That top tweet of the police just casually harassing the placard guy for filming an officer’s car is very interesting. Particularly how the officer is using carefully chosen words “I’m giving you an order to show me your ID” to skirt the fact he had no legal right to demand his ID.

So much of law enforcement abuse of power depends on intimidation and (most) people’s default reaction to trust their authority in all situations (which is also essential to their abuse of placards).

I had a similar experience where police straight up lied about tenant laws during an eviction process of the, protecting the most awful and abusive tenant (who was a cocaine dealer) a family friend had to deal with. The family member was immediately willing to believe the police, and had another family friend not been a lawyer who was familiar with tenant law and knows very well from professional experience never to trust police outright. The result was saving the family over a thousand dollars (out of multiple thousand owed), as the timing of them leaving the property, which the police was attempting to mess with, was very important in the legal process of a later claim.

The officer essentially conceded on the spot he had no legal grounds for what he had previously claimed with such confident authority, with plenty of weasel words, and just left.

“I’m giving you an order to show me your ID” isn't skirting the law, it's invoking it. It's illegal to disobey police, even illegal orders.

At least in the US, you are definitely not required to obey unlawful orders. Otherwise the police could tell you to commit a crime and you’d be in a Catch-22.

Now, the police will never tell you whether an order is lawful, they’ll try whatever they think they can get away with. So whatever the citizen/police equivalent of “Caveat Emptor” is, it definitely applies in these situations; asymmetric information is not your friend.

> Now, the police will never tell you whether an order is lawful

Not to mention that police have very little education on the law in the first place; “criminal justice” or “administration of justice"—what amounts to the practice of law enforcement—maybe, but that has a more distant and tenuous connection to law than one might think.

That isn't true at all in this circumstance. He isn't disrupting traffic, on private property, or breaking any law. It's not illegal to disobey police except under special circumstances.

Outside NYC, they probably never even heard of "placard abuse".

Until I moved here, I hadn't heard of it. The lawlessness of law enforcement is striking.

It's doubly galling when it's "courtesy" extended to non-police. A lot of officers can argue that they need to get to work and they need to park somewhere. Police cars also have to be parked somewhere. The City will need a carrot as well as a stick.

But when it's stuff like "NYPD Family Member", I think only of collecting and sharing new four-letter expletives. That's just flat-out corruption.

You should read about the "walk out of jail" cards that are made for each member, to be distributed to family members.

There's a thriving secondary market for that.

Muscovites would probably be sympathetic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Blue_Buckets