Another Episode of Great Moments in Cajun Justice: It really was a lot easier in the old days. The NOPD cops would just take you to the interrogation room and leave you. Then the guy in the Pink Bunny Costume would come in and beat a confession out of you. No one worried about having a proper ID, by the perps or the cops, in those days.

Gotcha—thanks for the knowledge

NAL, however;

I am not seeing how the argument puts the police in a no-win situation. It just concludes that the police acted inappropriately in that case. The argument has three parts:

1: Police must have reasonable suspicion before escalating past a level one encounter.
2: An officer saying “Stop” (or some variant thereof) is not a level one encounter.
3: At the time of encounter, the officer did not have reasonable suspicion.

Conclusion: Officer acted inappropriately as the encounter started off escalated past level one without reasonable suspicion.

The probability of Cisse’s guilt regarding any matter isn’t relevant, because at the start of the encounter the officer didn’t have any indication. To consider that is to try to use the ends to justify the means. The protection from being randomly hassled by police has to apply to everybody, even if they later turn out to have been guilty, else it doesn’t really exist.

Will depend on state law. In Kentucky the law reads: KRS 431.025 Notice of intention to arrest — Act of arrest — Force.

(1) The person making an arrest shall inform the person about to be arrested of the intention to arrest him, and of the offense for which he is being arrested.

(2) An arrest is made by placing the person being arrested in restraint, or by his submission to the custody of the person making the arrest. The submission shall be in the actual presence of the arrester.

(3) No unnecessary force or violence shall be used in making an arrest.

“Stop” might be the start of a voluntary encounter or a detainment. All three have different rules.

The problem is that the police in Cisse’s case were acting as though “Stop” was an arrest, while not meeting the standards which would allow them to perform the arrest. From the Cato article:

“(1) a “common-law inquiry” of individuals, which must be supported by a “founded suspicion that criminality is afoot,” (2) a forcible stop of an individual that must be supported by reasonable suspicion that person was involved in a crime, and (3) an arrest of an individual, which must be supported by probable cause.”

If “Stop” constitutes an arrest, well, police must have some level of articulable suspicion. In the case of Mr. Cisse, they didn’t. So if they lacked that founded suspicion, and yet he wasn’t free to go, that was legal arrest, which meant that the evidence found from it should not be admissible.

Mendip: “I have come to be hanged, do you hear?”
Tyson: “Have you filled in the necessary forms?”

(Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not For Burning, Act I)