Is It a Crime to Refuse to Help a Police Officer in Massachusetts?

Massachusetts keeps a provision on the books that lets a peace officer require a person’s help and makes neglect or refusal an offense. It is M.G.L. c. 268, sec. 24, and it is much narrower than the headline suggests.

The trigger phrase and the four situations

Section 24 reaches a person who, being required in the name of the commonwealth by a sheriff, deputy sheriff, constable, police officer or watchman, neglects or refuses to assist. Two things limit it immediately.

First, the request must be made in the name of the commonwealth. That phrase is in the statute.

Second, the situation has to be one of four the section enumerates: executing the officer’s office in a criminal case, preserving the peace, apprehending or securing a person for a breach of the peace, or a case of escape or rescue of a person arrested on civil process.

Outside those four, the section does not apply. It is not a general authority to draft a passerby into whatever an officer happens to need.

A fine frozen in time

The penalty is a fine of not more than $50, or imprisonment for not more than one month. The fifty dollar figure has never been revised, which is a large part of why the provision reads as a curiosity today. The number in the statute is the number the statute still carries.

What this page will not tell you

Whether to comply with or decline a request in a live encounter with police is not something a general information page can responsibly answer, and this one does not try. Section 24 describes what the statute reaches and what it penalizes. A person facing an actual charge, or trying to understand an encounter that already happened, needs a lawyer looking at the specific facts.

A label worth avoiding

Articles about this section sometimes call it a posse comitatus law. That phrase means something different in federal law, and using it here blends two unrelated legal concepts. Section 24 stands on its own text.