NickBallard
member
- Joined
- Jun 20, 2006
- Messages
- 83
How does citizen's arrest work? How do you do it and make it legal? The reason I ask is because you hear about all of these retreat laws and how you can't protect your property but instead have to run away. I've heard that you need a good reason to perform a citizen's arrest, but if the criminal's doing the crime to you, that's like a LEO catching someone at the scene of the crime. Let's say that someone's in your home and has a gun; instead of going to your retreat room, you perform a citizen's arrest (and of course you're armed because a police officer would be). Let's say that as you're walking up to your car, you see that your window's broken and someone is grabbing all of these things from your car. Of course you're not going to pull out your gun, because the police wouldn't, but what if you were to say, "Citizen's arrest" then they started running and you pepper spray the burglar so that you can hold him until police arrive to place him into custody, or maybe just taser him since police very frequently do that to running suspects that they catch at the scene of the crime. Or let's say that someone commits battery on you and then they stop the attack once they notice that you have non-lethal weapons. Normally you couldn't do anything because the attack is over for the moment. But what if you say "Citizen's arrest" (or whatever you're supposed to do). They say, "I'm going to hurt you," and then you do what the police would do, try to diffuse the situation verbally and if that doesn't work pull out your pepper spray, give a warning that you'll use it, if that doesn't work then spray. It's quite dangerous to let the assailant loose. They may hurt someone else or look for you later, so the justice system needs to take care of them. How does citizen's arrest work?