Know Your Rights
What state law actually requires during police encounters: when you must identify yourself, whether you may record officers, consent to vehicle searches, and where sobriety checkpoints are lawful.
The duty to answer a police officer is not the same in every state, and the difference is written down. Roughly half have a stop-and-identify statute that turns refusing to give a name into its own offence, but only once the officer already has reasonable suspicion of something else. In the other half no such statute exists, and the question of what you must say has a different answer at the same traffic stop one state line away.
Because these rules come from statutes and appellate holdings rather than city code, they are quotable in a way that most advice on the subject is not. The text says what triggers the duty, what satisfies it, and what the penalty is for refusing, and that is worth more than a summary of it.
All 50 States: Know Your Rights at the State Level
Each tile shows the strongest state-level rule for that state. Click a state to see its full statewide rules and how local cities are constrained.
Severity: Few Restrictions · Light Restrictions · Some Restrictions · Significant Restrictions · Heavy Restrictions
What's Covered
Stop & Identify Laws
Whether your state has a stop-and-identify statute compelling you to give your name during a lawful stop, what the officer must already suspect before the duty attaches, whether…
Recording Police
Your right to film or record officers performing their duties in public, the buffer-zone statutes several states passed that bar approaching within a set distance, how all-party…
Vehicle Search & Consent
When an officer may search a stopped vehicle without a warrant, what consent means and how it may be withdrawn, the plain-view and probable-cause doctrines as the state applies them…
DUI Checkpoint Legality
Whether sobriety checkpoints are lawful in the state at all, roughly a dozen bar them under their own constitution or statute despite the federal position, plus the…