Even if someone perceives that they are being stopped solely because of their race, or in fact, they are being stopped because of that with no charge of a crime or even the suspicion of one being committed, the hard reality is that successive court rulings, including a Supreme Court ruling, are unequivocal. When police detain someone even though there is no arrest, they have the right to ask for identification and the detainee must show it or be subject to arrest.
Civil liberties groups have challenged this on the grounds that this gives police the unfettered power to stop, search and harass citizens without any checks or safeguards. The courts have brushed this argument aside with the retort that police would be severely hampered in crime fighting without the authority to require a detainee to produce identification.
Unfortunately, the Watts stop did meet the low bar legal requirement in which she was legally compelled to show identification. This, of course, in no way cancels out the equally hard reality that blacks and Hispanics are stopped in wildly disproportionate numbers to whites, often times without any crime or even the suspicion of a crime being committed.