Sorry, fellas. I'm a little rusty. I didn't think of this until just now.
Consensual encounters, as applied in the context of the 4A, are court-created nonsense, a distortion.
The general idea is that police can make contact and consensually engage a citizen just as a citizen can do to another citizen. The lie is that when police do it, in the context of the 4A, they are investigating somebody. When citizens engage one another consensually, it almost never involves investigation of an offense. While citizens could contact someone and engage them consensually to investigate some suspected offense (Hey? Did you just steal a trinket from that little old lady?), they generally don't, and for sure citizens cannot temporarily seize someone to
investigate them further.
Take a moment to read or re-read
Terry v Ohio. One of the court's lines is that it would be unreasonable to forbid a police officer to detain and investigate. The court covers up with slick language what they are about to do:
"It would have been poor police work indeed for an officer of 30 years' experience in the detection of thievery from stores in this same neighborhood to have failed to investigate this behavior further."
What the court omits to mention is that Detective McFadden wasn't just investigating; he actually seized Terry. And, with that sentence, "...poor police work...", the court summarily dispensed with your right to be secure in your person if a cop can successfully rationalize his suspicions later to a judge. According to the court, it is
good police work to seize someone while investigating them further. Something citizens cannot do, not to merely
investigate somebody.
...
A statute presuming a contact initiated by an office as non-consensual misses the mark a little bit, I think. Nearer would be a statute repudiating the courts' artifice, and requiring RAS to initiate a consensual contact for investigative purposes. While they're at it, they can also eliminate or dramatically restrict the good faith exception (literally the police equivalent of "close enough for government work"), and qualified immunity (based on the out-dated idea that the king is immune because he is sovereign). Not that I trust legislatures to do the right thing. Heck, they're willing to rule me whether I consent or not. Why on earth would I put one jot of trust in an individual who is so arrogant as to think he can legitimately rule me without my express, individual consent, much less a whole group of them collected into something called a legislature?
