Comment by ars
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Agents who are masked and don't have any obligations to present warrants before abducting someone... really are we saying this is reasonable?
Police in general don’t need to show warrants to arrest people. In high profile situations it may be done to minimize political blowback, but clearly that is not a primary concern in this situation (except toward individual officers, which is why they are masking).
In many situations, they just need a documentable/articulable (to a judge, later) reasonable belief that a crime was occurring in their presence, or in other situations that a specific crime had occurred and there was a reasonable belief that person had committed that crime.
Resisting arrest, and impeding official business of a police officer are usually arrest-able offenses almost anywhere.
Details vary by jurisdiction and crime, but ‘you need a warrant to arrest someone’ is an edge case, not the common case. In those cases, it’s also often an indictment or bench warrant.
Editorializing what, exactly? The rule of law?
"what they were doing" is attempting to illegally abduct someone. The comptroller's "impeding" was a demand to see the one thing that would make their request a legal arrest.
Instead, they arrested the comptroller without even a pretense of the law.