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.