When the Police Tell You To Do Something

The Channel 9 web site has a pretty good piece about what you should do if a cop violates your rights or demands that you do something you shouldn't have to do. This is in response to the incident in Cambridge last week where the black Harvard professor was arrested trying to get into his own house.

I play in a little rock and roll band, and we do that perennial song, "I Fought the Law (and the Law Won)". You might as well face the fact that there is no song called "I Fought the Law (And I Won)," the cops have handcuffs and guns and back-up and the judge almost always takes their side. Channel 9 suggests that maybe when they tell you to do something, the smart thing is to do it, even if you shouldn't have to.

WASHINGTON, DC (WUSA) -- The controversy surrounding the arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates has raised the question of what rights a homeowner has to refuse the orders of a law enforcement officer who has entered that home in the course of his duties and what limits there are - if any - on what a homeowner can say to the officer without risking arrest for disorderly conduct.

"You generally have a right to call a police officer names as long as you don't rise to the level of a public nuisance, a public disturbance. And in your own home you generally have freedom to use language that might be offensive out on the street, and you have a right to be louder in your own home that you would out on the street," said George Washington University Law Professor Stephen Saltzburger.

The issues are complicated and case law depends on the specific facts of a given confrontation. In addition, laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction so what may be allowed in one state could be outlawed in another.

"Generally speaking, what I advise everybody is that if you know your rights and you know that an officer is wrong, that the officer is ordering you to do something upon pain of penalty, you should do it and sort it out later.

Choosing to raise the level of confrontation with a police officer is almost always a bad idea. If they are violating your rights, you've got remedies, but if you raise the level of confrontation there really a chance that there will be a physical encounter and, usually, the citizen is the one who is worse off in that," Saltzburger told 9News Now.

Police offer similar advice on following their instructions, even if you believe your rights are being violated. "My suggestion is go along with the officer's commands. Sort it out on the back end. You may not know that you look like the bank robber. You may not know that a call went out that the bank robber had a gun.

And it would be in your interests in that case not to do anything provocative," said Ted Deeds, Chief Operating Officer of the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Do You Have To Follow A Cop's Orders?

The problem of course is that we have a monolithic tradition of freedom of speech, and that includes provocative speech. The reality is that we have freedom of speech "in theory," but when it comes right down to it, you better zip your lip when the cops are around.