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Citizen’s arrests require announcing the arrest, detaining the suspect with reasonable force, and delivering them to the police. Any person can make an arrest under the right circumstances, but legal standards vary by jurisdiction and misuse can result in liability.
Each jurisdiction has its own legal requirements for the arrest of a valid citizen, but more generally they require you to first announce that you are making a citizen’s arrest, detain or detain the suspect with a reasonable amount of force, and then deliver the suspected to the police . There are many legal factors surrounding any action by an ordinary person making an arrest. The potential pitfalls are so severe that unless you’ve done a study of the specific citizen arrest law in your jurisdiction, you should probably let suspects be handled by the police except in extraordinary circumstances.
A citizen’s arrest is any restraint or detention of a suspected criminal by a person who is not a licensed law enforcement officer. Any person, regardless of nationality, can make an arrest under this type of law under the right circumstances. Most jurisdictions with common law legal systems allow ordinary people to make arrests, and the general outline of the actual procedure is broadly the same. There are distinct differences in the underlying legal standards that determine whether the arrested citizen was entitled to exercise this authority in the first place and whether the authority was exercised with due care.
To make a citizen’s arrest, you must first witness a crime. Some jurisdictions require you to see the crime happen on your own. Others allow you to arrest a suspect if he is fleeing an area and you have a reasonable suspicion that he has just committed a crime. Most jurisdictions require the crime to be a misdemeanor, but some allow arrest for certain types of misdemeanors. Arrest must always be necessary to avoid some further injustice, otherwise a witness is required to call and wait for the police.
You must hold or hold a person to make an arrest of a citizen using only the amount of force necessary to control the situation. This is a subjective legal standard that courts qualify as reasonable force, or the amount of force a reasonable person would have used in similar circumstances. Any legitimacy of the use of force against another person is subject to the legal prerequisite that there were reasonable grounds to suspect a person’s guilt.
All jurisdictions require you to turn over the arrested suspect to law enforcement at the earliest opportunity. Making an arrest of a citizen is not something to be undertaken lightly unless you have a thorough understanding of the applicable law. Misapplication of the law may subject you to civil and criminal liability for assault, battery, wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, kidnapping, discrimination, tort crimes or other unlawful acts.
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