Stop and identify statutes
US state laws allowing police to require identification of those suspected of a crime
"Stop and identify" statutes are laws currently in use in the US states of Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri (Kansas City only), Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin, authorizing police to lawfully order people whom they reasonably suspect of committing a crime to state their name.
If there is no reasonable suspicion that a person has committed a crime, is committing a crime, or is about to commit a crime, the person is not required to identify himself or herself, even in these states. Different obligations apply to drivers of motor vehicles, who generally are required by state vehicle codes to present a driver's license to police upon request.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires warrants to be supported by probable cause. In Terry v. Ohio (1968), the U.S. Supreme Court established that it is constitutional for police to temporarily detain a person based on "specific and articulable facts" that establish reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or will be committed. An officer may conduct a patdown for weapons based on a reasonable suspicion that the person is armed and poses a threat to the officer or others. In Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada (2004), the Supreme Court held that statutes requiring suspects to disclose their names during a valid Terry stop did not violate the Fourth Amendment.
Some "stop and identify" statutes that are unclear about how people must identify themselves violate suspects' due process rights through the void for vagueness doctrine.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Stop and identify statutes” as uS state laws allowing police to require identification of those suspected of a crime. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1386340. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stop and identify statutes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.