Hi, Folks,
I'm a police academy legal instructor, assigned to develop a much-needed and long overdue training package on open carry. I'm good with the legal aspects, but the challenge in police training is to integrate legal requirements into overall police procedure to include other considerations like officer safety and other tactical issues.
So, I'd like to consider good ideas that other police trainers have come up with. Have any of you heard of agencies whose officers seem to be well trained on police interface with open carry situations and who give proper considerations to citizens' rights? Those are the kind of agencies I'd like to contact.
Thanks.
1. Why would an open-carry "situation" be any different than any other situation? Lets do a fast review:
a. observe from a distance; no RAS, no contact.
b. consensual contact: open carry or no open carry--no reason to treat it any different than any other consensual contact.
c. Terry Stop with RAS: Terry's two prongs kick in. Prong1: if its an OCer, he's armed. Prong2: presently dangerous. If both prongs are satisfied, the cop is already legally allowed to temporarily seize the OC'd weapon.
So, why is there a question?
2. Cops first need to learn to respect the limits of their authority. We've seen lots in the last eight years. So, we know all about cops giving orders and making demands in authoritative tone of voice while choosing words that seem a request. We know all about police demanding identity documents without authority to make the demand, including during both consensual encounters and detentions. We know all about cops making it up as they go along: stuff like seizing an OCer on the backwards RAS of "how do I know you're not a prohibited possessor?". Stuff like detaining someone on the basis of someone exercising an enumerated right, "we had a complaint about a man with a gun." (As if a person legally carrying a gun justified a detention.) We know darned good and well most of those cops didn't get up that morning and say to themselves, "for the first time in my career, I'm gonna violate somebody's Fourth Amendment rights today." They were doing it all along. OCers just flushed them out into the open, bringing them to the attention of a group who knew the law.
So, if you're teaching a crowd who already plays fast and loose with the limits of their authority, there's not much point in teaching them about OC. They'll ignore it.; or you'll have to back up one step and teach them about that before teaching them about OC.
3. Start with dispatchers and review of dispatch policy. If a caller whines "man with a gun", dispatch needs to ask what the MWAG is doing with the gun. Is it holstered? Is he shopping? Is he shopping? Etc. If nothing going on, dispatch can say, "That's legal, ma'am/sir. Call us back when he does something illegal." And, if there is a policy to dispatch to all complaints, officers can be trained to observe from a distance without contacting the OCer.
4. Whatever you teach your students, look out for their interests. This next goes back to point #2. Over the years we've met quite a few cops who could screw up even a consensual encounter. We do file formal written complaints that trigger IA review. We do record contacts with police. We do file the occasional lawsuit. Its in your students' best interest not to contact an OCer without RAS, unless the student intends to scrupulously follow 4th Amendment case law. The tricks some cops pull that usually work on Joe Public won't work on most OCers. If your student is in the habit of pulling little abuses of authority, he's gonna want to leave those habits in the car before walking up to an OCer.
5. Do you have any idea how revealing the implications of the bolded comment? Why would there be any agencies who didn't give proper consideration to citizens' rights? Separately, are they really so few in number, and unknown or undiscoverable within the LE grapevine, that you needed to ask us here?