_the_notion_that_consensual.html
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police officers can briefly detain and search a person if they have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that he or she is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a crime. But cops need no such reasonable, articulable suspicions to engage people in consensual encounters: interactions that a reasonable person would feel free to decline or terminate at any time. Ordinary people are free to stop and talk to strangers, the thinking goes. Why should police officers be denied the same privilege?
And yet, as I’ve written before, a consensual police encounter is often anything but. Cops have guns, and handcuffs, and the power to arrest you or make your life difficult if you are rude or uncooperative. If a cop asks for a moment of our time, most of us will automatically give it, even if we know that we technically have the right to refuse.
This seems obvious, if you think about it. But there hasn’t been much research done to substantiate the theory. A new article in the Florida Coastal Law Review attempts to fill that gap. The article, titled “Testing Judicial Assumptions of the ‘Consensual’ Encounter: An Experimental Study” (it’s not yet online), provides some evidence supporting the contention that consensual police encounters are often less consensual than they seem.
Authors Alisa L. Smith, Erik Dolgoff, and Dana Stewart Speer engineered unexpected encounters between 83 undergraduate students at a “medium-sized, southern private university” and various campus security officers, who were instructed to approach the students and request a conversation in which they would ask for the students’ names, identification, and reasons for being on campus. The security officers did not openly state that the conversation was voluntary. But Smith and her co-authors note that if “at any point during the encounter a participant ignored, walked away from, or raised questions about the encounter, security was instructed to do nothing or advise the passersby that they were under no obligation to comply.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/08/15/alisa_l_smith_police_encounters_new_research_supports_the_notion_that_consensual.html
