> Note that absent reasonable articulable suspicion of a crime, law enforcement in the US cannot legally forcibly identify people.

Could you cite a source for this?

If a law enforcement officer personally recognizes someone's face, I don't believe that it's illegal for them to know who the person is.

If a law enforcement officer turns to their non-cop buddy and asks "do you know this person?" and their buddy says "yeah that's Joe", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.

If a law enforcement officer picks up a phone and describes the person's face to their non-cop buddy and the buddy says "that sounds like Joe's face you're describing", I don't believe it's illegal for them to identify the person that way.

You can see where this is going, right? At what point does it become illegal to look up a person's face in a store of the-way-faces-look? Where does that become the "forcible identification" you're talking about?

Generally speaking, people expose their faces in public, and so those exposed faces can be remembered, photographed, and recalled without the person's consent or any warrant. This is legal in the USA - there is no expectation of privacy in a public space, and the police don't have to give you any more privacy than a private citizen would. They just cannot search you - and looking at your face, and potentially recognizing it, is not a search.

The only arguement I can see, is that the police should also not expect any privacy and have their names and faces visable, but thats the only relatively modern issue I've had.

And maybe no database that is always on and always accessable state and federal wide, since thats removing just general public exposure expectation.